6 steps to website success

Hello everybody, and welcome to 6 Steps to Website Success. Hopefully that’s quite an obvious title for a talk and you know what I’m going to talk about today. So this talk is all about avoiding that situation where you open Wix, or you open Squarespace or your platform of choice, stare at loads of templates, install one, and then do absolutely nothing after that.
This talk is taking you through the process that I go through with my clients when we build their websites and it’s step by step. And at the end I’ll also give you a link for a free workbook where you can fill out your own version of this strategy. So first things first, your website is the center of your marketing universe, whether you like it or not.
Obviously we all have marketing, social media, we have networking, but most people seem to see your website as the single source of truth for your business. That’s where they’re looking to find more information about you, about your packages, about your pricing. And also, it’s where the magic happens. It’s where people are actually giving you their cold, hard cash, hopefully.
So if you’re an e-commerce website, it’s a lot more straightforward. It’s where they’re putting in their credit card details and they’re giving you money. Or if you’re a service-based business, it could be where they’re contacting you to inquire about your services or booking a call. So your website really should be the end goal in terms of getting business over the line.
So we need to make sure it’s in tip top shape.
There’s a stat here that says 81% of people research before making a big purchase. Now, I don’t know if you consider what you do a big purchase, but I imagine most of you are serving other businesses and you as a business when you’re investing in services or products, it’s likely that you’re doing some kind of level of research to make sure that you’re making the right decision.
And if your competitors’ websites are a lot better than yours, that might sway towards them, choosing them instead of you. So again, that’s another reason why we need to focus on making our website the best experience we can. So this is the obligatory why should you listen to me slide? So if you haven’t met me yet, my name is Emily Jones and I’m the founder of Two Shoes Creative.
So we are a design agency for purpose led businesses and charities. We’ve been going for almost five years now, but before that, I was contracting and freelancing in design in many different guises across marketing, email, UX design, web design, branding. So I think I’ve got quite a well-rounded view of what works in terms of having a successful website.
So let’s jump straight into our steps. Step one should be obvious, but it is something that people sometimes miss out. Now, when we’re starting anything, any project, we should have goals because if we don’t have goals, how do we know when we’ve won? So the first step in website success is setting goals. Broadly this is the kind of thing you should be looking to achieve with your website.
So the first thing is to increase your brand reputation and retention. So when you’re meeting people lovely events like this, or you’re publishing social media posts, your website should back up everything you’re saying and doing. It should be an extension of all your other marketing. It should look similar, it should feel similar, and it should make people trust you even more when they visit your website.
And it should also mean that you’re increasing your brand retention, because as they’re seeing you at all these touch points they’re getting to know you more. Secondly, once we’ve got those people on our website, we actually want to convert them into customers. That’s one of the most important things. It’s very nice getting loads of awareness but what we want to do is actually convert people to actually give you their cold, hard cash.
And lastly, and this is again something people sometimes overlook, is your website can actually attract new customers that you may not have ever met or marketed to before. And that is through search engine optimisation, which is people finding you on Google. So people looking for a business like yours, they just don’t know about you specifically yet. So when it comes to goal setting, there’s three types of goals that I get my clients to think about.
The first one is awareness. So here’s some examples of what awareness goals might be. Now these ones are a little bit harder to track. So things like increasing your brand retention. You would want to come up with some ideas as to what you want people to retain about your brand specifically. And the same with things like positioning yourself as an authority.
What do you want people to know you’re really good at? Now there are some measurable goals that we can do in terms of websites, and that’s things that you can track in your analytics. So for example, how many visitors you have on your website, how many page views you have, how long people are spending on your website. They can be really good to kind of track the awareness.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, how do I come up with this number? I’ve got a little calculation that you can do to work yourself backwards, so you don’t just have to pluck something out of the air. So once you’ve got that awareness down, we then need to think about how we’re generating leads on our website. So when it comes to lead generation, these are people that are kind of past the awareness phase and considering hiring you.
And there’s a few different ways that we can measure that. Getting newsletter subscribers is a really good way to kind of track lead generation. If people are kind enough to give you their email address, it means they’re interested in you in some way. So having a goal of how many newsletter subscribers that you want to gain via your website can be a really good way to track your lead generation.
