Author
Luka Maras
Category
Website strategy
Date
January 14, 2020
Read time
26 minutes
What is Website strategy?
Website strategy is the process of building websites that helps you achieve your business goals and meet your users’ needs.
Introduction
Soft part – your company and your clients:
Tech part – your website:
Do not be afraid to jump to another step of your strategy and then come back later to finish the one you were doing. It’s better to vary your process a little bit than to get bogged down in any of the phases. Yes, this process will yield some amazing results. But just writing and writing can be boring.
If I get an idea for website visuals or some content pieces, I just quickly sketch them out. Sometimes I even create a basic HTML mockup of a page to give myself a better sense of direction.
— A one-time thing.
If you are serious about using the Web to achieve your business goals, your website should be a never-ending work in progress. This doesn’t mean that you will never get to launch or redesign your company’s website. You will. However, as your business evolves, so should your website, to mirror its growth.
— A quick, 5-minute process.
Laying out your Website strategy may seem like a long process, especially in the beginning. Do not get discouraged. You should go through all the steps. Trust me, this will pay off manifold, especially in the long term.
— Just a way to choose a specific technology.
Certainly, choosing the right technology for your website will be one of the steps when formulating your Website strategy, but it’s not the end goal. Technology (software) is just a means to an end.
— Set in stone.
Keep in mind that your Website strategy isn’t an immutable law. As your business changes, so will your goals. The strategic process will make it way more easier for you to adapt to changes and keep your new goals firmly in your sights.
Website strategy bridges the gap between business and IT. It brings together business goals and website users’ needs.
— Master of your own domain
Yes, pun intended.
Big tech companies and online services come and go, but your domain and your website are yours. For example, Google or Facebook may change their rules for advertising, but no one can control your e-mail list to which you send your newsletter.
A well-designed and executed Website strategy will:
— Save you time and money in the long term.
Without a strategic approach to building websites, you are in a constant state of flux. The targets are unclear. Companies try to solve this issue by throwing more money at it. A new technology, the latest social network marketing gimmick, a visual redesign – without a clear goal and a roadmap to get there, all these things are pretty much useless.
— Help you answer any questions in relation to your website.
Issues and doubts will show up, whether during the process of building your website, or after the launch. This is normal. The great thing is that your Website strategy will help you find answers quickly. You just have to go back and read the answers you wrote down, for a particular step of your Website strategy.
— Complement and reinforce your “offline” business.
If your website is straightforward and easy to use, your customers will expect the same kind of service in you physical store. It goes the other way around, too.
— Benefits for Web designers and developers.
The main problem with most web designers and developers: They don't think like a business owner does.
A company hires a web developer or an agency to build their new website. The work is done, the agency got paid and that’s it. The new website doesn’t bring in any revenue to the company.
Unfortunately, this scenario is a very common one.
That’s why a Web strategist is far more valuable to a business then a great designer or a highly skilled developer.
If you are a web developer or designer, learning how to craft and execute a good website strategy will make you stand out from the herd. As you learn about the process, you will understand that you have to marry IT and business. This union is what brings in profits. It’s a win-win for all sides involved: Your client, their clients (end users, i.e. website users) and you.
— Benefits for managers and project leads.
You will learn how web technology ties in to business goals.
You don’t have to understand the nitty-gritty of web programming or the latest front-end technologies. What you have to understand is how different aspects of your website strategy fit in with your company’s vision.
You will learn to ask the right questions, such as: what kind of content our users prefer? In what format? What kind of design and functionality will drive up subscriptions? Etc.
Learning by doing is the best way to learn. So, before continuing, download our free PDF website strategy template and fill it as you proceed through the sections:
Download your website strategy template
Your website should reflect your values, who you are and your purpose, no matter what industry you are operating in.
To be able to create content (as well as the look and feel) for your website that is authentic, you must answer the following questions:
Think deeply about your answer.
This is not about your knowledge and skills, but why you chose your specific line of business and not something else.
Let me give you an example:
Any architect can tell you that they are designing buildings because they have the necessary skillset: That she has mastered the science of statics and strength of materials, the art of designing buildings so that they are functional and safe, etc.
But an architect that stands out may tell you that she designs zero energy buildings because her main concern is humanity’s impact on the environment. She enrolled into architectural studies because her talent for design makes it possible for her to directly contribute to her vision of a better world.
