Create a list of goals for your website

A website can be started for many different reasons. Whether you want to set up a website for your hobby, passion or business. Or you want to set up a web store to sell products. With a website, you can reach a larger audience than ever before and also engage more customers in a new way. It is advisable to set goals for your website. This means first setting your goals and encouraging or convincing yourself that a website makes sense for your business, portfolio or pleasure. Let's start with an encouragement for your website!

A website takes time and effort

Any website is a lot of work, at MijnHostingPartner.nl you have the opportunity to quickly install and create a website. Tools or content management systems like WordPress, Joomla and Umbraco make it easy for you to start and configure a website. However, as a beginner, it can often take a day or so to get it set up. For example, you need to install WordPress, set up permalinks properly, make sure you install a theme that suits your needs, install plugins that help you achieve your goals for the site. And think about the content of your website hosting and how you want to present it. Experienced web designers won't mind this, but as a beginner, you won't need to read much into it. But you'll also need some time to get it right.

So don't put too much pressure on yourself in the startup phase of your website and take the time to read in. In our knowledge base, you'll find a large number of articles that will help you with a number of settings and questions. And of course, you can always use our chat if you have a question during this process. We'll be happy to help you out if you get stuck.

Also, don't expect your website to show results right away. The reality is that it takes many months for a website to gain traction on the various search networks like Google and social media. Let's discuss this further in the rest of this blog post.

Creating goals for the first month

So for the first month, you can set goals to install the website, make the look as per your requirement with the theme of your choice. And to have a clear structure of your website. After that, the first thing on your list is to create a set of fixed pages for your website. Think of pages that provide necessary information, such as the Contact Us page, the About Us page, the Home page, and other fixed pages that rarely change. Especially on the home page and the about us page, it is very important that you pay enough attention to these pages. And make sure you put a larger number of words on paper than on the contact page, for example. As a general guideline, you can consider around 1500 words per page.

The next step is to make sure that if you want to use social media, you create the profiles for it. You have different logos or images made or create them yourself for your corporate identity. And you create and set up things, for example, Google Analytics, or the stats, Google Search Console and research broadly in your niche or industry. Who else is active in your branch and how do they handle certain things. With this information and these steps, you can then move on to the next few months.

Set goals for the first six months

After the first month, you should have a good foundation for your website. You're happy with the way it looks and the basic structure is ready. Now it's time to move on to your copy. Every website needs content, no matter what type of website it is. A portfolio where you show your latest work, a web shop, a corporate website or a blog website. Every website needs a certain base and frequency of text. Without it, your website has little chance of success.

We recommend keeping a list in the note-taking app of your choice, where you record the topics you want to write about. And more ideas for your website. A tool like Trello can also help you easily see your workflow for your website. In the first six months, it's important to publish as much content as possible. This helps search engines find your website faster and creates a solid foundation of content for your website to rank on. To this end, the simpler keywords with less search volume are often targeted in the beginning of a website. Later, as a website ages, the bigger keywords can be written. For example, try adding 30 articles to a web store in six months. 30 blog posts on a blog site or 30 normal content on other sites. With each page between 750 and 1500 words as a baseline. That's a whole lot of content to write. We recommend reviewing this weekly and seeing if you write it all yourself or if you hire a copywriter to do it. Or a colleague who can fit this into their schedule.

Goals for the first year and beyond

For the first year, the goal is obviously to generate conversions from the website after all the effort already put into creating and writing the content. After a year, you'll often see more return from organic search results and you've already generated some brand awareness on social media and other channels. Now, of course, the goal is to see some conversions from that as well. A conversion is a desired action by a visitor to your website. This can be through subscribing to a newsletter. A purchase from your web store, a reservation at your restaurant, or a click on an affiliate link. All of these things can be important for your website vision to continue.

So give yourself and your team about 1 year to host your website, and look at the work that has been done for the website in that year. And take a look at the conversions in the year since the website launched. Often you'll see that the website has added value. If this is not the case, you can also take a look at our partner MijnWebdesignPartner.nl, we have an enthusiastic team ready to help you with your website.

And have you already created a gameplan for your new website? Let us know via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram!