Website Visits
During the process of optimizing your website, you and your employees will likely visit your own website many times. While these visits are important and unavoidable, make sure you know how this action can inflate a key metric – website visits. An accurate website visit number includes all external traffic but EXCLUDES any internal traffic (visits from you and your team). To easily isolate the correct traffic, have the IP address from your law firm and employees’ personal computers on hand for your web developer. You can then use the metric as a pulse check on your site’s health. When on the rise, it is an indicator that your SEO and advertising efforts are successful!
Attracting Potential Clients
The primary goal of a good website is to help your firm meet its marketing goals, and one of those goals is to convert as many visitors into potential clients as possible. A recommended secondary goal is to convert visitors, particularly those who may not be looking for an attorney, into subscribers to your firm’s monthly email newsletter. In order to assess whether or not you’ve met this business goal, you need to look at your conversion rate. This is the number of visitors who either contact you about representation or who sign up for your firm’s monthly email newsletter. Understanding this number will help guide your advertising and SEO projects to attract the right visitors, potential clients, and those interested in your area of law.
Can potential clients find what they need?
The ‘Time on Site metric’ can be a little confusing, but understanding it is vital to your site’s health. Time on Site measures the average amount of time spent on your site by visitors, and there is a plethora of factors which determine this number. Though our first impulse might be to say that higher is better, that is not always the case. If Time on Site is high, potential clients might be struggling to find what they need, or they are doing thorough research because their initial impression of your firm didn’t entice them enough to contact you. Both are negative. A more optimistic understanding of a high TOS metric is that curious people are reading your blogs or using handheld devices or smartphones.
Google, Google, Google
Google and the way it ranks your website in an organic search can be a very intimidating nut to crack, so don’t be fooled by any SEO or web development company that promises immediate high organic search results for your firm’s web page. Ranking high in an organic search for reasons that are linked to producing clients for your firm is a long term achievement. It is a goal reached by a diverse web site rich in information particular to the clients you aim to attract; this includes keywords, tags, and other SEO variables. However, your organic rankings metric can and will fluctuate dramatically and regularly, so it is wise to concentrate on the content of your website and its continual growth rather than trying to manipulate this metric directly.
Google wants quality, useful, and honest information to serve their customers. Our advice is to give it to them.
How did my website visitors get to my web page?
This is a very important metric. Knowing how your visitors got to your website is “marketing-originated client percentage.” This metric will help you determine if the client found you as a result of word of mouth referral or if an advertising campaign funneled them in. Being able to determine how you attracted new business will allow you to mold your marketing effort. You don’t want to spend large sums of money on advertising if your true strength is word of mouth. You want to spend your marketing dollars wisely and know that you are getting real bang for your buck.
You may be tempted to leave the success or failure of your firm’s webpage to an employee or contractor instead of educating yourself about how all the pieces fit together. That avoidance makes sense because as attorneys, your time is valuable and often extremely limited, but we live in a digital world where nearly everyone uses the internet to decide what they buy and from whom, and you can’t afford NOT to pay attention. Your web page is, in most cases, your first introduction to a potential client and will help shape your reputation as a professional. Take the time to get familiar with your metrics, and use them to drive your firm to success.
We work with lawyers from diverse practice areas and sizes throughout the United States. If you’re in need of legal website design, social media management for attorneys, and legal SEO, Schedule a 15 minute consultation to find out how to take YOUR practice to the next level
