Purpose of Your Website

As you start to make a website for your business, you probably have some idea of how you’d like it to look and what you’d like it to do for you. But taking the time to write clear goals for your website is a big part of the development process. 

Your website goals most likely will differ from the goals of your visitors. You’ll probably want to think about increasing sales or building brand awareness. Your site visitors, on the other hand, will come looking for a specific product or service or an answer to a question or need. You have to find a middle ground between the two so your site does both things.

Having a goal will make creating your website much easier. As you set your website’s goals, you can:

• Find Your Target Audience: While figuring out your website’s goals, you’ll learn more about your target audience and what they want. This will help you design your website to meet those specific needs.
  
  For example, think about a fast-food restaurant that wants to promote its new breakfast menu. The target audience might include busy professionals on their way to work, stay-at-home parents who just dropped their kids off at school, or night-shift workers grabbing a bite to eat on their way home. In all these instances, visitors would most likely use a phone or tablet to access the business’s website. The website designer should make sure they design a mobile-friendly site that makes their breakfast menu easy to access.

• Figure Out How to Structure Your Site: Making clear goals for your website will let you organize your website pages and subpages in a way that makes sense. Your site’s goals will help you put what’s most important at the top of the list and let you design those elements so they’re as useful as possible.
  
  If your goal involves getting people to sign up for your monthly newsletter, for example, you’ll want to make the sign-up form easy to find and make sure it includes an eye-catching call to action (CTA).

• Make Interesting Website Content: Understanding your website’s purpose will help you create better content. When figuring out your goals, you’ll learn about your target audience. This will let you make content that matches the needs of potential visitors to your site.
  
  If a fast-food restaurant wants to advertise its new breakfast menu to night-shift workers coming home from work, for example, its content should feature messaging that talks about the feeling of enjoying a meal after a hard day of work.

You obviously want your goals for your website to meet your business’s needs, but the majority of sites share several types of common goals. Your business’s website may have one or more of the following goals:

Helping people find their business online is one of the most common goals business owners set for their websites. Simply put, businesses need online visitors in order to achieve their other site goals.

HubSpot provides a great example of a website accomplishing this goal. This company does a great job of using search engine optimization (SEO) to bring traffic to its site. This means its site often appears on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) for a lot of sales and marketing-related topics.

Just as HubSpot makes its site more discoverable to marketers, a business like a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) company may want to help local community members learn about the services it offers.

Another common website goal involves boosting your brand awareness, which can help the general public understand your business’s purpose. To boost your brand awareness, you must educate potential customers on what your business does, the services or products it offers, and what sets your company apart from the competition.

Many different businesses can get a lot out of making brand recognition a goal for their websites. In particular, new businesses, or businesses facing a lot of competition will get a lot out of choosing brand awareness as a goal.

Nike offers a great example of a company accomplishing this goal. Already well-known worldwide, Nike makes sure that every part of its website promotes its brand and current tagline. From the Nike swoosh logo to its tagline, “Just do it.” Nike makes sure visitors have an experience on their site that they won’t soon forget.

Brand recognition is important for smaller businesses, too. If you plan to build a travel blog, for example, it’s just as important to make sure that each page of your website promotes your brand and is something visitors will remember. You can achieve this through your site’s logo, tagline, colors, and writing style.

Many business websites focus on getting and keeping customers. This goal means not only bringing in new customers but also doing what you have to so that you can keep current customers and bring back any you may have lost. 

A wide variety of businesses can choose this as a goal — from startups to local auto mechanic businesses. If you want to attract and keep more customers, you should consider choosing customer acquisition as a goal.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is a great example of a business that concentrates on keeping its customers. This company’s website focuses on showing potential and current customers what it values. The company includes a number of links on its site to showcase its brand and the fact that it is an organization that truly cares about its customers and the planet.

This goal focuses completely on selling products and boosting sales. While boosting sales is a common ecommerce website goal, it also may be one of the goals of banking, insurance, and marketing companies. When boosting sales is the primary purpose of a website, every aspect of the site should focus on moving the customer through the sales funnel (e.g., bringing them closer to buying a product or service).

Amazon and Etsy do a great job of keeping sales goals at the forefront of their websites. Both companies designed their sites to help users find what they want quickly, understand the terms and conditions of their purchase, and simplify the purchase process.

Finally, bringing in leads represents another popular website goal. In the past few decades, it’s become cheaper and easier than ever to generate leads for your business online. In marketing terms, lead generation is the process of earning a potential customer’s interest in a product or service.

For example, the LendingTree website is great at generating leads. Already used to compare mortgage rates, this website has a platform that makes it easy for visitors to sign up for an account, download the company’s app and contact several mortgage brokers at once. Unsurprisingly, LendingTree is one of the most popular mortgage marketplaces available today.

Depending on your website’s purpose and what you want to accomplish with it, you may have different goals than other businesses. Here are some examples of strong website goals to offer some inspiration:

• Grow your website’s monthly views by new visitors by 10% in 2022.
• Boost awareness of new products and services by 65% in 2022.
• Boost your website’s sales by 7% in the first three months of 2022.
• Boost monthly sales of a specific product by 10% in January 2022.

As you start making goals for your website, remember to keep your site’s purpose in mind: to support your business. You can do several things to improve your website, but they won’t necessarily help you meet your business goals.

Some weak goals might be things like boosting your site speed, making a perfect design, getting a specific domain, or even earning a specific score from a website analytics company. When creating your business website, think about goals that will help your business grow.

After figuring out your website’s goals, you should keep them in mind as you develop your website, but you also need to successfully share your website’s purpose with your target audience. Your site has to let your customers know what you’re all about, and you can do this with things like strong CTAs and a simple, easy-to-use design.

No matter if your website supports your business or is your business, its purpose should be clear to every visitor. To ensure your site communicates your intentions clearly, it needs:

• Clear Writing: All of your website’s text should support its purpose and goals. If you plan to build a website with a goal to establish trust in your law office, for example, your writing style likely should have a formal tone to help show your firm’s authority in the field.
• Clear Design and Imagery: You should design your website in a way that supports its purpose and goals. If you want to build a website for an ecommerce business, for example, the fonts, images, and overall design should support the business’s sales goals.
• Clear Functionality: In addition, your website should function in a way that supports its purpose and goals. If you plan to build a website for your construction company that’ll inform visitors about the services you offer, you should list those services on the site’s homepage and direct visitors to other pages that explain them a little better.

Your website also should also have clear CTAs that lead visitors into taking specific actions. Effective CTAs usually tell people how to take that action as well. Some examples of CTAs include:

• A “Buy Now” button next to products.
• A hyperlink to a page with more information.
• A sentence that not only asks visitors to sign up for a newsletter but also tells them how to do so.
• Text that says, “Call Us” followed by a business’s phone number.

Your website’s design and overall structure should be simple and easy to follow. When people encounter confusing sites — or when they can’t find the information they need quickly — they often leave and look elsewhere. If you make your website’s menu easy to use and your products or services easy to find, your visitors should easily understand your site’s purpose.

Now that you’ve identified and refined your website goals, you can start to plan and create a business website with purpose. Designing a website with its purpose in mind will ensure that your website is created effectively and inline with your overall business goals.