10 Steps to Create a Website Strategy

What is a website strategy?

A website strategy is essentially a long-term business plan that’s built around your website. Your website strategy goes beyond the design you choose for your website—it helps inform the content you create, your marketing efforts, and more.

Typically, a website strategy includes several parts, including your website design, branding strategy, keyword research and implementation, and analytics. All of these individual parts work together to help you design and develop an effective website, making it easier to optimize your website in a way that’s aligned with your goals. Your website strategy can also help with the basics of branding, including your brand’s personality, appearance, and purpose.

Every website should start with a web strategy, especially if you’re building a website for your business. The more time you spend creating a website strategy, the better your website will be.

How to develop your website strategy in 10 steps

With a little time and effort, you can create a website strategy to help you build the best website for your brand. A content strategy guide can even help you understand how to use content to optimize your website. In the meantime, here’s how you can start creating a website strategy.

1. Set your goals

No good plan is complete without goals, so take some time to set a handful of goals for your website. Perhaps you want to sell more products or services, or maybe you want to increase the sales of a particular product. You might also set a goal to get a specific number of unique visitors each month or to convert a certain percentage of visitors to leads. The goals you set will determine what you’re working toward with your site strategy, so setting clear goals is important.

2. Find a story to tell

Every brand has a story to tell, so find your story and figure out how you want to tell it. If you want to tell a story for branding purposes, find a good, honest narrative and make sure you keep it simple.

3. Take an inventory of your content

Before you launch your website, figure out what kind of content you have to offer. You’ve probably got a basic story about your brand, but do you have any videos, testimonies, or blog posts that you’re ready to share? Content is essential if you want to drive more traffic to your website and convert website visitors into customers. If you’re using content that was written or created previously but not published, you can always add some relevant keywords to help increase your search engine rankings.

4. Identify your target audience

One thing you need to do is decide on the right target audience for your website. Every business targets a different specific demographic, so it’s smart to figure out who uses your products or services. The easiest way to do this is to look at any existing data you may have about your customers, including their age, location, and other information that allows you to segment your target audience.

If you don’t have any existing data to pull from, you can send a survey to your customers to determine your target audience. Keep in mind that you might need to offer an incentive to collect enough data to understand your target demographic.

5. Plan your website

Once you’ve figured out the basics, take some time to plan out your website. There are a lot of decisions to make when you’re building a website, including choosing between a static and dynamic website, deciding on a responsive or adaptive design, and deciding on a budget for your project.

During this planning process, you can also work with a web designer to start mocking up a rough draft of your website. You don’t have to keep your website design the same from start to finish, but having a plan to build off can be a big help. This also gives you a chance to tailor a website strategy around your website, your customers, and your needs.

6. Build your website

The next step to creating a website strategy is to actually build your website. You can’t monitor performance or add new content until you launch your website, so connect with a web developer or use a website builder to get started. Mailchimp’s website builder can help you create a website from a template even if you have no coding experience.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to buy a domain name as well as web hosting to get your website online.

7. Research keywords

Before you start planning or writing any content, use keyword research tools to figure out what relevant keywords you want your business to rank for. By using certain keywords in high-quality content, you can increase your search engine rankings when people search for that keyword. These keywords may change from time to time, so it’s smart to check out keyword rankings on a somewhat regular basis.

8. Plan and write content

Now that you know what keywords you want to use in your website, you can start planning and writing content. When you’re planning out content for your website, aim to use your keyword about once or twice per 100 words. If you create a website strategy that involves using keywords more than that, you may end up being penalized for keyword stuffing.

If you want to keep things fresh, mix it up with different types of content for your readers. Short Form blogs can be a good way to share basic information, but long-form posts allow you to take an in-depth look at topics, which can provide more value to readers.

9. Analyze your results over time

Your website probably isn’t going to do very well if you’re not using analytics in some way. You don’t have to be a completely data-driven company, but you do need to monitor things like monthly website visitors, monthly unique visitors, bounce rate, where visitors are coming from, and more. Understanding how your website is performing is essential, even when your site has been live for a few years. Fortunately, Mailchimp makes it easy to measure the success of your website and marketing campaign with analytics tools.

10. Adjust accordingly

At the end of the day, you’re probably not going to create a perfect website strategy the first time around. The good news is that you can make small adjustments to your website based on analytics and what you learn from operating your website. Perhaps you want to shift your website to focus more on the blog, or maybe you want to create more of an e-commerce website. You may even need to switch up your keywords to rank for something more relevant. Whatever the case may be, there’s no shame in going back and making changes to your website strategy.

Put your web strategy into action

Now that you know how to create a website strategy, it’s time to put your strategy into action. Make sure you take the time to set clear and relevant goals, so you can track your progress while you execute your website strategy.

With Mailchimp, building a quality website is easy. Mailchimp offers templates that can help you build a great website with little experience, or you can create your own custom website. We even offer email marketing tools to help you reach a larger audience.