Planning a New Website: What’s Your Goal?

We’re always in favor of having goals for your website. SMART goals for this month, this quarter, or this year make sense. After all, you’ll only improve what you measure, and without goals, it’s hard to know what to measure. Click through to the post below for some practical steps to identify goals for your current website. But what about when you’re planning a new website? What are the goals for your new website?

What Are Your Website Goals?

Why do you need a website?

You need a website because every business needs a website. If you don’t have a high quality online presence, you can’t expect to be trusted by modern consumers. In fact, the people you’d like to serve may just conclude that your business doesn’t exist if you don’t have a professional website.

So the question isn’t really about whether or why you need a website.

What do you want visitors to do?

This is the big question when you plan goals for your new website. Do you want your visitors to buy something? To call and make an appointment? To change their minds or behaviors in some way? To download additional information? To click through a link to make a purchase or commitment elsewhere? To give you permission to email them special offers? Brainstorm all the possible conversions that will bring people toward your organization’s primary goals, and plan your website to lead to the calls to action that fit with those conversions.

For example, we are planning a website for a reissue of a set of novels written by Suzette Haden Elgin in the 20th century. The author is deceased and doesn’t currently have a website. We know that authors’ websites have some overarching goals:

• Making people aware of the author and the books
• Building anticipation for forthcoming books
• Promoting current books
• Selling books, either directly or with affiliate marketing
• Providing a platform on which to build a following to persuade publishers to promote books

These are all likely goals for the new website. Our first step in planning the website, then, is to identify the calls to action associated with these large-scale goals.  We’ll build the website around those calls to action so we’ll have measurable goals in place.

Making people aware of the author and the books is not an obviously measurable goal. We can’t directly measure awareness. However, we can track the search volume for the author’s name, the traffic to the website, and the number of people who sign up for a newsletter or for updates on the forthcoming books. All of these actions imply increased awareness.

We can’t directly measure anticipation, either, but there again we can measure the traffic to information about the forthcoming books, the number of people who sign up for updates, and the search volume for the books’ titles.

Promoting current books is more measurable. The number of clicks on links leading to sales pages and of the sales of the books will give us that information. Sales figures also tell us whether we’re selling books.

Publishers like to see traffic to the website and people signing up, as well as engagement on social media platforms. All of these things are measurable.

Planning for the CTAs

Search volume and traffic can be measured with tools we’ll install. Sales figures and social media engagement can also be measured outside of any CTAs are provide on the website, though we should certainly integrate social media into the site. We can see, however, that we need a way for people to sign up for updates on forthcoming books.

We like to use graphics that link to a sign-up or pre-order page for this purpose. Here’s an example we made for Nancy Hartney.

We’ll make one for Suzette, too.

Planning the website

The CTA we’ve identified will give us the hero image for the website’s header. We could also create companion graphics for the currently available books and put the collection of graphics into a slider.

Otherwise, we know that we want to increase awareness of the author. We used Google Trends to see how often people searched for this author’s name in the past year, and we were not amazed to see that there is very low search volume. We are essentially starting from zero. This will make it easy to see whether our efforts are increasing awareness or not. We know that we’ll need to provide information about the author and her books, and that we’ll need to reach out — through social media and linkbuilding at least — to accomplish this. If people are already searching, just providing the best page on the web for the query will do the trick. If people aren’t already searching, you  have to be a bit more aggressive.

At this point, we have the information we need to provide to the designer:

• We need graphics (probably three) for a slider which link to sales pages for currently available books and for a page to sign up for announcements on the availability of the forthcoming books.
• We need space on the homepage for information about the author and her books.
• We’ll want pages for the various series of books by this author which are in print, as well as the series which will be reissued.

Now we need to do our basic keyword development and write the words.

Go through the same process we did for your new website and your chances of reaching your goals successfully will be far greater than if you just think of your favorite color.