Let’s go in-depth with some of the tasks you must do when planning your website. In this episode, we’ll discuss setting SMART goals for your website. If you want to follow along with the planning process, grab a copy of my Website Planner.
Transcript
Chrissy (00:08):
Welcome to Website Success. I’m your host, Chrissy Rey, and I have more than 25 years of experience helping my clients make websites that their clients love. Tune in each week as I share tips and tricks that’ll help you make your website the best it can be.
(00:27):
Hello and welcome. In this series, we’re gonna talk about going in-depth with all of the tasks that are related to planning your website. Now, before you begin, make sure you go to websitesuccessacademy.com and download a copy of my website planner. It’s really important that you have that because you can go through this series and you can answer all of the questions that are in the planner, and you’ll have a complete planning document at the end. And that’s gonna help you with building out your website.
(01:00):
Now we’re gonna start off by identifying your goals. This is the first task that you’re going to always do when you create a new website or when you redesign an existing website. You’re always going to identify your goals and that’s gonna let you decide what exactly you want to accomplish with the website. So you really need to think about what do you want your website to do?
(01:20):
Do you want to sell a product or a service? Do you wanna get clients to schedule a call with you? Do you want to build your authority to get more speaking engagements or to get more customers? Or do you want to build credibility? What is it that you wanna do with your website or what it, what is it that you want your website to do?
(01:39):
Now if you think about that website planner as a sort of roadmap for your website, you can think of your goals as the destination, or destinations, because you’re not limited to just one goal. You can have multiple goals, and everything else in the plan that you create when you, when you do the website planner, is going to help determine how you get to that destination. So when you think about your target audience or the site outline or the technology that you’re gonna use, your budget, anything like that, then those are all going to determine how you get to those goals. How do you get to those destinations? So you really need to know where you’re gonna go before you can really figure out the rest.
(02:21):
Now let’s talk about how we’re actually going to set these goals up. When it comes to planning a website, I very highly recommend using SMART goals. And SMART goals are going to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. If you’re not a fan of SMART Goals, you don’t have to use them, but I do recommend at least trying it for your first website or your first redesign because they make it a lot easier to track your progress after you’ve launched the website. So, for example, if you make a goal that’s measurable, you can actually see how many hits you’re getting on your website or how many visitors you’re getting for your website, or how many email subscribers your website is getting. So, so I do recommend making your goals, SMART goals, and we’re gonna talk more about that.
(03:06):
So the first thing about SMART goals is that they are specific. So you need to answer the question, what exactly and, and emphasis on that word exactly do you want to accomplish. Now your ultimate goal might be make money, and that’s a great goal to have, but it’s not really specific enough. So if you wanna really get that more specific, you can start with that general make money as your goal, and then make it more specific by thinking about the steps that are involved in achieving that goal. So if you think about make money, you might be able to do things like schedule sales calls because in order to make money, you need to schedule sales calls and then talk with the clients, close a sale, et cetera, et cetera.
(03:48):
So what are some of the things that you can do as steps toward making money for your website? So for example sell one-to-one coaching packages, schedule the sales calls, increase the email list subscribers, or something like that. If you’re totally stuck with thinking of a specific goal for your website, you can use some of the examples that I’ve already given. If you’re doing a redesign for your website, then, and you already have some existing data to compare to, then your goals could be something like improve lead conversions. So if you already know what your lead conversions were before, then you could measure if they’re improved or not. You can also do things like decrease the bounce rate and other goals like that, but again, make sure that they are as specific as possible.
(04:38):
Now, another thing about SMART goals is that they are measurable. So objectively quantifying your goal can make it easier to track your progress and know when you’ve actually reached that goal. So how will you know when you’ve reached your goal? And some measurements are numbers and so those are pretty easy to measure. So for example sell 1001 to one coaching packages. So there’s your number. Once you reach 1,001 to one coaching packages, you’ve reached a goal or you could say Schedule a thousand sales calls or schedule a hundred sales calls or get $1 million in donations. Or another one that is not numeric, it’s binary instead would be something like appear on the Google search engine result page. So that’s not necessarily it. You could have a measurement, so you could compare where you were on the Google search engine result page month over month. But if you’re just getting started, then you could just appear on the Google search engine result page. Whether or not you appear is a yes or no, a true or false. So the measurement for that is binary. It’s either yes or it’s no or true or false.
