We Bonanza Design get asked often both from our students and clients that how we should design a website sitemap? A sitemap seems to be easy to design on paper but tricky in doing.
Most often business owners, copy/paste it from other competitors. It usually works. However, you’d highly benefit from understanding the anatomy of online businesses and how it translates itself into a website sitemap.
Online business is a self-perpetuating engine that generates traffic, raises interests, transforms interest into a purchase, and retains customers. And to run an online business, your website works as the battleground to win prospects’ hearts and turn them into customers.
In your marketing website, you build up trust with prospects and educate them, and hopefully establish a long term partnership with them. So let’s take a closer look at the anatomy of an online business.
Your business website has three arms
In nutshell, the traffic is funneled into the marketing arm by which we educate and raise interest, then the operation arm takes care of registering new customers and converts them into paying ones, and the app arm provides our solution in the form of a product/service.
On the marketing end, the content is public and free. And on the app/solution side the content is protected and needs to be unlocked. The operation arm (aka sign-up wall) sits in between marketing and app (i.e. solution) arms.
In nutshell, each website sitemap has three pillars:
An online business without proper branding in place cannot grow itself. Proper branding conveys reliability, trust, and professionalism. The main pages to establish trust with your audience are the homepage, about us, and imprint.
Through social media and PR channels, the audience may understand little about what you exactly offer. The education pages do the job of communicating your core offerings in a simple and charming language that everyone could understand.
Without proper education of your audience, hardly any sale would occur. It’s your job to go in length breaking down your core offerings and how they would solve the problems of different buyers’ persona.
You need dedicated pages through which you generate and direct traffic. Each online business shall have a content engine that creates content regularly. You want to create content that addresses the needs of your audience. The more relevant and detailed your content is, the more relevant the traffic to your website will be.
You can generate traffic through blog articles and if you have a budget, you can purchase traffic.
Through marketing pages, you aim to excite prospects about your core offerings. When they get excited about your solutions, they want to use them. Then that’s when they face the sign-up wall.
For a prospect to access your core solutions, she has to first provide her personal information and become a user.
In cases that she wants to access a high-value product like Hubspot, providing the only personal information does not suffice. She has to make a payment first to access the product.
After the sign-up wall, one can access the promised land!
She can now access the solutions that she educates herself about through the marketing pages. The promised land primary yields two types of fruits
That’s it. Here’s of our rundown of how you can structure your website sitemap. I hope this is helpful to you. In case you have questions, feel free to contact us at contact@v2.bonanza.design
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