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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:01):
Hey, what's up in this episode of the website conversion show, we are talking about all things, site map and planning your websites, what pages need to be on there and how, you know, if you're setting this up the right way. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio. I'm coming to you live from my living room today instead of my office. And this is the website conversion show.
Okay. So when we're talking about our site map, we're talking about all the things, all the pages that have to exist on the website. A lot of the times we end up thinking about site architecture, site navigation and so on. And I don't blame you. That's where my mind goes to. I think about, you know, the, the navigation bar across the top of the site. And I think about the dropdowns and all the different things in, in many cases, but that's not necessarily your site map. And especially when you're going through a website redesign process, you're going through a new website build. You wanna make sure you have all of the different pages accounted for and allotted for inside of a planning diagram. Now, what happens a lot of the time is you'll see companies do, or, or as you like do kind of searches onto Google and so on.
You'll see companies create a visual site tree, like a navigational tree, and, you know, start at the homepage at the top and then breaks out to about page and, and product pages and so on. And that's not a bad, a bad way to keep track of these things. It's representational of what the site architecture or site navigation should be. The problem is a lot of the times we have a ton of pages that don't exist in the navigation, right? You might have calendar pages and thank you pages and landing pages. You could have all kinds of different subpages or product pages that aren't actually gonna live in the navigation. And it's easy to get lost when we just think about it visually in, in a framework like that. So what I like to do and what we do inside of our agency at web canopy studio is we create a site map architecture list.
we use a spreadsheet for this, and you could do it inside of a, of a project management tool as well. And so we'll create a sheet and it has all the different pages listed. And then it has a number of columns, actually, probably more columns. And you would even want to evaluate as far as what should go on that page. And so that's what I'm gonna walk through today is walk you through what those columns would look like, what we include in there and how we think about the different kinds of things that have to go on the site. So the first thing, the first area that we highlight are the basics, right? What are the core pieces of that page that just have to get documented so that we have a source and we have a place to come back to that tells us, yes, this is the information that we need.
So obviously like the URL, right? What's the, the www dot, whatever slash whatever we need to make sure that that is accounted for. And it's put in one place that we can easily go back to and find and compare to all the other pages as well. I might even challenge a little bit of that and just say, you need to have your current URL and the new URL, if you are modifying pages or, or page structures and, and the, the strings of, of the URL. The next thing is obviously the name of the page. What's your internal name? What are you calling it home? Okay. You, you can call it home, but when it's live, you're probably not gonna call it home. You're probably gonna call it your brand name or the core keyword that you're targeting, but, you know, you wanna make sure you have your internal naming convention there.
So it's easy to find and everybody's aware and can speak that language. Then we have the audience who's at four, a lot of the times we'll put our primary persona or the primary target audience directly on that page. And in the spreadsheet at least so that we can track inside of any kind of planning that we're gonna do, who this page is primarily for a lot of the other questions, which I'll show you in a second, also tie back to that concept. And the reason is if I have a single source of truth that tells me who these pages are for, or who the primary audience is as I'm going through as a content writer, or as a designer, I'm gonna know, okay, this is geared towards CEO, Sam, or this is geared towards it, director Dan, and in my mind having done like a brief about that, I'm gonna know, okay, this person, I can do a little research if I need to, more than likely it's already done, but this person resonates with this kind of thinking and this kind of train of thought.
And so the more information I provide for this specific persona, the more harm it's gonna do for impacting our conversion rate. So just knowing the target audience is gonna help you identify moving forward at all stages, wireframe content, design development, so on who it is we're trying to approach and engage with. Okay. So then we're also evaluating, is this existing or is this new, okay, is this a new page or is this an existing page? It might just be getting modified or redeveloped next. These are the next few questions are things that I think most companies don't really look at or evaluate as they are creating pages on their website. I think as you're planning the pages on your website, these are absolutely critical to making sure that you address and that you have a really good grasp on because without it, you will absolutely run the risk of making pages that no one really engages with.
That's gonna have a high bounce rate, the people aren't going to want to take the next step or the call to action that you're providing. And ultimately you're creating what we end up seeing many times is like a beautiful website that does literally nothing for your brand. And you're making this kind of brochure if you will. And that's not what we wanna do. We're gonna try and push ourselves away from that a little bit. Okay. So look, first question that you have to make sure that you're documenting on this is what is the purpose of this page? Why does this page even exist? What's the point of having this page? If we don't know the actual outcome or the goal or what it is that people should be doing on it? So from an agency perspective, this also helps us keep our team accountable and it helps us us keep our clients accountable because as we're going through outlines and reviews, and we're talking about, okay, this is the page.
