{"id":1004,"date":"2018-11-15T18:40:05","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T18:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecontentconsultancy.com\/?p=1004"},"modified":"2018-11-15T18:40:05","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T18:40:05","slug":"set-website-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecontentconsultancy.com\/set-website-goals\/","title":{"rendered":"Set Website Goals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Creating a good website is important to many small businesses. Most of us don’t have a physical shop front or impressive office to catch people’s attention and so a website, alongside our social media business pages are what we have to rely on.<\/p>\n

To make sure your website is working hard for your business, I highly recommend setting some goals to help keep you focussed on what your website is aiming to do and to give you something to evaluate its success against.<\/p>\n

Before you set those goals, have a think about some of the following questions:<\/p>\n

What are you trying to achieve?<\/h2>\n

As with any content, your first goal needs to focus on what you are trying to achieve with your website. If you put the money, time and effort in to creating one, then you want it to show results.<\/p>\n

So, think about what is the primary aim of your website – is it simply to advertise what you do? Is it to encourage people to make contact?<\/p>\n

If you are selling products via your website then think about how best this will be achieved…with ease, simplicity and, importantly, secure payments.<\/p>\n

What are the main things to exhibit?<\/h2>\n

Many businesses have a lot to offer…whether\u00a0that is a number of services or a selection of products.<\/p>\n

Depending on the number of pages (which is something else to decide)\u00a0 you need to think what do you want ‘front and centre’ , i.e. on your homepage and on your main navigation menu.<\/p>\n

Consider which things are most likely to catch people’s attention, as well as what they are most likely to be looking for.<\/p>\n

Most people will give a website seconds to review it. If they can’t find what they are looking for or nothing catches their attention, they will ‘hit’ back and go to the next ‘results page’ item. There is a reason we call it ‘surfing the internet’ – people do at speed and are happy to criss cross back and forwards!<\/p>\n

What do you want people to do?<\/h2>\n

As well as getting people to notice things about your business, you want visitors to stay as long as possible and ‘do’ something with the information.<\/p>\n

The length of a visit is really important for ‘search engine optimisation’. The longer someone stays browsing your content the better it is.<\/p>\n

Therefore, think about what you want people to do. What areas do you want them to explore? Think about the ‘customer’s journey’ and how this might work as they ‘travel’ through your webpages.<\/p>\n

Consider also your main calls to action – at lots of different points – these can be getting visitors to:<\/p>\n