What is the Point of Your Website?

While it seems like an obvious question, it’s one that many businesses don’t explore deeply enough. If you have an existing website and think it should be doing better to serve your company, it may well be time to step back and ask a few searching questions.

What is the purpose of your website and do you have the elements in place to achieve that purpose?

Here we take a look at four generic reasons for having a website and how to be more specific and really nail down what you mean.

Attracting Visitors and Creating Sales/Business

Everyone wants people to visit their website and to get more sales of their product or more hires of their service. But what does this actually mean for your business?

Let’s say you run a local legal firm. You want customers to find you and book an appointment. Is that enough? Perhaps you should say that you want your website to deliver twice as many clients over the next twelve months. How is your site going to do this? How will you measure success?

Your website is about to go live. You have a number of great products online and you expect plenty of interest. But how many people do you need to visit your site and are you providing the perfect environment for them to buy? Perhaps you want X number of orders in the first six months. Maybe you want to improve your conversion rate from 1 in 10 visitors to 1 in 5 who buy your product.

Again, the more specific you are about what your goals are for your website, the better placed you will be to achieve them. Simply attracting visitors is too vague a purpose. You need something that is measurable and distinct.

Building Your Brand and Reputation

You want to get your brand out there and prove that you are business that can be trusted to deliver. But what does that actually entail? You may, for instance, want to build a series of blog posts that highlight your brand and builds your reputation. You could measure the success of these posts by the number of people that share them on social media.

Do you need to offer something different from your competitors? Is your website creating a buzz in your sector? How are you going to define and measure all this? Perhaps one of your key performance indicators is to get 20 people linking back to your site each month.

Making It Easy to Buy Your Product

The key reason for the vast majority of business websites is to sell products or services. But how do you want your site to do that?

Are you expecting a 100 new sales directly via the website in the first month? Perhaps you want your site to take over the burden placed on office your sales team so you’re looking for a reduction in activity there. How does adding more payment options improve the number of online sales?

Providing Better Customer Service

Many businesses use their website for improving customer service. The latest AI chatbots are able to provide a whole range of answers to the most often asked questions. The great news is that visitors don’t have to wait on the end of a telephone line and get the answer that they are looking for.

Perhaps your goal is to reduce the number of calls to your helpline by 50% and migrate queries onto your website.

The more specific you can be about the purpose of your website the more likely it is to fulfil your requirements and the better placed you will be to make changes if you need to. Try to be as clear as possible and set realistic targets that you can then be measured and tracked.