This page exists because X, Y, Z, right? Because of this really big core important thing, if we don't actually like, hold the client accountable or hold our team accountable to keeping in line with what that purpose is, it's easy to go off the rails and we go on tangents. So we can go down these rabbit holes that don't necessarily contribute to the bottom line. So what is the purpose of this page? We can all kind of tie back and circle up and align around that. Then we talk about what question that this page has to answer. What are the, the questions that are circling around in the back of the mind of the, of the people who are gonna be coming to this page for reference or for resource? Are they coming there for information? Are they coming there because they want like a DIY solution and they're looking for ideas, are they coming there because they want to vet your company and, you know, make you prove to them that they are worth, or that you're worth their time.
What are the questions that are in the back of their mind? And if you document this here, especially prior to doing any kind of wire framing, you then can go back, right? You can go back and start to say, okay, as we wire frame this, we said, this was the purpose. And we said, these are the questions that must be answered. Does this wire frame, does this content, does this layout actually do what we said it should do? And you're gonna be able to pretty, you know, objectively answer that question based off of the information that you have in front of you, right? So what action or CTA do you want users to take? This is really, really helpful in knowing the outline that you're producing. That there's one primary thing we want people to do on that page. There's one primary call to action that we want people to click on or the, or the button, or it's the form to fill out or, or anything like that.
What is that action? You want them to take again, as a, let's say I'm strategically planning this for my brand, and I'm looking at this specific page. I'm gonna say, what action do I want users to take? If I know on this page, I want them to click on the call to action, to book a demo. Then everything on that page should guide people towards the demo. The issue that a lot of people have when they're building pages like this is that they will create tons of calls to action. Oh, you want learn about here, click here. You want to learn about our product. Look here. You want to book a demo, click here. And in theory it looks good and it makes sense, but you're essentially overwhelming somebody in the two seconds that they have on your website with all these different things you want them to do.
And guess what? They're not gonna do any of it. So ideally every page has just one call to action. And you're highlighting that here, and you're not necessarily allowing the confusion to pop up with all the different options that'll pop up. Then what we wanna do is talk about the target KPI. Is there a metric? Is there a metric that we can track or that we're trying to really zero in on for this specific page? In many cases, it could be number of page views, number of clicks to this specific button or this specific page. Maybe it's the conversion rate. Maybe it's time on page. What is the primary metric that you wanna be tracking on this? And there's probably not one magic answer for everything. There's not one size fits all. Every page might be different. You might have types of pages that will be kind of congruent and, and aligned, but you're not necessarily gonna say, okay, every page, the magic target KPI is gonna be page views, for example, because you might have bottom of funnel, landing pages or demo pages where you're not necessarily so much concerned about page views, as much as you are number of submissions or people who fill out the form or click the, the book now button.
Okay. So tracking that here allows you to have a really clear picture before you even go in and build the website or build the new pages. What kind of dashboards you need to be thinking about? What kind of numbers are really where we're gonna be aiming to set goals and so on. And so this is a really, really awesome opportunity for you to set that precedent before we get, there is the last thing you wanna do is say, okay, we built this website. What do we want to know about it? What do we wanna get out of it? This allows you to start having that conversation early so that you're not stuck in this post-planning mode after the website's already live and trying to figure out what's good and what's bad. And then the last thing that we put in the site map architecture here is looking at all the things SEO, okay?
And this can be quite extensive. It doesn't have to be, but some of the ones that we always want to hit on, and we will put this on early in the, in the process so that we don't have to go back and do this later. It's gonna be a lot more confusing if we do this later, because we're not necessarily planning for SEO, we're just kind of retroactively fitting it in. And so if we can start targeting page keywords, titles, meta descriptions, we're looking at what are the potential H one H two H three, et cetera, for all those pages, we know we're gonna have a handful of images. So what are the alt tags that we might want to put in there, right? And then how are we linking this to other pages on the site or other pages elsewhere? Are there specific things that we wanna make sure are attributed early inside of this?
And then there's tons more that we could get into, but those are the really big ones, right? And we do all this in the planning mode specifically, so that we're not stuck in a situation later on down the road where we have to come up with some kind of a solution and figure out how to make this work. Perfect example. I can tell your story. We had a developer working with us years ago, who was awesome and doing tons of page and site launches with us. And he happened to be trying to wrap up a big project that we wanted to get to final QA and launch point the following morning. And so being a developer, as many developers are, he decided to just, you know, I'm gonna do an all nighter. I'm gonna work late. I'm gonna crank all this workout. Which was awesome, super successful guy.
He, you know, he does that stuff now still I'm sure. And so he was working with us doing this exact process. It was like 3:00 AM. And he goes, and the last thing that he needs to do to finish all of his QA, he realizes that anyone else working on the account account managers had not put on any kind of list about keywords or I'm sorry, page titles and descriptions. And so in HubSpot, that's a required field to publish a site live. That's a required field to turn the site even on, right. Or to turn that page on. So he ends up just plugging in some placeholders, sends a quick message, says, Hey, you know, there there's placeholder text on there. Let's not forget. He goes home and goes to bed in the morning. A couple hours later, account manager shows up, runs through the site, looks great.
