To create a great website that accomplishes what you want, you first need to establish what it is you are trying to achieve. Then, you need a way to measure your progress to see if you are on the right path towards accomplishing what you set out to do.

That's the purpose of website goals. Setting goals for your website at the start of the project is the first thing you should do. After all, how are you supposed to get where you want to go, if you don't know where the destination is?

To help you do that, we've broken down the most common website goals for businesses. From there, we break down what success looks like and what metrics to measure to know if you've achieved your goals for the project.

Why Setting Goals for Your Website Sets The Project Up For Sucess

Website-Goals-Examples

It's very simple: setting a goal for the project establishes the direction of the project and helps inform every decision that is made.

Without having goals for your website, it's almost impossible to set a direction and know what to prioritize. It leads to an unorganized and chaotic workflow.

Examples of Website Goals

Now, let's take a look at the most common website goals many businesses want to achieve. Keep in mind that these goals don't have to be mutually exclusive. You could even attempt to achieve all of them with your website.

Build Brand Awareness

This is one of the top website goals our clients tell us they want to achieve. Building brand awareness is critical, especially on the internet. The good news is that a website is the best way to achieve this for the long term.

Sure, social media is a great way to get your name out there quickly. However, a potential customer can only learn so much about you from a few Facebook posts.

A great website serves as your company's best salesperson. That's why a website is your best bet for building brand awareness. It's a 24/7 advertisement for your business that presents your brand in the best possible light. With a website, you can tell your brand's story and explain what makes you different.

Best of all, a website is a space dedicated to just your brand. Your competitors aren't able to fight for the same consumer's attention as they can on search engines and social media.

To first build your brand awareness, you need a well-designed website. But how do you reach new customers and resonate with them –since that's what ultimately makes your brand?

That's where content comes in. Let's take a look at how you can leverage content to grow your reach and influence.

Educate and Inform Your Target Audience

A website is one of the best ways to leverage education-based selling. Education-based selling is one of the most effective content strategies to pursue.

Josh Kaufman, the author of the Personal MBA, defines education-based selling as "the process of making your prospects better and more informed customers. By investing time and energy in making your customers smarter, you simultaneously build trust and make them more interested in your offer."

Essentially, by producing valuable content on your website such as helpful blogs, videos, how-to guides, and ebooks, you can increase your brand reach, build trust with your audience and close more sales.

Doing so gets your brand name out there amongst the audience you're trying to sell to. Over time, you will establish your expertise within your industry and be seen as a high authority source.

By creating content that is designed to help people, you build trust with your audience, and they'll be more likely to buy from you. The content has established your expertise, and people will develop a positive relationship with your brand.

You're not going to close every sale with education-based selling. However, when there comes a time for a consumer to make a purchase decision, you can bet they're much more likely to go to the ones that have already provided value to them before.

Increase SEO Authority

Website Goals: SEO

If you produce quality content that is optimized for search engines, eventually you will see your rankings climb.

It may take a while, but the hard works pay off in the end. The first ten positions on Google (page one) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic. It's clear. If your business isn't ranking on page one of Google, it essentially doesn't exist.

Moreover, the only way your business will get there is with an optimized website that consistently produces quality content. However, SEO is no longer just tied to content, although that still plays a significant role in determining where you rank.

Today, Google is more and more evaluating websites on performance, specifically mobile, and ensuring it provides a great user experience. Your website affects your SEO ranking so much that it has become one of the top website goals of small business redesigning their site.

Even with the best content, you're going to have a hard time ranking if your business website isn't in line with today's standards.

Leverage Your Website To Nurture and Convert Leads

Of course, the holy grail of website goals. You didn't think we would leave this one out, right? Your website is your number one tool for generating, nurturing, and ultimately converting leads.

Today, a website should be at the centerpiece of your digital marketing strategy. How?First, to rank on Google, where most of your prospects will be finding you through organic search, you need a quality website.

