Website Strategy: A Great Place to Start
Get Clear Direction for Your Website
Web Strategy Inclusions
Discussions
Strategy starts with questions, whether you want a website or to update your existing website. Before we get *too* excited about what it might look or sound like, we’ll have some important questions for you. Like…
- Why do you want a new website? Has anything changed recently in your industry or business?
- What do you want to achieve with these changes?
- Where does this fit into your overall business goals (short and long-term)?
- Who is your target audience and what problems do you solve for them?
- Who are your competitors and what makes you unique?
- How do you market your business and how would you like your website to support that?
Discovery
After the initial discussion, we’ll dig deeper with discovery. The discovery process is different for every project, but it might involve things like:
- Hopping on a call to learn more about your brand and offer
- Surveying your customers, team members, or both
- Looking at your analytics and/or heat mapping to understand current performance and user behaviour
- Looking through your website in detail (or parts of your website if it’s quite large)
- Seeing what others in your industry are doing
- Looking at search data, trends, and keyword opportunities
Findings
After discovery, it’s time to share our findings. Some of the strategic documents and findings we often put together for clients include:
- A breakdown of goals (and specific recommendations for your site)
- A sitemap diagram that shows what pages should go on your site and how they fit together
- An written overview of what information and sections should go on each page of your website
- A visual wireframe that shows the proposed layout of key pages on your site
- A brand book that defines your offer, audience, tone of voice, key messages, taglines, and USP
- An on-page SEO strategy with suggested keywords (based on relevance, volume, and competition) for each page of your website
- Scoping out the options and costs involved in implementing the content, design, and functions we’ve recommended for your website
About Our Web Strategies
Do I need a website strategy as part of our project?
If we’re writing your website copy or designing your site, we always include at least some strategy components. We find it absolutely essential to the process and ensuring that we’re on the same page as you from the start— and that we get the best possible end result.
How long will it take for you to send through strategy deliverables?
This depends on a lot of factors, like the number of strategic documents we’re producing and the amount of discovery we need to do. If you have a big website, complex industry, or a lot of materials for us to go through, it might take several weeks before you see anything. For smaller projects or very focused strategies, it might only be a few days from when we get started.
How much do your web strategies cost?
Most of our website strategy work is included in our other packages and not priced separately. However, if you need a standalone website strategy (to scope out a big project), we can put together a proposal based on the scope involved. If you choose to engage us for website design or copywriting services that use the strategies we put together, we will credit the cost of your website strategy towards your followup project.
What makes you qualified to offer website strategy?
We’ve each spent more than a decade working in online marketing and web design, and have always taken a strategic approach to our work. Over the years, we’ve tried a lot of different tools to help make the process of getting a new website or website copy easier and more effective for clients. The process and deliverables mentioned here are ones that we keep coming back to because they make it easier to plan websites that work.