So you’ve built a website for your business, but maybe you just aren’t seeing the results you want. Maybe your visitors glance at a single page and leave instead of delving deeper into your site, or maybe no one is signing up for your email list. If your website just isn’t doing its job, ask yourself: does every page on your site have a clearly stated goal?
Why does every page need a goal?
People are more likely to do something when you tell them the exact steps they need to take. For example “sign up for our email list” or “share this page on social media” are very clear messages. If you tell people what to do, and make it easy for them to do it, they often will. Pages and sites with clear goals have more interaction from visitors.
Integrating goals into your pages
Of course, it’s always best to know your pages’ goals in the content creation stage, but if you already have your website built, don’t worry – it’s easy to make small changes on your pages to make them goal-oriented. But, if you’re still in the process of creating your website, always make sure that your designer clearly understands what the goal of your site is. A good designer will be able to integrate your goals into the page designs.
To make goals a part of every page, you first need to identify what the goal of each page is. Here are some common page goals:
- Signing up for a newsletter or mailing list
- Purchasing a product or service
- Making a donation to a charity or nonprofit
- Sharing content on social media
- Continuing on to another page within your site
The goals listed above are common ones, though yours might be different. That’s fine, as long as you know what the goal is. Think about what a visitor can gain from each page, or what they should do next once they finish looking at a page. Determine that one action that you want your visitors to take – that is your goal. Each page should have only one goal.
After you know what that goal for every page is, you can make your content more effective by getting rid of anything that isn’t directly related to your goal. Take a look at everything on each page, and ask yourself if it helps visitors to the site get to the page’s goal. If not, get rid of it – it serves no purpose. Not every page needs eye-catching images, social share buttons, or lots of text. If the goal of a page is to get people to sign up for a newsletter, all you need is a short blurb about the newsletter, and a box for people to enter their email address, nothing fancy.
Dive in!
Now that you know what you need to do to make your site more effective, it’s time to get started. But it can be a big project, so make sure you approach the it with a clear strategy in mind. The best way to start is to identify each element of your site (images, text, buttons, etc.) and note whether or not it helps you reach your page’s goal. After you’ve identified everything, you can go through and delete the things that are unnecessary.
If you need a redesign or just starting out and want to create a website that will help you accomplish your goals, contact us. Office To-Go can help your site get found in searches, generate leads, and make sales. We create WordPress websites with goal-oriented pages, so that your website can be more effective at doing its job.
