When I was in advertising, I sometimes had clients who would look at a proposed marketing design and give the feedback of “I don’t like it”.
Well, what don’t you like? The color, the design, the message, the concept?
They had no idea. Because they didn’t know what they wanted.
😲😲😲
That’s why, before you design or redesign your website, you need to set your website objectives and goals.
What do you want your website to achieve, that will help you meet your business goals?
Do you want to increase online sales? Drive foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar store? Generate leads? Get more traffic?
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else” – Yogi Berra.
Why do you need to set website objectives?
You need to set goals for a website because your website is an essential tool for achieving your business goals, and you need to make sure that it is designed to meet those goals.
Here are 3 key reasons why you need to define your website goals:
- You or your web designer can create a site that is effective and efficient.
- Your website will be accessible and attractive to your target audience.
- You can measure the success of your website once it is launched or redesigned.
16 examples of website objectives and goals to set for your business
Branding
Your brand is one of your most important assets as a business, so establishing your brand messaging pillars and brand imagery through your website is one of the most important website objectives examples.
Your website is often the first interaction potential customers have with your business, so it’s important that it makes a good impression.
But within branding too, there can be multiple web design goals you can keep in mind.
1. Build a stable online presence
It is all very well to have multiple social media profiles, but you also need your website to create an online presence that is not at the mercy of social media algorithms.
You have complete control of your website, so an important website objective could be to share your brand story and competitive differentiation with your audience.
Your website objective could be to establish an online presence that stays permanent and solid, providing your audience and customers with the best interaction with your brand.
If you have a new small business, this could be the most important reason for creating a website.
2. Build credibility
Building credibility for your brand is essential if you want people to take you seriously and trust your business. So it goes without saying that in order to appear professional, you need to create a website.
By clearly communicating your brand values and messaging, you can use your website to build trust and credibility with potential customers. Here are some ways to build a credible online brand
- Ensure your website includes testimonials, customer reviews, and other elements that instill confidence in visitors.
- Use a brand kit to make sure you create a consistent online brand on your website
- Make sure you have a good Google My Business profile connected to your website.
Then customers can leave their reviews there, and your potential customers can find those reviews and follow you to your website.
3. Increase brand awareness and online visibility
One of the most important website objectives is to get more eyes on your business online.
Whether your business has been around for some time or you’re just starting off, if you need more of your audience to know about you and find you, your website can definitely help.
You have a much higher chance of being found by your potential customers with your website than with just social media. Especially because you may have different audiences on different social platforms, and you need a core central point where all of your audience can know about your brand.
You can increase brand awareness and online visibility through your website in multiple ways:
- Optimizing your website for search engines with a customized SEO strategy so your audience finds you when they are looking for answers to their questions
- Sharing your website and content on social media
- Setting up Google Ads to direct your audience to your website
- Adding your business to directories
If you don’t even have a website to begin with, which central point can you divert your audience to, to know more about your business?
Pro Tip:
Organic traffic is one of the best ways to drive website visitors. It is sustainable and has a high ROI.
So often, one of the primary website objectives of small businesses includes investing in search engine optimization and content marketing to improve your search engine positioning and organic traffic.
Another way to get more traffic which could also be a core website objective is to optimize your website for local SEO.
4. Establish brand authority
You can use your website to establish brand authority, especially if you are a business that has been around for some time.
Then your website objective could include creating helpful and informative original content.
If you can become known as an expert in your field, people will be more likely to visit your website and do business with you.
Pro Tip:
If you already have a branded website, make sure it upholds all your brand attributes to provide the best experience for your target audience.
Review your business and branding goals every few months and analyze how you can create or refresh your website to help you better establish your brand.
Get a FREE, detailed guide to creating your brand story
Marketing
No matter how much social media marketing you do or Youtube videos you create, you need a website to hold it all together.
It is your most important marketing platform and your key website objective could be to use it to do your small business brand communication and present your offers.
5. Generate leads
Not everyone will buy from you. Before you drive sales, you need leads, which is a list of people who have higher chances of becoming customers.
