Sitemaps for Your Business Website

Sitemap Form: https://gsquaredstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Website-Sitemap-Form.pdf

Good day. Today we're going to be talking about Sitemaps, a crucial step on the journey to creating your business website. I'm going to be keeping this real simple for you and sharing with you the tools I use to have helped over a hundred clients make this process a snap.

Hi, I am Garik Goodell, owner of G Squared Studio, where I help clients grow their business, utilizing their website as well as content coaching. My main focus is to help my clients focus on momentum over perfection. We're working in a digital realm here where things can always be updated and changed and it's better to get it out there, learn, reiterate, and improve than it is to wait until you think it's perfect. So first, what is a site map? Picture this, you are planning a trip across the digital landscape, but you didn't bring a map. Yours lost as a penguin in the desert, but whoosh, A site map comes in to save the day. It's like a blueprint for your website. It's like the treasure map guiding your users and Google as well through your digital landscape. So now you kind of have a little bit of a perspective of what this is.

How do you actually create one? It's not that hard of a process. It's really just sitting down and thinking about the elements you're going to need for your site. I created a form which is down into the description. I highly recommend you download that and take a look at it. I suggest even you pause right now and go download it so you can look at the form while we're going through it. So let's go over that form. First question, pretty simple. What is the primary goal of your website? Feel free to click, click. Feel free to click all that apply here, but make sure you do prioritize them so you really know what the number one goal of your website is. Is it creating general leads for your business? Is it selling products or services online? Providing information about your business, which some websites do.

Some people are like, I just need leads, but other people are like, I just want people to better know what we do or affirm what we do because our sales process will never happen online. I just need some affirmation through my website. Build brand awareness, educate your audience or other, there could be other things as well, so feel free to list them there. Who is your target audience? Is it general consumers business to business? Is there a specific demographic? I hope there is, and feel free to check out my target market video if you need help on that process. Or is there another target audience that you're looking for? What kind of key products or services do you offer? This is where I want you to list all your services that you're going to want on your website or all your products that you're going to want on the website so you have a full grasp of all those elements that we want.

What pages do you think are essential for your website? These are the standard pages about US service products. A store contact us, blog slash news testimonial page, portfolio page, FAQ page, or is there something else that you might need? Do you have any design preferences or inspirations? So it is a great idea to go out online and look at websites that you think are amazing. This can help your design process as well as get another grasp of maybe what additional pages could be neat to have on your site. You might come across a website. There's a really unique page that it's sharing that really brings some character and maybe authenticity to who they're speaking to and what they do. So it's great to go out and get inspiration and that could give you ideas for another page you might want to have on your website also.

It's a great idea. Next question, are there any competitor sites you want to emulate or make sure you differentiate from? This is a great idea as well. Go look at other people in your industry and see what they're doing. See if there's unique pages you think could be good, or maybe they're doing things you want to make sure you avoid, and either way, it's going to really help you hone in through this process. Okay. Now that you've completed that form, what you want to do is you now have a reasonably good perspective of all the different pages you're going to want on your website, which is really what forms your site map. What I'd like to do next is either grab my iPad if you have one or a blank piece of paper or a bunch of sticky notes, that works fantastic as well. Let's just talk sticky notes for a sec.

So what you want to do is write each page that you're going to want on your website on a sticky note, and then you can put 'em up on a wall. I like to use a whiteboard because then I can draw the connections between the pages. Show an example here with that. Then you can kind of get that perspective of how your site maps going to work, what pages are on there, and then prioritize them. So you see the sticky map here of my site map for my website. That is always still in process. So you have my homepage and then for example, we have the web design page, and then under that we have a portfolio page so you can see how the page is nest within each other and how they prioritize and how they'll show up on your menu on your website.

Really what this is coming down to is you're creating your menu structure for your website. The other thing you can do, here's just a quick example of how it looks like if you do it on iPad or a piece of paper, same exact concept. We're just kind of branching out from the home in the center to our secondary pages and our tertiary pages, the pages that come after tertiary. There you go. Now you have a site map that's mapped out the pages you want on your website, and I promise you, if you do this before you start a project, whether you're going to build a website yourself or hire a professional, this is going to save a lot of time and if it saves time, it saves money, which is good. I hope you found this helpful. If you know anyone else who might find some use in this video, please feel free to share it. Please like and subscribe. I'm trying to get to one K by May, so get it out into the world. I hope you have a great day and great success. Good day. Good day. Good day, good day. Today we're going to be discussing sitemaps, one of the most and crucial.