What’s the Purpose of a Website?

A website should exist primarily as a means for growth. It should leverage the business by serving as a tool to meet big-picture business goals.

For years, the purpose of a website has been to tell people about your business. Many organizations feel they need a website “just because I heard you should,” or “because our young sales rep says we need to have an online presence.”

Before setting goals for your website, it is important to recognize why they are essential to your site’s success. This’s 4 key benefits of having goals for your site are listed:

• Target audience: Defining goals for your site helps you determine exactly who your target audience is, what their challenges are, and what they deem important.
• Crafting effective content: Knowing more about your target audience will help you to develop online personas, allowing you to create effective content that speaks directly to your audience.
• Website organization: Once you know the main goals of your site, you can effectively organize and prioritize content, thus guiding visitors where you want them to go in order to achieve these goals.
• Success measurement: Clearly defined goals help you to understand how effective your site actually is. Once defined, you can measure whether your site has met, surpassed, or underachieved on its goals.

Your SMART Goal for Your Website:

If you haven’t thought about what your website goal is, or it’s been a while since you’ve thought about it or checked in on your metrics, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What is the primary goal of our website?
• Is the goal for our website aligned with our overall business objectives?
• Do we need to consider some additional, departmental goals?
• Do we have all the metrics in place to measure our site’s performance against our goals?
• Are we routinely reviewing our metrics?
• Are we using our data to drive decisions about website improvements when we fall short of our goal?
• Is the goal we set too easy, too challenging, or “just right” (attainable)?

We Can Help

If you’re struggling to come up with the best website goal for your business, or if you don’t know how to set up the metrics for measuring progress to your goal, we’d love to help.

We’ve helped many businesses establish a clear, prioritized plan to set and meet their website goals and build an amazing websites to grow.