10 Steps to Create a Website Strategy (That Actually Delivers Results)

Building a website without a comprehensive website strategy is like heading to Target without a shopping list — you might find some good things, but you’ll probably forget the most important one.

It’s a carefully thought-out online website marketing strategy that will help your website engage readers, boost conversions, feature helpful content, and streamline operations.

Join us as we walk you through the three phases of the process — research, production, and growth, and the steps you must take to complete them successfully. 

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What Is a Website Marketing Strategy?

A website marketing strategy is a structured action plan designed to help your website prosper in all things, starting with traffic, conversions, and building brand visibility. It relies on various digital marketing techniques to attract, retain, and convert visitors into customers or loyal users. 

Luckily, you have a diverse arsenal of marketing weapons at your disposal to help you with that. From analyzing your target audience and creating an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content strategy to running targeted paid ads and email marketing campaigns, that well of tools doesn’t dry up. It’s all about how you use them. 

Still, a truly effective strategy goes beyond just tactics — it requires thoughtful, brand-specific execution that aligns with business goals. A great example of this is Stone Island, the Italian sportswear brand. The company successfully revamped its website marketing strategy to drive revenue growth and enhance customer experience. In the last 2024 H1 report by the Moncler Group, we can see that Stone Island accounted for 15.4% of the company's revenue, with a tendency to increase. A better site is bound to lead to more traffic, which leads to more conversions — causation at its finest. 

By taking complete control of its digital operations, starting with the revamp of its website, Stone Island transformed its online presence, improved product presentation, customer engagement, and global accessibility. You can do the same. 

The Three Parts of Online Website Marketing Strategy

The three main parts of a website strategy consist of:

1. Research
2. Production
3. Growth

Let's explore these in detail.

The Research Phase

The research phase of an online website marketing strategy is where you outline the goals and objectives of your enterprise and set the groundwork for achieving them. It involves gathering data, analyzing competitors, and understanding user behavior to ensure your website meets business objectives and customer needs. 

1. Defining Goals and Objectives

Setting clear and measurable goals is essential for tracking progress and optimizing your efforts. Keeping goals and objectives in mind allows you to allocate your resources more efficiently to the areas driving results. This will also show you the direction and focus for further website strategy and development. 

To define goals and objectives, put your faith in a goal-setting framework called SMART. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. With it, you can give your goals clarity and a sense of direction. 

For example, a new website can have traffic-related SMART goals. Let’s illustrate with an example of such a goal: 

• Specific — Increase organic traffic through SEO optimization
• Measurable — Boost organic traffic by 30%
• Achievable — Optimize blog content, improve keyword rankings, and acquire backlinks
• Relevant — Organic traffic directly impacts lead generation and conversions
• Time-bound — Achieve this goal within the next six months

The same can be done for conversation rate optimization, lead generation, page speed optimization, and other goals you want to set for your website. 

2. Understand Your Target Audience

A carefully executed website strategy relies heavily on data about a potential user or visitor, otherwise known as a user persona. The user persona is our ideal customer, so we need to collect insights about them to understand what they need and how to provide that. 

We want to examine the demographics, interests, location, and potential pain points of the people visiting our site. To do this, it’s Google Analytics you need to turn to. There, you can gather data on user demographics, behavior, and interests. 

Customer surveys are another great way to gather user or customer feedback. Consider offering incentives, such as an Amazon voucher, to participants. This will drive engagement and provide you with more data to analyze. 

Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram offer detailed audience data, so don’t overlook the potential of social media. 

3. Analyze Competitors

Competitor analysis allows you to identify gaps, discover opportunities, and refine your approach based on industry leaders and rivals. It boils down to you beating them at their own game, and to do that, you must develop a stronger, more competitive website strategy.

Examine their website performance, content, SEO, and user experience to discover their weaknesses and strengths. Tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs can reveal the keywords they are ranking for, the number of backlinks they have, and the share of organic traffic they are getting. 

Moreover, through SEMrush, you can identify whether they are running Google or Facebook ads as part of their paid advertising strategy. It’s also important to look into the type of content they publish, how often they publish, and whether they employ pillar and content cluster strategies. This way, you can find an edge and get some of their traffic. 

The Production Phase

The production phase of a website strategy refers to putting the plan into action. Here are the steps involved. 

5. Planning the Website Structure

A proper website structure is defined in a sitemap — a structured list or visual representation of a website’s pages. The sitemap ensures search engines, like Google, can find and index all of your site’s pages. See it as a blueprint for your website where all important content is easily accessible. 

A proper sitemap also benefits user experience (UX) by making it easier for visitors to find relevant content, which is especially important for large websites. Speaking of user experience, we need to highlight the importance of intuitive navigation. Not only does it improve user experience (UX) by helping them find the content they are after instantly, but it also reduces bounce rates and enhances SEO performance.