Think how strong a selling point that is. Her message will reach a very specific audience.
The more specific and unique your offer is, the higher you can charge for your services.
Why?
Because you are positioning yourself as a specialist within your broader industry. Speaking of which…
If you do your Website strategy properly, you will surpass your competition. Why? Because only a handful of companies take this approach to building and redesigning websites.
After answering the preceding three questions, stand back and take a more objective look at your business. Ask yourself:
What differentiates my business from others?
Usually, you can stand out in only one of the three areas for your service or product:
Once you have identified your area of differentiation, remember to converge all your website building efforts in that direction – content (text, video, downloadables), design, user interface and user experience.
The last thing you want to have is just another website in a sea of blandness.
Identifying your target audience – your website users – is crucial. As well as knowing their needs and aspirations.
Like I mentioned in the previous section – your website should reflect your values. But that must be made in conjunction with making your website geared towards your audience.
Why?
Because the truth is:
Nobody cares about you or your company. All your website visitors care about is what you can do for them.
Your website definitely should reflect your values, because you want customers who share those same values.
But those values should come through messages targeted at your audience.
And to know who you are offering your products and services to, answer the following questions:
The persona will help you to create content and design your website as if you were creating it for one person. Of course, you are targeting a wider audience, but anyone who visits your website should have a feeling as if it were a one-on-one interaction.
Make the benefits your business provides stand out on your web pages. What problem are you solving? What wish are you fulfilling?
This is where you have to jot down what your product or service is about: Why will someone want to buy it – what’s in it for them (benefit)? As well as the features and potential objections.
This material will be the core content of each individual service or product page. It all boils down to this:
Each business either solves a problem or makes a wish come true.
Here is a quick example:
A mobile phone is a necessity in today’s world. If you are looking for work, need to keep in touch with relatives and friends, you need it. A basic, no-name mobile phone will solve this problem (it doesn’t even need to be a smartphone).
On the other hand, the latest iPhone, encased in a golden frame is not a necessity. Someone who will buy it definitely goes beyond the basic need to stay connected. This is an example of fulfilling a wish.
Alright, let’s see the features and benefits through an example now:
Let’s say you are selling computers. In this case, the features can be:
OK, these are the features. But how do they benefit your potential clients?
Because of the power your computer packs, it can:
Benefits should be the most prominent part of your web pages’ content. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t list your products’ or services’ features. You just don’t put them first.
If your website is an online store, things like discounts and free shipping offers should be among the most prominent elements.
You should counter any objections to your services or products before they are raised.
This can be done:
The latter is more common for websites that are about a single, specific service. This page or section of your website is sometimes labeled “support”.
Writing down the answers to the most common objections you’re likely to have from your customers will ensure:
Finally! You made it through the conceptual, analytical and documenting phase to emerge on the other side and start building your website!
Now that you have successfully defined the first part of your Website strategy, what follows is the actual website building process. Here, you will define:
Based on the last two, keyword research and design decisions will be made.
[insert generic image of an arrow hitting a target here]
What is the main goal of your website? The most-heard answer is “to increase my profits”. This is logical, because:
If your website doesn’t make you any money, it’s just a liability.
However, some goals are different, like: increasing a brand’s reach or raising consciousness about a cause that’s important to you (environment, a political cause, etc).
If you can, discuss this with someone who isn’t directly involved with your business. Because what often happens is that, as the owner, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Once, we had a potential client – a company that wanted to launch a subscription-based educational web portal. As the preliminary consulting meeting progressed, they realized that a board game would be their ideal product, not a website! How is that for a change?
Be completely honest with yourself. You may be amazed at what will emerge to the surface during your website strategy creation process!
Why would someone visit your website?
Take a pen and a piece of paper. Finally! Sketching time is here!
The majority of websites follow a hierarchical structure like this one:
Be aware that you should keep your pages at a maximum “depth” of 3 clicks from the homepage. More than that, and you will turn away your users.
Defining the functionality will directly influence the choice of technology for your website.
Here are some of the possible functionalities that you may need on your website:
…and so on. But make sure to keep in mind this:
Do not implement a functionality just because you heard that it’s good for marketing or that someone else reaped success by using it.
If in doubt about the choice of technology for your website, get professional advice from a web strategist or a consultant with a web development background.
Think thoroughly by going through all the previous steps and see if a specific functionality would really yield benefits (think long-term).
