What’s Your Small Business Website For?

It might seem like a strange question. You’ve built your small business website to help promote your business, increase sales and educate your customers, right?

This is a pretty hefty list of things for your website to do. You probably need to be a little less ambitious with your website goals.

Let’s make things a bit easier. You should define one or more goals that are more manageable, specific and measurable (ever heard of SMART goals?)

What’s the role of your website? Is it:

• a brochure site, with pictures and info about your products? Do you send people to it to find out more about what you offer?
• there to inform or educate your readers?
• a blog or diary type of site, where you add regular updates on subjects related to your business?
• there to gather leads? Maybe you have customer surveys, or you exchange free info for email addresses, or twitter followers
• an e-commerce site? Do you sell your stuff online?

The structure and design of the website will be different for each of these and needs to support your small business website goal. Here’s an example. Which one of these is better defined, more manageable and easier to measure on your website:

1. Promote your small business, or

2. Gather relevant leads by collecting email addresses and phone numbers?

See what I mean?

It’s important to get the goals right for any website, even if you have 10,000 pages. For a small business website though, it’s even more important, because you have to carefully justify the time and resources that you spend on every single page.

Once your goal is defined, you can break it down into the steps that visitors can take to complete it. This will help you to define the role of each of the pages or sections. Are the pages there to educate? Do you want people to read them, then click through to read more information? Or do you want them to come back tomorrow to read your latest update? How about next week?

It’s traditional in web design to think in terms of visitors, bounce rates and funnels, but this thinking could be out of date for your site.

It might be better to think about the time spent on key pages, conversions, single page visits and repeat visitors.

Once you’ve defined your website goals(s) you’ll find it a lot easier to plan out your website, write it and promote it.

Tags: goals, website

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