But if you’re a service-based business, it could be things like contact form fills, it could be consultation bookings, it could be freebie downloads, whatever works for you in your business. And again, if you’re e-commerce, it’s slightly more straightforward. It’s how people are actually adding things to a basket. So adding things not necessarily checking out just yet.
And lastly sales. So to kind of work your way back from what we need in terms of awareness and lead generation, we need to know how much we’re trying to sell. So here’s a couple of examples. But make it work for you. It could be how many people you’re booking on a service, how many products that you’re selling. It could be a money related goal, how much income you want.
And from here we can then work out what stats we need in terms of awareness and lead generation to get to our sales goals. So I don’t know if you all look at your website stats, but, there are stats to say that 2 – 5% of people who visit your website will convert. So that actually seems quite low.
So when you go away afterwards and have a look at your analytics, if you’re in that 2 – 5% of people who are actually taking action on your website, that’s actually bang on average. If you do have an e-commerce business, unfortunately it’s a little bit lower because it’s more competitive market so it’s 1 – 4%. So that can help us calculate, what our goals should be.
So here’s a really simple example for a service-based business. So say you need five sales a month. And you know, if you can get ten people on the phone, the half of them are going to convert customers. That means you want ten people to book calls on your website a month. And if we’re working on that kind of 2% success rate, we just need 500 visitors a month so you can kind of work back there to find your goals.
For ecommerce it’s even simpler if you need to sell 50 products, you need 5000 visitors to sell those 50 products at the lower end of that 1% conversion rate. We can get a little bit more complicated when it comes to things like money. So if you kind of got an income goal and you have lots of different products, you can kind of work out what your average order value is and work it out from there.
So if you know that people tend to spend 50 pounds, you know that you need 100 customers to reach your 5000 income goal, which would be 10,000 visitors a month. Once you’ve kind of got a handle on what your stats are and you’ve started tracking them, you can then start playing around with improving some of it. So if you wanted more income, you could look at maybe getting more visitors to your site, or you could look at improving your conversion rate so that you can have the same amount of visitors, but more of them are converting.
So the idea is just to kind of get to know your stats a bit. Track them for an extended period of time and then you can adjust your goals as you go. You’ll find that you might have seasons in your business, so you need kind of at least a year of data to start making actionable steps for the next year of your business.
But wait, it’s not all about you. If we had a website that was just all about getting sales for your business, it likely wouldn’t get any because it wouldn’t be focusing on your customer. So what we need to do next is work out what your customer’s goals are when they reach your website, spoiler alert it’s not just to book a 1 to 1 consultation with you probably.
It’s probably to get information about something. So people, when they’re on a website, at least a business website, they’re kind of doing three things. The first thing is to get information. Generally they don’t care who they’re getting information for. They just want information about something. That’s where SEO can play in, so you can come to the top of the search results and answer people’s questions.
It’s to get information about you specifically. That’s a really good one. Maybe they’ve seen you around this in your marketing and they want to learn more about you. And lastly it is to buy. But it’s likely they’ve done one of those two things first before they’d even consider buying from you yet.
So how do we work out what our audience want? We can’t mind read yet. ChatGPT can’t mind read yet. So how do we do that? That’s where we go in to Step two, research. I love research, you should love research. It really, really helps to focus what you need to do on your website.
You see I like threes. So there’s three kinds of broad types of research that I do for or with my clients. The first one is audience insights. So we want to get in the minds of our audience. And there’s so many different ways you can do this. These are kind of my top five. So the first one is actually talking to people.
It’s a really underrated way of getting research. When you’re at an event like this today, you’re talking about your business. Just note down maybe not a piece of paper because that’ll be a bit weird, but in your head, what people are asking you about your business and you’ll start to build up kind of your frequently asked questions. One for me, for example, is I talk about building websites.
People always ask me, oh, what’s the best platform to build a website on? So I need to think about that in the back of my head and think, how can I get my website’s content to answer that question for people? You can do the next step and do surveys and interviews, either with your target audience or if you’ve got previous clients, it can be really useful to talk to them about why they chose you, maybe what doubts they had before they purchased with you, how they found your service.
Did anything surprise them about what you did? And that can really give you an insight into how you can meet your potential customers doubts about hiring you. Then, of course, we’ve got good old fashioned desk research. The beauty of the internet is that people talk about themselves all the time on there. So it’s likely that you’ll be able to find a blog, a YouTube video, another piece of research with people talking about a problem that you can solve for them.