(05:44):
The next thing we wanna talk about with our SMART goal is whether or not it’s achievable. Is it possible to achieve the goal? You know, your business, you, you know it better than anyone hopefully. And why you might like to sell 50 of your one-to-one coaching packages, or whether you’d like to sell a thousand of your one-to-one coaching packages, is that realistic? So do you have the capacity to do that? Are you physically able to manage 1000 one-to-one coaching sessions? If you don’t have the staff to handle that or sell that, then maybe 50 is a more reasonable number, or maybe 10 is a more reasonable number. And a lot of people when they’re setting their goals, like they like to do pie in the sky and like lofty goals where they’ll eventually get. But for these SMART goals for your website, I want you to think of goals that are actually achievable that you can actually reach within a reasonable amount of time. So within a week, a month, a year, a two years, something like that. So again, think of reasonable and achievable goals and keep in mind the effort that you expect to give to the goal while you’re actually working on it. So think about you know, what your schedule looks like, what, what your free time is gonna look like when it comes to working with your website, and also what resources you’ll have available when you’re working on that goal to help you achieve that goal. So think about those two when it comes to deciding if a goal is achievable or not.
(07:11):
The next thing is that SMART goals are relevant, so the R in SMART is relevant and you need to think about why is the goal important. So I’m gonna tell you a little bit, little story to talk about this. So I had a client come to me that wanted to sell their business. So we’ve had them as a, as a, as a client for other projects before, but they had one of their businesses, they wanted to sell it and they already had a website. We didn’t build their website, somebody else built their website. But the design and the content hadn’t been updated in probably five years. It, it had been a while. They, they built it years ago, hadn’t really done much with it. So when somebody would search for them on Google or Bing or anything like that, then outdated information came up about the business. And so they actually had a couple of potential buyers pass on the business, on pass on purchasing the business because they didn’t think they were legitimate. So when they went and searched for the business on the internet, and it also didn’t help that they were, they were not really active on social media. They didn’t even have a Google business profile or anything like that. But so when the potential buyers went and searched for them on the internet, they didn’t find anything. They, the business basically didn’t exist except for that outdated information. And they knew it was outdated because they had spoken with the owner of the business and they knew that information was has, was several years out of gate. And so they were like, okay, is this business legit? Is it, are they actually active? Are they doing anything? And they weren’t really sure about it, so they just decided to pass on purchasing the business. So what we did was we determined that their goal was to display the updated information on the search engine result page to establish the legitimacy of the business. And that was really the only thing that we needed to worry about was, was whether or not it was legitimate. And so that really helped us guide some of the other decisions that we made down the road in the planning process. We didn’t need to allocate as much of a budget to some of the other things because really the, the, the goal, the the relevancy was to establish legitimacy. It wasn’t really anything else.
(09:25):
So again, think about for the relevance, why is the goal important? So if you’re thinking about your own business, maybe you need to schedule five sales calls to close more customers, or maybe you need to increase your email list subscribers by a hundred to drive more sales leads. Or maybe you need to increase your blog traffic by 10% to improve your brand awareness and drive leads. So again, think about why the goal is important and add that to your SMART goal.
(09:54):
SMART goals are also going to be time-bound. So give yourself a timeline and that’s gonna help you keep on track. It’s gonna help you decide when you need to check in, when you need to check to see if that that measurable part of your SMART goal is measured, if it’s, if you’ve reached that or not. So again, you wanna make sure that the SMART goal is time-bound. So some examples of some time-bound SMART goals. If we go back to the scheduling five sales calls, we’re gonna say we’re gonna schedule five sales calls this month to close two customers or schedule a hundred sales calls this month to close on 10 customers. So whatever your metrics are, again, think achievable and relevant. So you know, you, you’ve gotta keep all of those other aspects of the SMART goal in mind. Or for example, you could increase the email list subscribers by 1000 people in Q1 to drive sales leads. So again, think about what are, when these goals need to be reached. So this month, Q1, next month, this year, try to keep those goals time bound and you can have short-term goals and long-term goals. And I do recommend having a couple of each, having at least a few of each to get started. So I, I want you to have at least a couple of goals, maybe make one or two short term and then a couple of longer term SMART goals for your website. So make, maybe make one or two short term, like what’s gonna happen in the next month, the next quarter, and then what’s gonna happen in the next year, two years, or something like that.
(11:28):
So now it’s time for you to come up with some SMART goals for your website. Again, make at least a couple of short term, a couple of longer term goals. Remember to make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. And if you are using the website planner, there is a page to document your goals. And if you’re not using the website planner, if you’re just doing this on your own, then I do recommend those goals somewhere. So put them in a Google Doc, write them down in a notebook or something like that so that way you can check in to make sure that you’ve actually achieved them.
(12:02):
So thanks for following along and I will see you in the next episode.