Here are the 7 elements of an Effective Website Strategy.
Does your website strategy accelerate growth?
The success of your business depends on a winning plan.
1. Start with Sharing Your Organizational Goals with Your Marketing Team
The first element of an effective website strategy is to know your business goals.
Upper Management sets the strategy and direction of the company. Management must share these goals and objectives with the marketing team. The marketing team will develop the online strategy to help accomplish these goals.
Let’s define the goals and objectives.
Goals are the outcomes you intend to achieve, whereas objectives are the specific actions and measurable steps that you need to take to achieve a goal. Alignment and order: Goals are set to achieve the mission of an organization or individual, while objectives are set for the accomplishment of goals.
Your goal might be to grow online sales by 25% over the next 12 months without an increase in ad spending.
Your Business Strategy Might Be To …
- Enhance SEO efforts to Drive incremental free traffic.
- Refine paid search campaigns to drive higher volumes of qualified traffic at the same or lower CPC.
- Redesign selected areas to increase conversion rate on direct, organics, and partner traffic.
- Develop custom landing pages for each primary target audience AND product to increase conversion rate on a banner, email, and paid search traffic.
2. What is Your Website Strategy?
The second element of an effective website strategy is to Spell out your Website Game Plan. What are your Objectives? What are you trying to accomplish?
Not a website strategy – “My website is brochureware. A place for people to see what we do. ”
Not a website strategy – “I just want a basic website.”
Does your Website Game Plan support your organizational goals?
Be mindful of website usability and design.
In this video, we get into greater detail about the elements of website design every website must have and how to build relevant, engaging content.
Try to think of everything from your client’s perspective. How can we use the website to help the client through a process flow we want them to take?
Possible organizational website goals
- Good: Increase sales. Better: Perform Keyword Research
to gain insight into how buyers are searching for our products online.
- Good: Drive more traffic to our website. Better: Enhance SEO efforts
to Drive incremental free traffic.
- Good: Generate leads. Better: Refine paid search campaigns to drive higher volumes of qualified traffic at the same or lower CPC.
- Better: Redesign selected areas to increase conversion rate on direct, organic, and partner traffic.
- Develop custom landing pages for each primary target audience AND product to increase conversion rate on a banner, email, and paid search traffic.
- Good: Reduce support costs
- Good: Foster loyalty among customers
- Good: Streamline processes
3. Understand the Problem Your Target Audience is Trying to Solve
The third element and essential step in an effective website strategy are to know Who’s your target audience and what needs are they trying to address?
This will help you target your content appropriately. This is important because marketing works best when it’s relevant. If you create content for everyone, you’re not creating it for anyone.
You may be a company that sells renewable energy product(s). Who are the individuals or groups of community members that your program needs to influence?
Categorize your audiences, select behavior changes, segment your primary audience and understand motives for and barriers to participation.
The three categories of target audiences and following our example of renewable energy products are primary(single-family homeowner), influencers (Department of Energy), and gatekeepers.
Identify the specific behavior you want from each audience type
Then identify the specific behavior you wish to change in each audience type: What is it that you want each audience to do differently as a result of your messaging?
Segment your primary audience because certain subsets are more inclined to participate in your program or complete the desired behavior than others. For example, it may be useful to break down your primary audience (e.g., single-family homeowners) based on characteristics such as income, age, or language spoken in the home, or perhaps attitudes, beliefs, and values. Then prioritize for those people whom you want to quickly act on your messages and participate in your program.
Google Analytics Reveals Much About Your Audience Behavior
A starting point is getting demographic data via Google Analytics, as well as analytics from social media and email. This will tell you the age, gender, education, and income of your target audience.
You can also collect feedback from customers to help you understand their priorities, decide where to reach them, and flesh out buyer personas. Buyer personas will bring these two sets of information together so you know what content to create, how it will help your audience, and what will make them care about it.
Learn more about understanding your audience for content marketing here.
4. Building Credibility with Reviews
The fourth element of an effective website strategy is to build credibility and trust. How do we build credibility?
Let prospects know what your customers are saying about your product or service.
Give them as many Google Reviews, Testimonials, and Video Reviews that are relevant to each product or service you offer.
Are there any deals and special offers available? Can they talk to a live person?
Help them through the process. How do they get started?
Start Here is always a good place to begin.
5. Prioritize Website Design Efforts
The fifth element of an effective website strategy is to know, as the image above shows, common design priorities are often the Home Page first, then Category pages, Forms, with Landing Pages as a last thought.
The Winning Website Design Effort
The winning website design effort for better lead generating, higher-converting websites lies in placing the most effort in what makes the cash register ring!