And then, of course, we’ve got SEO research, which I’ll talk about in a minute.
Next we’ve got competitor analysis. So the obvious one is to look at your direct competitors. So have a look at people in your industry doing exactly the same thing as you. It’s important that we do compare ourselves to competitors. I don’t want you to do it in a way that you’re going to get really bogged down and jealous of what they’re doing, but mainly it’s so that A. You can stand out from them with the messaging that you’ve got.
But secondly, to make sure you’re not accidentally copying someone and you’re going to get in trouble. And the second one, which is often underrated, is looking at your indirect competitors. So when I say indirect competitors, I mean things that people might buy instead of you. So, for example, me as a web designer, people might choose to invest in social media marketing instead of me.
They might be making a decision between investing in their social media and investing in their website. So I need to make sure that they choose website first because if they don’t have a good website there’s no point of doing social media marketing because your leads are just going to fall off. So have a look at other kind of little pockets of things that people could be spending money on, and how you can kind of get one up on those kinds of things.
And lastly, we’ve got SEO research. So there’s tools online where you can see what people are searching on Google, how often they’re searching for them, and how competitive it is to reach the top. And that can really help you also get insight into the kind of questions that your audience are asking, and then you can answer them.
So now we’ve got our goals and we’ve got loads of really great audience insights. Next, we need to move on to strategy. When you’re creating your website, these are the five things I need you to be thinking about all the time. So who are you targeting? Hopefully we’ve found that out through our researching. What need am I answering. Again, we should know exactly what people need, or at least what people think they need
before they come to you. But what value are you adding? Why should they choose you? What’s your unique perspective. Again, what makes you so great next to all of the other people who might offer the same services as you? And why should they listen to you? Why do you have authority to say that you’re good at a thing?
Is it qualifications? Is the experience? What makes you the most experienced to do the job for them?
So it’s kind of look at our strategy and our tactics we need to go back to our goals. So likely when you’ve written your goals you’ve written a big list of goals, under them we want to write tactics in which you can achieve these. Loads of different ways of doing it, but for example, for increasing brand retention, you want to make sure you have a strong visual identity on your website.
If you are booking, if you want to book ten consultation calls a month, you need to make it really easy to book a consultation call. You don’t want to hide that page somewhere where they don’t know where to find it. You don’t want to ask them a million questions before they get on the phone. You want to make it really simple.
And a good example with e-commerce is that a lot of people fall at the final hurdle when it comes to e-commerce brands, because they don’t know the shipping costs until they’ve put everything in their basket. So a really simple one there is making it really upfront what your shipping costs are. So yeah, when you’ve got all your goals, you can then start to outline all the different ways you could achieve these goals.
So we’ve got our goals, done our research. We’ve got our strategy. Next we’re going to plan. I know you’re thinking, we’re at Step 4 and we haven’t even built our website yet. What we want to do is plan all of our content for our pages. And in general, we want to focus on one main topic per page.
For our content plan, we want to outline what pages we need on our website, what purpose each page is serving, and what you want people to do when they leave the page. And this will give you a really focused task of knowing exactly what you need to say to get people to take action. A lot of people ask me about blogging, and it’s the same.
What I want you to do is to create topics for your blog that are based on the goals and research and prioritise ones that are going to deliver the most value. I would always say, don’t start blogging until that you know that you’ve covered everything else on your website so that people have got somewhere to go after they’ve read your amazing blog.
So we’ve got our content plan now. Finally, we’re going to start building our website. But we’re not because I’m going to get you to write your website first. Now there’s a lot of designers in the room, and I know that your first instinct is to open a lovely builder and start putting loads of colors on the page and making it look really good, but I always find that it’s best to write first because once you know what your words are, it’s easy to build the visuals around that.
And I want you to go back to these five questions. When you’re writing your website, everything needs to be focused on your audience, why they need you specifically.
Once you’ve written your website then you can go in and start building, and that’s a whole other presentation in itself. And like I said, people always ask me what’s the best platform to build on? And I would say if you’re building your own website, just pick the one that you like the best. If you know how to use Squarespace, don’t spend two weeks trying to learn to use Webflow.
