Establish achievable goals for your website

The basics of websites can be put together in an afternoon with modern Content Management Systems such as WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla or Drupal. However, the biggest and most work will always be making sure that people actually come to your website hosting. One of the most common sources for this is organic search traffic from Google. So when users search for a term within your hobby, freelance work, or services. Then it is important that your company or website appears among them. And preferably as high as possible, of course.

That requires the necessary work, let's discuss in this blog post what all goes into this. And how you can set clear goals for yourself for this. That are less frightening and motivate you to get started, instead of just peering at the disappointing statistics. Let's get started!

What is the main goal of your website?

You don't start a website for no reason, even if you only start this as a hobby there is a reason behind it. For example, do you want your blog website to inform, entertain or convince people? Do you want to get more visitors to your physical store, attract more customers through the website, generate purchases. And so on and so forth.

If you know what the main purpose of your website is, it is easy to break it down into bite-sized chunks, take the example of informing people with a blog. You do this by writing content on the topics you have in mind. And then promoting it to get as many people as possible to read it. A few components are important take aways in this:

• 1. Write more content
• 2. Attract more visitors
• Promote content
  

Once you have determined your main goal, you can start breaking it down into what you consider the most important goals of a website. After this you can start breaking it down into an action plan. And how you want to achieve this.

Attract more visitors, but how many?

More visitors to a website can be achieved in a number of ways, you can get direct results by advertising for this. But you can also use a combination of promoting your content on social media and trying to get more traffic from the Google search engine. For both options it is important that you create more content for this, and optimize and promote your existing content. You are not alone on Social Media, and your competitor will also be busy adopting hashtags and appealing to your target audience. So it's up to you to further connect with this and try to get you up here.

Attracting more visitors is also a broad concept, so it's nice for yourself to set a clear set of targets for this. Trello is perfect to use for this. With a handy task and goal list, this is particularly pleasant to use, think of it as a whiteboard you can have online. With then also the option to automate certain tasks.

Look at your current monthly traffic, and take 500 visitors as your first goal. Also put the other goals on top of this that go up in small increments. Like a total of 1000 visitors in the month, 2000, 5000, etc. That way you can keep this in front of you and maybe cross it off sooner than 10,000 visitors all at once. This kind of thing is motivating.

Conversions, what are they, and how to set clear goals for them

Conversions is another term that often sees the light of day in the world of online marketing and beyond. A conversion refers to a desirable action by a visitor. This can be anything, and could be a newsletter subscription, a completed contact form or more something like clicking on an ad.

So convenient goals for this can extend to, say, getting 10 new users for your newsletter. Or a white paper downloaded more than 100 times. So list for yourself what is important for your company and website. And set goals with the conversions to achieve them.

Set content goal

Every website needs content to achieve even one of your goals, in fact, without content in the form of text, images, audio or video, doesn't add much. A website like a software tool is the exception to this rule. Once you get started with a Web site, you may soon discover that quite a bit of content may be required. From the pages themselves, to a description for each product in your online store.

So should you have a certain list of content that you want to produce, or you want to publish content on a regular basis, it's important to make sure that you put a system to this. Or at least put out a daily, weekly or monthly schedule for this. For example, if you write a post or page every day, you will have 365 pages by the end of the year. This can seem like a huge task at the beginning, but if you arrange this for yourself with a good schedule. Then you can do this easily.

So use a schedule for yourself and for your colleagues and try to not only have your goals clear, but to achieve them!