Website Optimization:
6 Ways to Align Your Website to Your Business Goals
by Crunch Ranjani
Just about every business these days has a website. It’s a great way to showcase your services, share more about yourself, and help people find you online. But is your website as effective, useful, and helpful to your business as it could be?
When used correctly, a website is a powerful marketing tool. It can be optimized to serve an essential purpose in your business and make marketing easier. With some simple tweaks, you can optimize your website to help you achieve your business goals, hit your sales targets, and more.
Let’s dive in and find out how to optimize your website.
Special thanks to our WordPress Developer Sara Obando for sharing her expertise on Website Optimization in The Lounge - our digital wellness community and membership site for holistic entrepreneurs.
Optimizing Your Website: Know Your Goals
To optimize your website, you first need to get clear on your goals and objectives. Ask yourself what purpose your website serves and if it fulfills its objective in its present state.
Some questions you should ask to guide you in setting goals for your website include:
Does your brand need a website?
What is the main goal of your brand? Is your website aligned with it?
Is your website directly connected to your brand?
Is your website balanced in terms of form (how it looks) and function (what it does)?
What is the main action you want a visitor to your website to take?
What is your brand’s main priority? How does your website support that?
Getting clarity on your goals will help you see where you can make changes and optimize your website to create the outcomes you want for your business.
Use the B.E. C.O.O.L. Framework to Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website is not a one-time event. Every time you shift your goals or priorities, remember to re-evaluate your website to ensure that it is optimized. The B.E. C.O.O.L. framework is a helpful guide for holistic entrepreneurs who want to check that their website is aligned with their goals.
Brand Cohesiveness
Do the different elements of your brand on different platforms look like they are part of the same organization? If they do, congratulations - you have brand cohesiveness.
Whether someone is looking at your website, social media pages, business card, physical location, or some other part of your business, they should feel like it is consistent. This helps people recognize your brand and differentiate it from others.
Action Steps to Optimize Your Website:
Check the “look” of your website across all pages by reviewing consistency in font, colors, style, etc.
Check the “feel” of your website by evaluating consistency in terms of messaging, content themes shared, the writing and/or speaking style, etc.
Check for brand cohesiveness with other platforms or areas where people may connect with your business including social media platforms, emails, forms, physical location, and brand/marketing collateral.
Remove or change any inconsistent parts.
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Entrance Point
You only get one chance to make a first impression - and this applies to your website too. A website visitor makes their decision about whether to stay on a website within a few seconds, which is why entrance points are critical.
An entrance point is a page within your website that people regularly encounter as their first point of contact. For most businesses, this could be the home page, a particular blog post, or even a standalone sales page or product page. Ensure that this page is making a good first impression and is aligned with the goal of your website.
Action Steps to Optimize Your Website:
Use analytics and data to determine your website entrance points.
Evaluate what people will see and how they will feel in the first two to five seconds.
Are you capturing their interest, sharing relevant information to keep them on your website, and giving them a call to action?
Get feedback from friends and family about their impressions of your entry points to help you decide if something needs to be changed.
Call to Action
What does your website ask people to do? This is the call to action (CTA) and it is directly tied to your goals.
Each page of your website should have a CTA to guide people to the next step. To determine the best CTA for each page, it can be helpful to draw out a sitemap to better visualize where a visitor should go after visiting each page.
Action Steps to Optimize Your Website:
Create a sitemap to establish the flow of a visitor through your website.
Ensure that each page includes a CTA that leads them to the next step you want them to take or the page that you want them to visit.
Organization
In line with the idea of making things clear and easy for website visitors, a very important thing to consider when optimizing your website is the organization. Ask yourself: Is the information on the website organized in a way that is easy for people to find what they need?
It is a good idea to always make sure that a website visitor always has easy access to three things:
What your website is about.
What problem you can solve for them.
A way to contact you.
Action Steps to Optimize Your Website:
Check that each page of your website has a header and footer with links that make your website easy to navigate to the three main things.
If your webpage pages are long and contain a lot of content, it may be advisable to include a sidebar or links in the middle as well.
Ask family and friends to navigate your website and observe their actions. Use these insights to guide how your website is organized.
Consider your target demographic and how they might interact with your website as well.
Other Devices
You might create your website on your computer, but that doesn’t mean every visitor to your site will see it on a computer. More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so your website needs to be optimized for this too.
Most layouts, templates, and platforms you use to create your website are designed to be responsive, but sometimes, our content may not look exactly how we want it to on other devices. Additionally, you may want to consider accessibility issues like how your website shows up for people using low data mode (images may not load) or screen readers.
Action Steps to Optimize Your Website:
Check that your pages are displaying correctly on mobile and tablet mode. You can do this via your website platform or tools like Google Inspect.
Look out for text alignment, image display, font size, font color, and text contrast with the background.
Include alt text for all images and avoid too many emojis.
Listing View
What does your website look like when people encounter it on Google or see a link you’ve shared on social media? This is your listing view and often determines whether someone will click through to visit your website. By optimizing this, you can bring more visitors to your website.
You can change the image and text shared in the listing view on your website platform. Use descriptions that include keywords, interest the reader, and keep the character limits in mind!
Action Steps to Optimize Your Website:
Ensure that the listing view for each page is updated with an accurate and enticing title and description.
Update the image with a relevant picture that ties in with the content and your brand
Each platform has specific ways to update the listing information. YoastSEO and RankMath are great plugins for WordPress sites.
What Next?
Once you have finished optimizing your website using the B.E. C.O.O.L framework, the next step is to save all your changes and be cool. These changes often take a day or two to show up (particularly changes to the listing view!) so give it time to see if your tweaks are working.
Website optimization is not a one-and-done activity but rather, an ongoing process. As your goals and priorities shift, it is advisable to periodically review your website optimization.
If you’re interested in learning more about website optimization, please feel warmly welcome to reach out to us! We would love to hear from you.
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