Your business plan outlines the goals of your company or organization; so, too, should your website have goals. Just as you do for most all of your business activities and processes, think of your website, and its goal(s), in terms of ROI: Return On Investment. If you invest in a website, you expect a return on that investment – in time, money and effort. To realize that return, your site needs to have a goal.

What is a website goal?

Any website can (and should) have a goal:

• educate, inform, enlighten
• sell products, information, services
• stay in touch with family and friends
• share news and links about interests, hobbies, passions
• communicate with people in your community and around the world
• entertain
• express opinions and beliefs

Your website goal emanates from the reason to establish and maintain a website, so your goal should clearly define:

• who your audience is
• what exactly you are offering
• what the benefits of your offer are
• what you need to have on your website
• where online and offline your audience hangs out

Once you know your website goal, you can define the action you want your audience to take:

• contact you
• sign up for an RSS feed, newsletter, ezine
• download/purchase product(s)
• post an article
• make a comment

By defining the action you want your visitors to take, it’s simple to build your website around it, as well as to track your website and its visitors, and the actions they take once they have arrived; i.e., placed an order, what other pages they visited, signed up for an RSS feed, requested contact, etc.)

How do you benefit from defining a website goal?

Knowing the webite’s goal helps you define the actions you need to take to gather intelligence and draw up the blueprints to build your site:

• research: target market/audience, competition, other sites
• determine keywords
• design, layout and structure of your website
• create content (copy as well as graphics)
• make the site user-friendly and easily navigable>
• promote and drive visitors to the site

Investing some time initially for research and planning of your website goal will bring you a great ROI, not only in terms of visitors but also in converting those visitors into customers, building brand awareness and recognition, establishing relationships and other business activity that contributes to profitability and other business goals.

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