For example:
Let’s say that you are offering gardening services. You did a little research and saw that there is a demand but also that other websites in your niche are poorly made. So, the obvious choice was to create a basic, really simple website with a separate page for each service. But then you noticed that you could write articles regularly, which would offer advice and tips on gardening. This will build trust with your audience and boost your traffic. Which would in turn lead to more customers. So WordPress was the obvious choice because it’s perfectly suited for a simple website with a blog. And it’s free.
Is your website going to be in English only?
Or do you plan to have a multilingual website?
If so, think about how this will affect your website’s architecture, content production, SEO, user interface and so on.
Content makes the world go round
Content forms the basis of your website. In fact:
Content is, and always will be, the most important part of your website. Content is king, period!
Before starting to create content, you should research:
Writing the copy for your website should always be done with SEO in mind (in other words, Google). For keyword research, you can use the free Keyword planner tool from Google, or commercial ones like KWFinder. KWFinder is the best SEO tool out there when you take into account the quality/price ratio. It is very simple to use and the benefits are huge. I have used it to boost the organic traffic for many local and international websites that I did SEO for.
If your website is new (or hasn’t even been launched yet), do your keyword research targeting long tail queries. This means searches which have 3 or more keywords inside them. For example:
The keywords women shoes are searched for tens of thousands of times each month. This means that if you rank at the top of results for them, you can make a significant amount of money! But for broad searches like this one, the competitiveness is huge. Instead, go for long tail searches like:
women’s shoes for achilles tendonitis – there are about two hundred monthly searches done, but it’s much easier to rank for them.
By looking at forums, Facebook groups and talking to your customers discover what they could be searching for. What problems ail them, what wishes they have.
In section 4, we touched upon the topic of benefits of your product or service.
Combined with your selected keywords, write your website copy clearly stating the benefits.
And remember to engage your audience!
Back to your purpose, remember the example with the architect?
Compare this message (imagine it on the homepage of their website):
We are an award-winning architectural practice working on architectural and urban design, interior and commercial architecture.
To this one:
We use innovative technology to create energy-efficient buildings that achieve targets such as net zero energy and deep energy retrofit to reduce construction time, cost and environmental impact.
In fact, a local search for architects will turn up results which are nearly all generic, like the first example above. Almost every studio says they won awards or honorable mentions in competitions. And that they offer services for any type of building imaginable. There is no differentiation here, no one stands out.
But the second example is highly focused on a very specific market segment. Add some emotion to that copy – for example, “better buildings for a better world” – and there you have it.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of pages/content on any given website:
The first ones are for your services – a separate page for each service that you offer.
The second ones, articles, serve to spark interest and build trust with your audience. That’s content marketing: giving useful information for free. This positions you as an authority within your industry and you are building trust because you are not shoving your product down your users’ throats by repeating “buy, buy!”. Rather, you are giving valuable, preferably actionable information for free.
If it’s top quality content, you will get a lot of exposure for free, which translates to increased website traffic and more leads and customers. Great content gets shared and linked to naturally.
Whether it’s a service/product offer page or an article, keep in mind at all times that your website’s content—text, images, downloadable materials, design—should reflect your purpose coupled with your users’ needs.
Web design must be geared towards conversion. A website should look beautiful, but above all, should be easy to use and made to convert visitors into customers.
Finally, we have arrived at the visual part! This is where most people start their website building process, which is wrong.
If you went through all the previous steps, you will start to see that the surface layer, the outer skin of your website, rightfully comes last!
A website should be:
1. Functioning
2. Useful
3. Usable
4. Converting
5. Beautiful
Functioning
The first one is a no-brainer: if there is a missing page or a non-functioning form, the website doesn’t work. Users will leave and that’s it. That’s why each page and every functionality of your website should be tested before deployment.
Useful
Even if the website is really hard to use and you will curse the designer who made it, you will still stick to it. Trust me, if it’s the only website with the proper information, you will suffer through the horrific user interface just to obtain the information that you need!
Usable
Proper, solid code is the foundation on which you should build an intuitive user interface (UI) which will lead to a great user experience (UX). Before going into detail, such as fonts, colours and images, start with wireframes or mockups. To build them, sign up at Mockflow for free and check out their WireFramePro tool. It’s great and easy to use.
Your should test your pages for usability. This is trickier than testing the functionality: programming code either works or doesn’t. But humans are unpredictable and you never know where they’ll click. It’s better to test your website with 1 or 2 users than just launch it without doing it.