You can generate leads by grabbing the attention of website visitors and persuading them to take action. There are several ways to generate leads through a website. You can encourage your users:
- Schedule a call with you
- Download a free resource, such as an e-book or white paper
- Sign up for a webinar
- Take a quiz
One of the most important website objectives is to increase your email subscriber base.
By collecting email addresses, you can stay in touch with your customers and cultivate long-term relationships.
Here are a few ways to collect email addresses and generate leads:
1. Create a lead magnet
Offer something valuable in exchange for an email address. This could be a discount code, exclusive content, or early access to new products or services. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something your target audience will actually find valuable.
2. Make your lead magnet easy to find
Make sure you have an obvious call-to-action on your website that invites visitors to sign up for your email list. Your CTA should be clear, concise, and easy to find. You might want to include it in your website’s sidebar or header, or create a dedicated landing page.
3. Use pop-ups judiciously.
Pop-ups can be effective at collecting email addresses, but they can also be annoying and intrusive if used excessively. If you do decide to use pop-ups on your website, make sure they’re well designed and only appear after a user has been on your site for a certain amount of time (e.g., 30 seconds).
6. Share your marketing messages
One of the most effective ways to use your website is to promote your marketing messages.
There are different kinds of marketing messages you can have for your brand and share on your website:
- Product/ service descriptions
- Offers
- Events
- News
- Content
By clearly highlighting your products, helpful content, specials, and promotions, you can encourage website visitors to take action.
You can also use your website to stay top of mind with your customers and prospects. By regularly sharing helpful news updates, you can keep your audience engaged and build long-term relationships.
7. Increase brand engagement
No one finds your brand and immediately buys from you. They browse around, check out multiple pages, and based on how they feel about your brand, they might visit your website again to buy.
So one of the most important website objectives you could set is to increase brand engagement, to encourage visitors to stay on your site longer and interact with your brand.
Here are a few goals you can have for your website to increase brand engagement:
1. Optimize your user experience
A good user experience is one of the key ways to improve user engagement because when your audience likes browsing through your website, they are likely to stick around longer.
Make sure your website is easy to navigate so your audience can find information quickly. Your website should also load fast.
Related: Easy UX improvements for your website
2. Create helpful content
Your website content should be well-written and engaging. It should also be relevant to your target audience. If you can get people interested in what you have to say, they’re more likely to stick around and learn more about your brand.
It is always good to write blog posts with SEO-friendly content, but you could also include videos, podcasts, or other engaging content on your website.
Get a FREE Template to Create SEO Content for Your Website
Sales
For a business, driving sales is one of the most important goals. It can be the same for your website objectives. Here are a few ways to drive sales through your website.
8. Set up an online shop
You could have a retail shop or be selling through social media already.
Or you could be starting your business from scratch.
Either way, your website objective could be to set up an online shop on your website, to drive basic or additional sales.
If e-commerce is to be a primary web design goal, then make it a priority from the beginning as your website theme, layout, and structure, should be designed with e-commerce in mind.
8. Drive conversions
Maybe you already have a website and you can see that your visitor adds items to the cart but doesn’t end up buying them.
Or you see that your products/ services pages get a lot of visits but you don’t get purchases.
Then your website goal could be to drive those conversions, or more specifically:
- Reduce abandoned cart rate
- Improve your product/ service descriptions
- Simplify the e-commerce process of your website
9. Drive upsells and cross-sells
As a business owner, you know that upselling and cross-selling are essential ways to increase profits. And one of the best ways to do this is through your website.
You can use your website to give visitors to easily browse through and add additional items to their purchases.
You could also incentives for visitors to buy more. This could be in the form of discounts or special offers. For example, you could offer a 10% discount for orders over $100 or a free gift with purchase.
Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something that will motivate visitors to spend more on your site.
10. Drive more people to your retail store
If you know that your business works wonderfully in your brick-and-mortar store, then your website objectives could simply include driving your website visitors to your physical store.
You could offer exclusive in-store deals that can’t be found online. You can also host events at your store and promote them heavily on your website.
11. Drive more people to your online store
If you know that your business works wonderfully in your brick-and-mortar store, then your website objectives could simply include driving your website visitors to your physical store.
You could offer exclusive in-store deals that can’t be found online. You can also host events at your store and promote them heavily on your website.