The Form and Checkout Page
Actually, it’s the confirmation page that ensures the purchase. You get the idea. Please note that the checkout page is most important in eCommerce sites. For industries that don’t sell products online, the landing page is the top priority.
The Landing Page
A landing page is a page on your site that is designed to convert visitors into leads.
It is different from other pages on your website in that it follows both of these criteria:
- It has a form that allows you to capture a visitor’s information in exchange for a desirable and valuable offer.
- There is NO navigation to the rest of the website. We want customers to focus on the Call-to-Action that gets us a name and email.
Place time, money, and effort on each landing page for a winning website design.
The goal should be one landing page for every product you sell. Additionally, one Landing page for every service you sell. Tap here for details of the Ingredients of what makes a successful Landing Page.
The Detail Page
A product detail page is a web page that provides information on a specific product. A good product page includes a descriptive product name, has quality images with the option to enlarge the view, offers clear product options, such as color or quantity, size, color, price, shipping information, reviews, and an easy way to select options, and show product availability. Don’t forget to tell them how they can purchase the product from you.
The Category Page
The Category page is basically the bridge between your homepage and your product pages. After your homepage, the category page is the next most important step in your funnel. This is the part where you help narrow down options for people and guide them to their desired product page so they make a purchase.
The Home Page
The home page is the table of contents of your website. It tells the entire story of your business and all the solutions your business provides. There’s so much information here. That’s why it’s important that all your advertising that directs traffic to your website should NOT be directed to the home page.
Each of your paid ads goes to the landing page that speaks to one particular product. Otherwise, it is too confusing for the visitor.
6. Measure the Right Metrics
The sixth element of an effective website strategy is to know the
5 Metrics That DON”T Matter
- Traffic.
- Time on Site
- Average Page Views.
- Hits.
- Surveys.
- Focus groups.
12 Metrics That DO Matter
Every Industry has Average Conversion rates.
| Business Metrics | Site Metrics | User Metrics |
| Revenue | Conversion rate | User Testing Results |
| Transactions | Most Visited Pages | Satisfaction Survey Trends |
| Profit | Time on Site | Focus Group Feedback |
| Gross Margin | Traffic | Customer Support Inquiries |
| Site Type | Metrics |
| Selling Products or Services Online | Revenue, Profit, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Average cost per conversion |
| Lead Generation Sites | Lead Volume, Conversion Rate, Revenue originating from web leads, Cost Per Lead, Revenue Per Visit. |
| Ad-based content sites | Revenue, Profit, Average Page Views Per Visit, Average Cost Per Visit, Average Revenue Per Visit. |
7. Create, Measure, Learn, Adjust
The seventh element of an effective website strategy is to know that Your website is never “done”. Think of it as a long-term initiative. Technology is always changing. Competitive environments always changing. Customer expectations are continuously evolving.
Google Analytics must be set up for your website. What pages are ranking top ten? Which pages are not ranking that we want top ten? How are they doing on a weekly and monthly basis? What do you need to change? Here is an internal linking strategy for getting a page to rank on the first page.
Conclusion
A winning website strategy is important to the success of your business. Tie your organizational goals into the website by knowing your audience and knowing what you want to accomplish with and for your audiences. It’s your responsibility to direct them on the right path within your website. The forms, checkout, and landing pages help you grow your business. Place the most time, energy, and money here. Evaluate and reevaluate what is and isn’t working on a weekly and monthly basis.
The Bottom Line
The 7 elements of an effective website strategy will help you align your website with your organizational goals. Plus, knowing your target audience and prioritizing your website design efforts will help you build trust and convert more prospects to customers than the competition. By adopting this method, you will see your website generate qualified leads.
Unlike other methods that don’t really explain which areas to focus on when developing a website strategy, my method will help you break down each area toward achieving your organizational goals through your website. My method will help you take follow-up action based on the flow your audience is taking, which will boost your lead generating or sales overall.
Start right now by spending 10 minutes to evaluate your organizational goals and another 30 minutes to apply the website design efforts to your goals. Once you have a logical flow scoped out, it’ll be easy to develop the right content and place your tasks into a well-thought-out plan for the website. All that remains is that you kick off your next website by following your new master plan.
Web Strategy Planning Template
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Carol is the founder of Hit-the-Web Marketing since 2009. She's been building websites and marketing campaigns from scratch into something scalable and successful for over 20 years.
We build websites around lead generating strategies. Then, we go to work driving traffic to your website, converting visitors into customers, and nurturing and retaining your customers. Our main service is Google Ads. Because 92.07% of people searching on the web use Google as their search engine of choice. 