Some of the ways to accomplish this intuitiveness include keeping the primary navigation menu between 5-7 core items so as not to avoid users. Also, structuring pages in a parent-child format to group related content.

Ultimately, you need to examine pages that drive conversions, engagement, or sales, such as the homepage or the services/products page. These pages should also be on the website's main menu since they traditionally have the highest conversion rate. 

6. Focusing on UX/UI Design

Humans are visual beings. People can remember over 2000 pictures with a staggering 90% accuracy over several days, which warrants a visually appealing site and a detailed website design strategy that strings everything together.  

Moreover, visual stability is one of Google’s Core Web Vitals, which warrants your website's uniform typography, color schemes, and button styles. 

Proper contrast of text and background, responsive design that adapts to desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, and pages and images that load quickly are just some of the areas you must focus on when building the UX/UI design of your website. 

Thankfully, you can use different graphic design software to create the final look of your website and multiple templates that are already optimized for the best possible user experience. 

7. SEO Optimization

Visually attractive websites with excellent user experience are just one side of the coin — the other — SEO optimization. Your website must be optimized for search engines to ensure ranking for crucial search terms. Better ranking usually translates to more views and better conversions. 

An SEO strategy for a new website with a high-performance mentality consists of on-page, technical, and content-driven actions. On-page SEO includes the proper use of header tags, keyword-rich meta titles, and meta descriptions that signal to search engines what the page is about. 

Boosting a page’s loading speed by compressing images, using lazy loading to delay the loading of non-essential elements, and having a clean URL structure are some of the best practices from the technical side of things. 

The most important aspect of a content strategy is creating high-quality, user-oriented content rich in valuable information. For example, if you describe a product or service without first-hand experience using it, the content will lack the necessary depth. No inside knowledge of the product or service, not enough value for the reader. That will undoubtedly lead to higher bounce rates and low engagement — all signals to the big boss that this content doesn’t deserve to rank. Google always give priority to toVideos, infographics, and other visuals can enhance users' time on the page, signaling to Google and other search engines that users find your content valuable. 

8. Development

When choosing the CMS platform for your website, you must consider several factors — your needs, technical expertise, and scalability requirements.  

WordPress is the most popular option due to its variety of themes and plugins. Webflow, on the other hand, provides a no-code, design-focused experience with built-in SEO tools and, more importantly, its scalability, which is especially important for marketers. With Webflow, you get a content management system, highly customizable design, and secure hosting via AWS and global CDN support. 

For advanced customization, custom-coded websites using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript offer full control but require development expertise.  

Regardless of the platform, follow coding best practices to give your website the power to perform. Keep code clean and modular, optimize for speed, ensure mobile responsiveness, and follow security protocols. 

Thorough testing is vital before launch. Conduct performance testing, cross-browser and device compatibility checks, and fix broken links or UI inconsistencies. Testing for SEO, accessibility, and security is also important for a seamless, high-performing, and user-friendly website and shouldn’t be overlooked. 

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The Growth Phase

Once your website is firing on all cylinders, it’s time to upgrade. That’s where content and checking the performance metrics come to the forefront. 

9. Implementing the Content Marketing Strategy

A proper website content strategy will be the lifeline of your website. It will help you not just rank on search engines but build a brand and become the go-to source of information for your users. This feat is easier said than done, of course.

It implies regularly updating existing articles and publishing new ones. Websites with a predictable output of content are in the best position to rank and attract organic traffic, so most resort to building a content calendar. 

This calendar will tell you when a page is outdated and needs a revamp. Let’s say you are running a SaaS company like Salesforce. Their newsroom alone gets at least 3 to 5 new posts a month, not to mention posts about new partnerships and software solutions. Keeping track of all the product updates they are constantly improving would be a handful without a content calendar. 

You can also leverage social media to create hype around your page. Promoting sections of it on your social media channels with a call-to-action leading to the URL itself is always an option. 

10. Monitor, Analyze, Improve

The key metrics for a website’s performance include traffic, time on page, bounce rate, average session time, and conversions. Website owners can track these using tools such as Google Analytics and its Google Search Console. 

You can also consider creating customized dashboards using PowerBI tools and other third-party data management systems. Either way, tracking and analyzing data is how you decide whether your website needs updates and changes. Data, in combination with user feedback, is the most significant source of intel you can wish for. 

Conclusion

A well-crafted website strategy isn’t just a luxury — it’s the playbook that turns a basic online presence into a high-performing digital asset. From setting clear goals and understanding your audience to optimizing SEO and leveraging content marketing, every step is critical in driving traffic, engagement, and conversions.

Now, you've got the know-how — it's time for the do-now. Flow Ninja is here to help with that. Get in touch, and let’s build a strategy that actually delivers results.

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