Converting
I don’t know if this word even exists as an adjective, but let’s make it clear:
Above anything else, your website should convert your visitors into customers.
A design that converts is infinitely more important than a beautiful design. Now, if you can achieve both, great! But above all, concentrate on making your website visitors wanting to click that button, whether it’s to buy your product, subscribe to your newsletter or contact you for more information on your service.
Beautiful
This is where problems can arise. Because beauty is purely subjective. Remember this: Do not get emotionally attached to your website’s design. If you want to achieve your business goals, website properties like ease of use, clarity, high conversion rates and fast loading times should always precede aesthetics. If you are just starting out and don’t want to spend money on a unique, professional design, check out ThemeForest. It has great designs and themes for a variety of content management systems and plain HTML websites also, at really affordable prices.
If you can’t make it beautiful, make it simple, minimalistic. Simplicity always pays off.
On the Web, the competition is just a click away. A slow-loading, badly designed or boring web page? Bounce!
Always remember:
Today’s Web users want everything right now.
If in doubt, ask yourself how do you surf the web? When searching for something, will you:
Wait for 10 seconds for a web page to load? I think you’ll agree with me when I say that most of us immediately click the back button on our browser if the loading time exceeds 3 seconds, not 10!
To check the loading times of your web pages, use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest.
These things are expected from a website. They are the norm, not the exception! Yet, a lot of websites still lack them. How come you don’t see them? Because the majority of websites that end up on the first page of Google’s search results have great and useful content, load quickly and are user-friendly. Want to be a part of that 1% exclusive club? Do your work properly and thoroughly and you will.
First, to see if anything is wrong technically with your website, connect it with Google Search Console. It’s free and it will notify you if there is something wrong with your web pages, like loading speed, mobile rendering issues, indexing by Google’s crawler, etc.
Once you’re sure that everything’s running smoothly, move on to…
Your website is launched/redesigned, it is functioning properly and you have amazing content. Visitors start pouring in. But that doesn’t mean that you should stop. You can further improve it. How?
By doing:
CRO – conversion rate optimisation. This is the process of converting more visitors into leads and customers. It is done by tracking and analysing your visitors’ behaviour and then making changes to see what works even better.
First, connect your website with Google Analytics, preferably through Google Tag Manager. Analyse and see what pages are performing better and why.
Analytics are great if you use them in combination with a visitor-tracking tool like Hotjar. It enables you to see where visitors click and how they use your web pages.
Based on these insights, you can change your design, the structure of your content, headlines, etc. And then see if the changes result in more visitors becoming customers. You can even do A/B, split and multivariate testing with Google Optimize (also free).
This process takes time and at least a moderate amount of traffic to be effective. But it pays off in the long run!
Are you having doubts?
Are you stuck?
It is here that the strategic process comes to the rescue!
You can solve any problem by going back to your business and website goals.
Example 1:
Say that you are not sure about some design choices – for example, a product page.
It says that selling more products is the website’s goal. Now it’s clear that the UI should facilitate the buying process. And that the layout of the elements on the page should be clear. Product benefits and features must be at the forefront. A strong call to action (CTA) should be prominent and visible at all times.
Therefore, no matter how nice and smooth those gradients on the “buy now” button look on your monitor, think again. If there is not enough contrast, chances are some users won’t notice it fast enough. See how it looks like on other screens. Also, see if the colours are consistent across your website – with other buttons and links.
Example 2:
You are planning to write a series of articles but are not sure if they will boost your website’s traffic.
Go back to your audience (step 3) and the benefits you can provide them (step 4). Remind yourself who you are writing for and what their problems and wishes are. Ask yourself:
By going back to your business goals and users’ needs you can solve any problem that may show up during your website building process.
This also shows you why a lot of websites under-perform or never help a business. The website owner is constantly trying out the newest digital marketing techniques or programming functionalities. But he never really asks himself if these solutions are helping achieve his business goals and user needs – because he never took the strategic approach in the first place.
If you put in the time and effort to answer the questions in each step of your Website strategy, you will be surprised at what you will discover. It may make you rethink the whole approach to your business.
Many of my clients have told me they never thought about their business model, presentation, communication with potential clients from this point of view.
A solid Website strategy is not a separate part of your business. It is very important in itself, but still a part of your overall business strategy.