A quality website builds your brand awareness by creating an attractive, modern-day storefront of your business. From there, you need to leverage your website and continue to build brand awareness by creating great content that is useful to your audience.

For example, if you're a landscaper, great content would be videos or blog posts breaking down how to take care of your property. Let's say you're a men's tailor or clothing retailer; producing content showing off the latest styles, how to take care of your wardrobe and how to make minor DIY adjustments to your clothes would be considered very valuable by your audience.

We think you get the idea. Creating great content will ultimately increase your SEO authority. You will climb the ranks of Google and become more visible to more people over time.

Once you've got that down; then you can really start leveraging your website as a lead generation tool. Once you're ranking on Google, people in the market will be able to find your content through organic search of your services easily. By mapping your content to every stage of the buyer's journey, you can generate and then nurture leads down your sales funnel till they become a paying customer.

On the social media front, you can leverage your website's content by running Facebook or Instagram ads. By building out landing pages that offer helpful content in exchange for the user's contact info, you can start to generate leads. Examples of the ideal types of content to put behind a landing page are ebooks, video tutorials, or free consultation offers. Just make sure it's tailored to your audience.

Creating content and then leveraging digital marketing tactics will bring in traffic to your website. From there, a well-designed website will drive users to the right pages so they can convert on the website and become a sales lead. The most common example of this is when a user fills out a form on the site.

There are so many different ways you can leverage your website as a lead generation tool, the full amount of which is outside the scope of this article. However, the message is clear, without a great website, none of this is possible. And the first step of creating a great website is to set goals for it.

What Sucess Looks Like: Measuring Website Goals

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The website goals mentioned above are common amongst all types of businesses. They are great things to strive to achieve and will make a difference to your business's bottom line. But, how do you know if you're on your way to achieving them?

Let's take a lot at what the KPI's (key performance indicators) are for the above tactics. By tracking and measuring these metrics, you'll be able to optimize your digital marketing efforts.

Brand Awareness: To measure your brand awareness-building efforts, Google Analytics is the best tool at your disposal. You can check new and new vs. returning visitors, see how many people you're reaching and how well you retain visitors.

You can also see where your visitors come from (referral traffic) to measure what platforms resonate with your audience and thus where you should focus your efforts. If you're active on social media, tracking likes, social shares, and engagement allow you to see how much influence you're having on the platform.

Educate and Inform Your Target Audience: For measuring the value that education-based selling produces for your business, you want to focus in on your blog metrics. Measuring the traffic of each post and seeing what is most popular, what's being shared on social, and tracking which people who consume your content become paying customers are great markers to guide your decision making.

SEO Authority: Here, Google Search Console and third-party tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush are what you're going to want to leverage. With Search Console, you can see where specific pages of your site rank on Google, how many impressions/clicks you get for terms people are searching related to your business, and what terms those people searched for to find you.

With third-party tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you can get even more granular. You can start to see the specific keywords you are ranking for and the keywords of your competitors. You can then use all this information to inform your content marketing decisions to make it more effective.

Lead Generation: You can measure your lead generation efforts by setting up goals in Google Analytics. Goals allow you to track specific actions that users take on your website, like filling out a form. With goal tracking, you can see what offers and landing pages work best and then optimize your efforts around them in the future. You can also see the users entire journey on your website and look at ways to optimize your site to speed up the customer journey.

These are some of the most popular and effective website goals businesses routinely set. The ones you need to set for your business may differ, but the underlying principle of this article is the same.

Without setting goals for your website, it's going to be challenging to build a great website and achieve what you want.

These are some of the most popular and effective website goals businesses routinely set. The ones you need to set for your business may differ, but the underlying principle of this article is the same. Without setting goals for your website, it’s going to be difficult to build a great website and achieve what you want.

Bailey Canning is an advertising professional from New Jersey currently living in Boulder, Colorado. He started Inbound Web Development to work directly with businesses to create conversion focused websites & innovative digital marketing campaigns.