Business operations and cost-cutting
A website is essential for the branding and marketing of any business.
But a website can also be a big help when it comes to running your business smoothly. You can automate tasks, streamline communication, and reduce costs.
12. Provide complete information
As a business owner, you know that providing accurate and up-to-date information about your company is essential. After all, your potential customers need to know what you do, how to reach you, and what to expect when they do business with you.
However, social media is not enough to provide all the information, and to provide it individually to every audience is time-consuming and expensive.
So your website objectives could simply be to provide a comprehensive overview of your business. It’s the perfect platform for sharing detailed information about your business processes, refund policies, brand values, contact information, and answers to other questions your audience may have.
13. Reduce manual tasks
Your website goals and objectives could include streamlining your processes and saving you time.
For example, you can use set up your website to automate your appointment bookings, inventories, and invoicing. You can also use it to track your sales, inventory, and finances.
14. Provide support
What happens when your visitors have questions or encounter problems? Not everyone wants to pick up the phone and call you – it’s a hassle for them, not to mention time-consuming and additional expenses for you.
Instead, you can set customer support to be your website objective. Live chat, contact forms, and FAQ pages – are great ways to provide customer support through your website.
Customer relationships
As a business owner, one of your main goals is to build strong relationships with your customers. You can build relationships in many ways, but they all have one goal in common: to encourage customers to keep coming back.
15. Personalize visits
One way to build good customer relationships and make your visitors engage with your website is to personalize the experience for them.
For example, if you know that a user has visited your site before and added items to their shopping cart, you could show them relevant ads or special offers when they return.
This will make them feel that your website can address their needs and they will be tempted to return.
16. Develop loyalty programs
There are many benefits to offering loyalty programs as your website objective. For one, it shows that you value your customers and their business. It also gives you a chance to reward your most loyal customers with exclusive deals and discounts. And finally, it helps you to collect valuable data about your customers’ purchasing habits.
If you’re thinking about setting up a loyalty program on your website, there are a few things to keep in mind.
First, you need to decide what type of program will work best for your business. There are many different options out there, so take some time to research the different possibilities.
Second, you need to set up accurate tracking methods so that you can properly track and manage your program.
And finally, make sure to promote your loyalty program prominently on your website so that customers are aware of it and can take advantage of it.
By following these tips, you can create a successful loyalty program on your website that will help you build strong customer relationships and grow your business.
Tips for setting website objectives that will help your business
1. Combine multiple web design goals
You don’t have to restrict yourself to only one out of these 16 goals. You can include branding, SEO, and smoothening business operations.
However, it is important not to overwhelm yourself or your designer by trying to do multiple things at the same time.
Start by defining your website goals, and create a roadmap and timeline of when you are going to focus on which aspect.
For example, while branding and SEO should be done in the first stage, you can add in elements of customer satisfaction when you refresh or update your website a few months later.
2. Create SMART goals
Once you have a good understanding of your goals, you can start creating SMART goals for your website design.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
For example, if you want to increase sales on your eCommerce site, a SMART goal could be to increase conversion rates by 5% within the next six months.
Or, if you’re launching a new blog, a SMART goal could be to publish two new articles per week for the first month. By setting SMART goals for your website design, you can ensure that your efforts are focused and effective.
Here are some more SMART goals you could have for your website:
- Capture X leads per month/week/day
- Increase conversion rate on lead capture forms by X%
- Grow email list by X subscribers per month/week/day
- Grow event registrations by X per month/week/day
- Generate X number of sales per month/week/day
- Increase click-through rate on store locator by X%
3. Track your website goals
No matter what your website objectives are, you need to track and measure your performance to know if you need to tweak your website strategy or website & SEO maintenance.
Here are some tools you can to track your website performance:
Examples of website objectives and goals: Conclusion
No matter what business goals you have, there’s a good chance that your website can help you achieve them—but only if you take the time to set clear objectives and also maintain your website properly.
Once you know what success looks like for your small business website, it’ll be much easier to measure whether or not you’re meeting (or exceeding ;)) those goals.
What are your website objectives? What challenges do you face in achieving them? Leave a comment!
