Website Goals – Determine Why Your Site Exists

Right now, there are about 2 billion websites on the Internet. This number is growing every minute because entrepreneurs know that if their business is not represented on the Internet, they lose the lion's share of the audience. A website is important even for businesses that traditionally work offline because the first thing a person does when they hear about a new brand or store is checking their website. However, the site is not a panacea for all problems. Each company works according to different business models and have different strategies for development, sales, and customer acquisition. Accordingly, the site should perform different tasks for different companies. In this article, we will analyze what goals a site can have and how to achieve these website goals.

Website goals examples

Saying, "we just want to have a nice website," is wrong and will not bring you real results. You must clearly understand what exactly you want to achieve. Do you want to improve customer satisfaction? Increase the percentage of online sales? Increase brand awareness? Just wanting to have a website is not a clear goal and has nothing to do with business results. Your website objectives should be specific and measurable.

Typical website objectives include:

• Improving lead conversion rate;
• Increasing LTV;
• Increasing traffic;
• Increasing the average check of the buyer;
• Increasing brand awareness;
• Allowing customers to place orders for goods on their own;
• Introducing potential customers to the assortment before it appears in offline retail outlets;
• Expanding distribution channels for goods, and so on.

How do I set goals for my website?

If you pay for the development of a site or spend a lot of time creating it yourself, you are doing it for a reason. You don't want to waste your money and time, do you?

Any business activity should have a clearly defined purpose. Setting clear website goals and objective will help you determine the range of tasks needed to achieve them. You must have a plan of action to achieve your goals, small and large. And planning in business is always better than chaotic, disorganized decision-making.

First, think about what goal will fit your business model. For example, a freelance photographer's website's goals will be different from b2b website goals. There are two important steps to take in order to set goals correctly:

• Analysis of potential or actual visitors on your website;
• Analysis of the current state of your business and existing challenges.

This is necessary in order to determine the main goals, make the site effective, and solve existing problems. If you skip these steps, your site will not meet your customers' needs and perform intended tasks.

When setting goals for your new website, you can use the SMART methodology in your management. This means that the goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-sensitive

When working on website marketing objectives, you should end up with a list of short-term and long-term goals with varying degrees of importance.

What should be the main goal in developing a website?

Okay, you've decided you need a website, but why? You must decide on the main tasks that you set for the site. Depending on your business objectives, they may be different, but they should definitely be global and measurable. Below you will find several options for the main web design goals.

Let people find you

Whatever you do, there are definitely people in the world who are interested in your products and services and are looking for them right now. Having your site online will help them find what they are looking for. To do this, the site must meet the requirements of search engines and be well-optimized for search queries.

Build your online presence

Not all brands that have websites sell goods and services through them. Sometimes the main task of the site becomes to build an online presence and make sure that the brand is known and remembered.

You might think that if you have a website, you already have a presence on the Internet and success, and that's enough. But try googling your brand, product, or service online. What will you see? If you are listed on at least the first two pages of the search results, it's fine. But most sites that aren't taken care of are somewhere so far away in the search results that no one will ever reach there. In addition, you should pay attention to what information the website provides about you. What will a person see when they get to your resource? Will they receive full information about your products and services? Will they be able to find out about your promotions and new products? If you are building a brand, developing an online presence is very important to you.

Engage your audience

People are more willing to buy from companies and brands with which they build strong, emotional relationships and constant contact. What should such relationships be based on? On trust, of course! A proven way to create it is to communicate with your customers and keep in touch with them. It's not just a face-to-face conversation. The visual component of your website, blog articles, and any other type of content that you publish on behalf of your brand is your communication with customers.

In addition, users expect websites to have easily accessible contact information and various communication channels. If your weak point is communication with customers, the main goal of your site may be to build long-term relationships with your audience and engage it.

Strengthening brand loyalty

Once you start building relationships with your customers and gaining their trust, your next step should be to build a loyal customer base. Customers need to know that choosing your offer will benefit them most.

Why should you care about building your community? In this way, you will get interested customers who will provide you with constant feedback and will be much more willing to use your products and services and recommend them to others. Having a community helps attract new leads. Increasing customer loyalty typically is achieved through a loyalty program or opening a forum/comments section on the website.

Sales generation

If you're selling products or services on the market, one of your website's main purposes will be to generate sales. One of the benefits of e-commerce is that a website allows people who are already interested in your products and services to contact you directly. For most marketers, generating qualified leads is the most important goal. The site plays a big role in it.

Lead generation through the website is achieved by creating contact forms and working on their conversion, as well as CTAs – calls to action.

How to check whether you accomplish your goals with your website

Just because you've built a website with specific goals in mind doesn't automatically make it effective. Sometimes it may turn out that the site does not help achieve previously set goals. This can happen if the goals are not clearly outlined or the pages of the site are created without taking specific goals into account. But how do you know if your site is fulfilling its goals and if you have identified them correctly?

There are many ways and tools to check if your site meets the set goals. One of the simplest is Google Analytics. This tool provides extensive analytics on the website and its users. First of all, you should pay attention to the following indicators:

1. The number of site visits.

2. The number of subscriptions to the newsletter.

3. The number of completed feedback forms.

4. Sales amount.

5. Conversion rate.

6. Bounce rate.

7. Cart abandonment rate.

These are just some of the basic data that should be constantly monitored to ensure that a website is doing its job. It is also worth remembering that different metrics will be important for different types of websites. For example, for online stores, the most important thing is the conversion rate and the abandoned cart rate. For blogs, traffic and the number of comments are more important. In any case, detailed statistics allow you to control the achievement of the site goals.

In addition, if you set goals in quantitative terms (for example, you want to receive at least 200 orders from an online store every month), then you can easily check the achievement of this goal by comparing monthly indicators. It is important to remember to check the compliance of your site with the set goals in order to make changes to the site in time.

How do you choose an agency that will help you achieve your goals? 

If you order website development from an agency, it is very important that the specialists also understand the goals of your website. In the first stages, you should talk with the project manager and identify the main problem areas of your business and the tasks that the site must solve. In this case, the PM will be able to correctly draw up the terms of reference for the team and convey the nuances that are important when creating pages for various purposes.