It passes all the different things that we'd look at for QA at different levels. And so, you know, we show it to the client. Client says, it's great. Let's go ahead and get ready to launch it. And then right before we go to launch, we do another post QA and uhoh we caught it. But we're sitting here looking at all of these pages that have no descriptions. The actual titles are just like the internal names and they don't have page titles that are specific to the keywords and the things we're trying to rank for. And it ended up being this nightmare of, you know, an extra day or two of extra work that we had to figure out and not pass that issue onto the client. And so there are lots of little examples like that, that seem kind of silly and small, but they end up adding on tons of time.
And when you're talking about deadlines and launches, anytime that you're talking hours or days of adding extra stuff, it hurts critically. Whether that's from an agency perspective or, or a person who's running this internally for their own business. So long story short, it's just easy enough to plan all of your SEO up front to make sure that you know, what keywords and, and descriptions and titles and so on that you want to plan for the last little bit that I'll mention here is about redirects. Okay. So oftentimes this is skipped over. This is what clients on, on RN C have a ton of issues when they're working with somebody else and they go to launch their website and their site traffic drops really, really quickly and they never get it picked back up. So then they call me and say, Hey, John, I'm having an issue because people are not hitting my website.
Traffic volume has dropped off and our search volume has dropped off. Well, the reason a lot of the times is because they didn't properly handle redirects. They might have had hundreds of pages and, and URLs on their website. Maybe they changed the, the URL structure. They consolidated pages, they deleted old pages, but now you have this, you know, search engine, that's trying to say, okay, this website used to index at 300 and some pages, and now it only indexes at 115 pages. Where'd they go? You know, so you're going to have a lot of different issues and, and deans on your record, if you will. So that you're not gonna get rankings as you should. And really it's not anyone's fault other than whoever was going through and saying, okay, we're consolidating pages, which makes sense. We just didn't create a redirect strategy.
So if a page is going to be removed, or if it's going to be consolidated with another page, or if a page is going to get a different naming convention in the URL, the www dot, if it's gonna change it all, you need to make sure that your redirects are in place. Now we'll have a whole other series on redirects and a proper strategy and what that is. But long story short, when you're creating a site map, you just want to have a section to note, Hey, this needs redirect. It's probably should redirect to this page or something along those lines. Okay. So that's really it. I think that's everything that we have today. Please let us know if you guys have any questions we're looking through all different kinds of things within site maps and site architecture. Public helps we'll catch you later.
Okay. As a recap, I like to end every episode and just kind of go through and hit some of the highlights of the things that you know, are really important to talk through that we went over. And so just a quick summary of everything that I would wanna walk away with you guys understanding, or having a grasp of number one site maps. When you think about planning your website, you gotta start with your site map and you cannot think about your site map as just pages that are existing on a website in some like navigational dropdown. It's not like that. You need to think about your site map as this overall, like spreadsheet of documentation, of what pages need to be living and existing on your website, why they're there and all these other important elements, right? This is your go-to source for your site.
In general. Next, you have to answer major questions on this site map because it's going to help you so much more. You're gonna take hours off of your plate later on. You're gonna take so much confusion off of your plate later on. If you just answer major questions at this stage in the site map, so that as you go through, you're creating wire frames, you're creating content, you're creating designs. You have all that information right in front of you. It's like a guiding light, right? It's that source of truth for you. Number three, we're going to outline all the important elements around SEO. So I know prior to even getting into the development prior to getting to design to wire framing, anything like that, I know my primary characteristics that I'm trying to target around title tags, descriptions, alt tags, all of that stuff. If I could just have it in a quick, even if it's just conceptual at the very early stages, you can always massage this as time goes on and you evaluate more of your pages.
You wanna have that here. And then lastly, redirects, don't forget about redirects. Simply just stating whether this page is getting redirected. Pages are redirecting to it. It's a consolidation. It's, it's no longer there doesn't really matter just as long as we make sure we have that documented. Why? Because you're going to ruin your SEO credibility if you don't. So I think that's it. If you guys have any other questions, I highly highly recommend you go to webcanopystudio.com/assessment. Take the website conversion assessment. It's gonna ask you 30 questions about your existing website, how you handle it where you're at within different elements of that website conversion process, and based off of your answers and how well you do inside of there, you're gonna get a customized report. That'll show you all the different things that you can do to improve and lots of ideas and so on inside of that. So hope this is helpful. Guys. Let us know if you have any questions, we'll catch you later. We'll see ya.