Set SMART Website Goals to ensure that they are results oriented. Your website should be a tool to help you achieve goals in your business by working as a lead generator. Use the S.M.A.R.T. acronym to help you set your website goals wisely and get results.
Specific
Specific goals are more likely to be achieved because they help you see how to get to the desired end result.
Measurable
Measurable goals would be things like number of newsletter signups, sales conversions, the path people are taking through the content on your site, how many times a video is viewed, and anything else related to the main goal.
Actionable
Identify content and functionality tasks that will help you fulfill your goals and who will be responsible for each one.
Realistic & Relevant
Your goals need to be realistic in that if you want to hit a hundred thousand visitors in a month you’re going to have to have an advertising budget and some joint venture partners to help drive the traffic. This is not to say you shouldn’t set the bar high because you don’t want it to be so low that you lose your motivation and momentum. Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Goals also need to be relevant or appropriate for user interaction and other goals of a specific area of your site that will help you achieve the goals.
Time-based
Set a start and finish date to ground the goals, then you’ve set your unconscious mind into motion to begin working on the goal and are then able to give time frames to your tasks and tracking as well.
Some examples of SMART website goals include:
- Increase traffic by 50% in 6 months.
- Increase sales of X product online by 20% over the next month.
- Have 100 members in Y program in the next quarter.
- Add 1000 new subscribers to the newsletter over the next 3 months.
- Share a link to your landing page or new blog post on LinkedIn 5 times each week.
- Increase brand loyalty on social media by encouraging fans to give at least 1 message of positive feedback per day.
Be careful not to set too many goals at one time. Set a limit and stick to it, especially if setting and tracking goals is new to you. Plan who will be responsible for each task from deciding on the goals, implementing the activities to set things in motion and keeping track of the results.
Set milestones and have everyone involved included in milestone meetings so they are invested in the outcome. Reward your team when goals are met and when they aren’t find out why quickly, and figure out how to fix the system so you can recover and stay on track. Consider split testing changes to your web pages during the process to improve your results.
Now go set a few SMART goals for your website and share them below!