I’m guilty of this. If I’m procrastinating actually building my own website, I’ll start learning a new program. And really, I know that I can probably build something in Squarespace really quickly. If you’re working with a web developer, they’ll help advise you on the best platform to use. If you’ve kind of set your goals, your strategy, and your content plan, you should know the kind of features you need.
And to be honest, most of these are the same with the exception Shopify, which is very e-commerce focused. But there are so many platforms out there, I would just recommend choosing one you know, you can afford and that, you know, you can use.
Loads of designers in the room, so probably don’t need to go through this. But the key to excellent website design is to have a strong visual identity. We want to make sure that when people are on your social media, looking at your leaflets, meeting in person, when they click on your website, it feels familiar to them. It’s not a massive surprise.
The colors aren’t completely different. The vibe is completely off. We want to make sure we’ve got high quality written content. Like I said earlier, you could have the most beautiful website in the world, but if it’s not saying anything no one’s going to do anything. We want to make sure our customer journey is smooth. Like I said, when we were looking at our strategy, we want to make it easy to book a consultation call.
We want to make it easy to book with you. Yeah. We don’t want them to fall off at the final hurdle because something isn’t working. And of course, we need to optimise for SEO, for site speed and for accessibility. This is slightly more technical, but basically we want to make sure that our page loads fast on desktop and mobile,
people get bored really easily, and we want to make sure that we’re meeting accessibility guidelines, not only because it’s the law, but also we don’t want to exclude anyone unnecessarily.
We’ve done five steps and we’ve completed our website, but unfortunately our website is never really done. You can’t just build your website, run away for two years and expect it to work, certain parts will, but what we want to do is make sure that we’re always improving. And also we need to know if we’re meeting our goals. And to do that, we can monitor our progress.
When you first launch your website, it’s really good to get feedback from that audience that you did some research with earlier. If you can get feedback from your target audience, that’s absolutely brilliant. Get them to do really specific tasks on your website. Ask them if they can book a call with you on your website. Ask them to investigate something about a certain service and report back to you what they found out.
And there you’ll find out if there’s any sticking points in terms of your website. You can track your website data. You can do this in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or within your platforms like Squarespace and Wix. And you get all this amazing data about what pages people are on, how they’re getting there, how long they’ve been there.
I would just track some of the key stats that are related to your goals, that you don’t get too overwhelmed by all the amazing data that you can have, and also you want to be creating and updating your content regularly, it’s likely you’re updating your social media quite often. You don’t need to update your website every day, but at least every month, every two weeks.
Amazing. If you’re putting out great social media content, it’s likely that you can use some of that on your website. So as you tweak your social media messaging, I don’t know you try a new headline on your Instagram stories and everyone loves it, why not put it on your website? If you’ve done a new photoshoot and you’ve put it on your Instagram, again, put it on your website.
And I often find that a lot of my clients who’ve been making some absolutely amazing video content on social media, and as great as Instagram Reels are, they last a few days before no one sees them again, and you can put them on your website and they will last forever. So yeah, start to think of your website as a kind of moving algorithm in the same way that social media is, and that way also if people are traveling between them, they’re seeing the same kind of messaging.
And to leave you on this note, growing your business is a marathon, not a sprint. Like with any marketing, you don’t get instant results often, and when it comes to updating your website, it’s likely it’ll take a few months for it to settle in and for you to start seeing that data starting to work. So yeah, you’ve just got to remember that it may seem that everyone else is making 10k in a day, a million pounds in a month,
we don’t know if they’re lying. So just make sure that you’re really focusing on yourself and growing a steady, sustainable business without burning out. Promised you a free workbook. So if you scan this you can see the slides from today and you can download a workbook, which is a little Google doc, where you can fill out all of these different sections that we’ve done today.
And also brace yourself for this. I’m really sorry, I’ve got a Christmas challenge on at the moment. So I’m encouraging everybody, if you go on my social media I’m wearing Christmas hat, to get their website in tip top shape for Christmas. There’s also a link on there for my website, Accelerator Challenge, where I will be emailing you every month with a task that you can do in relation to these 6 steps, to get your website in tip top shape in time for the festive season.
Sorry, I know I’ve got my Christmas hat in my bag as well. I’ll be taking some pictures later. So yeah. Does anyone have any questions about websites?