A website strategy is a plan that outlines the flow and design of your website content. It includes elements such as keywords, content, and design. In a nutshell, website strategy is about creating a plan that will guide your visitors along an engaging, strategic journey with the intent to convert those visitors into leads or customers. This can involve everything from choosing the right keywords to crafting the perfect content to designing a look that will appeal to your target audience. At Bayou Brand House, we believe that striking the perfect balance between all of these elements is key to creating a website that is optimized for conversion.
If you’re looking for help creating a website strategy that will work for your business, read on!
Why Is a Website Strategy Important?
Navigating through a website without a well thought out strategy is a bit like traveling without a map. It can leave your visitors confused, unsure, or worst of all frustrated. Understanding where you want your visitors to go on your website is not enough, you must also consider how you want them to get there.
This allows you to warm visitors up by guiding them through understanding why you are (or aren’t) a good fit for them. By understanding how you want to connect with your audience and ideal clients, you can integrate that into your strategy to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward.
It also helps to determine which keywords to use on your website. By targeting the right keywords, you can increase the chances that your website will be found by search engines, which in turn will help you attract more visitors. A well-planned website strategy can and should help to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) score, making it easier for people who are looking for information about your business or product to find you online.
Let’s be real…it’s unlikely that someone is going to jump straight to the contact page to book a call with you immediately after hitting your website. They’re researching; doing their homework.
Your website strategy should include how you want to show up and connect with your ideal clients. And at the end of the day, your website should be effective at convincing visitors why they should book a call with you, or that maybe you’re not the right fit. And that’s ok too. The goal isn’t to book everyone…it’s to book the right ones.
What Are the Different Elements of a Website Strategy?
There are a few different elements that go into crafting a website strategy, and each is important to ensure that your website is successful.
The things we consider at Bayou Brand House when developing a custom website strategy are:
1. Content
What is the purpose of your website? Is it to inform, entertain, sell products or services?
2. Design
How does your content look and feel on the page? Is it easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for?
3. Goals
What do you ultimately want website visitors to do after landing on your website?
4. SEO
Thorough keyword research and targeted implementation. This includes optimizing titles, tags, meta data, images and more.
5. Connection
What makes you different from your competitors? What is the special sauce that will make people want to work with you?
How Do You Develop a Website Strategy?
There are a few steps you need to take in order to develop a website strategy.
1. Define Your Goals
What do you want your website to accomplish? What are your business goals? What are the key objectives of your website?
2. Assess Your Current Situation
If you currently have a website, who is currently visiting your website and why? Are there any areas of the site that could be improved? It’s helpful to analyze your statistics if you’ve been tracking them (Google Analytics, etc.)
3. Identify Your Who
Who is your target market and what are their needs and wants? How can you best reach them through your website content, design, SEO and connection strategies?
4. Identify Your Why
What is the purpose of starting your business? Why is it important to you? This will help you create goals for your business, develop a powerful brand message and overall influence the direction of your business.
(We talked about both the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ over in this blog post if you’d like to learn more!)
4. Putting it all together
Once we have all of those elements fully fleshed out, it’s time to start putting it all together. We start with your goals, which helps us determine where we ultimately want visitors to go and what we want them to do. This can be anything from booking a call, taking a quiz, or signing up for your newsletter. Then we formulate the structure of your content around those goals.
Then, with a solid understanding of your ‘why’ and your ‘who’, we develop a map of how we want your visitors to get to those goals. This largely depends on your target audience and the connection you want to have with them. Want to connect with visitors on a personal level? We aim to guide them to your About page. More interested in highlighting your exceptional and unique services? We’ll put more focus on getting visitors to a killer sales page.
There you have it!
The next time you visit a website, try taking what you know now and make note of the feelings you have as your clicking or scrolling through. Pay attention to what made you click on each button. If you clicked off without ever leaving the homepage, ask yourself why. This is a great way to help you begin learning best (and worst) practices for your own website.
Got questions? Need some help? Pop on over to our Insta and drop us a DM!
