Overall Website Strategy

The overall strategy of the website considers three main components:

• Website goals and objectives – what are the main goals and objectives of the website? Goals could be establishing thought leadership and building your brand, engaging customers with your content, and converting visitors into customers.  Establishing these goals will determine a lot of the other components that need to be factored in a website strategy like design and functionality, path to conversion, content, and messaging.
• Research your target audience: For a website strategy to be successful you need to decide on the right target audience for your website. Every business targets a specific demographic group, so it’s smart to figure out who are the potential customers for your products or services. Creating visitor personas is a tactic that will help determine the right design, function and messaging on your website. The easiest way to begin with audience research is to look at any existing data about your potential buyers including their age, location, and other information that allows you to segment your target audience. Data can also include information about search demand around the solutions you offer. Understanding how people search across different online platforms will provide insights into the specific pain points they are looking to address.
• Analyze your competition: Most people who are on the lookout for a solution to their pain points will visit more than one website. A good understanding of what your competitors do well or poorly will help you determine the right approach to the experience on your website. Take a close look at your competitors’ websites and take time to audit their websites and online presence. Then use this information to inform your own website strategy and ensure that your website stands out.

Branding Strategy and Your Webiste

Building a strong brand matters not only for your website strategy but for your overall business success. Strong brand helps differentiate you from the your competitors and builds trust. Branding provides familiar and recognizable characters that create comfort in a potential buyer and create a strong sales cycle. While all other components are also very important for the success of your website, it is most important to get the brand identity right. When trust is built, and your website visitors feel comfortable with your brand they will always find ways to engage further. Consider the below checklist in your website strategy to make sure your brand identity is recognized.

• Design and colors – are you using consistent brand colors?
• Imagery – Photography or art should convey confidence and integrity. Are the images on your website consistent with your brand? Do they properly tell your brand story?
• Design elements – Consider including a visual language through basic geometry or consistent icons.
• Massaging – Brand messaging is a key part in defining your brand. Establish a tone and voice so that your brand sounds consistent throughout all the pages on the website.
• Product marketing – Speak about and describe your product or service with the same tone and voice of your brand with grit, integrity and confidence so when visitors read about your product or service they know exactly where you stand.
• Value proposition – Have a clear value proposition and make it visible from the front page of your website.
• Visitor persona – Make your brand person driven. This is where a good understanding of your target audience will come useful.

Strategic website technical considerations

Your website has a creative process to govern the look and feel of it, but a website is a technical project too. It requires development resources, coding and search engine optimization considerations and resources. A strong technical approach to a website strategy will also help with visitor experience making it easier for visitors to navigate around your website.

Things to consider:

• Site structure and hierarchy – Site structure refers to how you organize your website content. With an easy site hierarchy that governs the site structure visitors will be able to easily navigate and find information on your website. An example would be how you group you product and solutions pages, content types or content topics. Structuring your website is crucial for both its usability to visitors and search engine indexing.
• URL structure – URLs are very important for SEO. Having a consistent URL structure will help with your website getting indexed easily. Also, URLs that contain desired targeted keywords can help with organic rankings.
• Types of pages – the types of pages you consider for your website are part of the overall content strategy. But the types of pages will determine a lot on how your website is structured and how you design your URLs. The types of pages will also influence the design of your website.

Content Strategy and Your Website

• Content types – there are many content types you can build as part of your website and thought leadership. Different content types work for different business models. As you are planning your website strategy and the content strategy consider what content types would work best for you and what content types you have the resources to produce. It is important to consider that as you add more content to your website, you’d have to provide a good portal to your content, like a resource page, a blog, a library of your webinars, etc. A design and structure plan for your resources is important to incorporate into the website strategy.
• Content topics and taxonomy – This is related to the content types you’d like to create on your website. To properly organize them and make it easier for people to engage with your content it is important to plan your content topics. Content topics and the way you describe them will guide the path of your visitors within your content. Consider using pain points in your industry to describe these topics, look at keywords and search volume and look at what your competitors are doing. All these insights should drive how you use content topics and how you organize your content.
• Lead generation content – As you plan your content types consider the lead generation content that will influence the top funnel buyers. These content types include whitepapers, eBooks, guides, reports, surveys, etc. You can also ask for newsletter subscription or even blog subscription to collect lead data.