A website is more effective when there is a strategy behind it. Knowing how to approach the planning and implementation of your website will greatly increase the chances of your success. Let’s look at the steps you need to take to ensure that your website achieves your objectives.
Set Your Goals
The more specific you are when articulating your goals, the clearer your path to achieving them will become. If you’re looking to start a business website, your list of goals should go beyond creating a presence for your brand on the internet.
Are you looking to reach the top of the search engine rankings for keywords in your niche? Do you need to educate consumers in order to drive sales? List all outcomes you expect from running a website in the most detailed way possible.
Plan Your On-Site Marketing Funnel
Your website should be more than a series of pages that list information. The goal of your site should be to secure conversions. These conversions can be sales, newsletter signups, contact form submissions, or engagement that interfaces with your social media.
The user’s journey needs to be mapped out from arrival on your website to the moment they close their browser window. Based on your goals, build landing pages and functionality that move your visitor closer to your desired outcome.
Clearly Define Your Target Audience
One of the most common mistakes new entrepreneurs make when starting a website is not defining their target audience. The form your site takes on will depend on the audience to which you want to show your message.
For example, a website aimed at pensioners will be very different from one that targets adolescent video game enthusiasts. Define your target audience and flesh out a website that will tailor to their interests.
Create Content
It is often said that “content is king.” In today’s world of social media and blogging, quality, authoritative content plays a bigger role than any search engine optimization hacks.
The content platform you choose for your website will play as important a role as the content itself. Choosing the right content platform should help create synergies among your staff while contributing to an influx of potential customers. As per the experts at Contentful:
Content platforms help teams stay flexible, fast and connected. They mitigate risk and empower developers and creatives to take greater ownership over what they create and ship. In the productivity sector, the parallel workflows that content platforms support play a key role.
Finding the best content platform and flooding your website with valuable content is the key to building trust with your audience. If your website visitors can obtain more value from your content than they do from the competition, you will have their attention and patronage.
Strategy Leads to Success
Before jumping into the creation of your website, take the time to do your research. Coming up with a winning website strategy should precede hiring a developer, securing a hosting package, or even registering your domain name.