You have to appreciate how a law firm’s main website has become one of the single most critical factors for connecting your firm with new clients.
From the first impression to the last — whether users click through and call or navigate away, your website’s Google Analytics data is painting a picture. These analytics help tell you why your Web-driven business is either thriving or stalling. Analytics give you access to data to help better guide your website’s craft ed user experience, helping to increase its conversion rate and maximizing the number of interested prospects you generate from your site.
This article is most helpful if you have Google Analytics installed on your site. If you are not sure, check out this page (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032399?hl=en) from Google to find out.
There are a number of insights you can gain through the help of your Google Analytics dashboard to improve your site. Some of the more important criteria to evaluate in Google Analytics include:
- • Location – ensuring you are getting the right visitors to your site
• First Impressions – discovering how people are “seeing your firm” for the first time
• Channels – knowing where your clients are coming from when they find you on the Web
• Blogs – finally confirming whether you are wasting your time or making progress with blogging
• Devices – evaluating what technologies people are using to access your site (e.g., phones, tablets or computers) - Combining & Filtering – getting deep into analytics and gaining insight to get more business from your site
Let’s run through these topics and learn how to gain a better sense of how your website is performing.
At ConsultWebs, we have prepared an analytics re-source bundle (https://www.consultwebs.com/analytics-insights/) which contains tips for law firms on interpreting their analytics data. The bundle also includes a custom dashboard that we have created to highlight some important data for law firms.
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Location, Location, Location
While the Internet has certainly opened up more global business opportunities, the fact remains that people still need to connect with local businesses. You want to ensure your site traffic is coming from the market areas you are targeting with your advertising. If you accept clients nationwide, it would make sense to have traffic from across the United States. If you mostly deal locally, however, having a lot of traffic from other states (and even other countries) is likely worthless and potentially detrimental to your search rankings and future caseload potential from your site.
Ideally, you want to ensure you are getting most of your site’s traffic from your target geographic market areas. You should check for spam-related traffic to identify potential site visits that may dramatically skew your overall analytics data.
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Your Site First Impressions
Most Web experts agree that you have anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds to grab your average website visitor’s attention and keep them on the page. The primary purpose of your law firm’s website is to retain visitors long enough to guide them to a phone call, form submission, or live chat.
The most common first entry pages on a typical law firm website include your homepage, blog articles, top-level practice area pages, and your attorney bios. Naturally, you want to make a great impression on the most-viewed pages. By adding resources, video, attractive visual graphics, and also citing additional resources which should be linked to your deeper supporting pages, you will help retain visitors on your site longer and increase your conversion rate. You may also consider addressing common potential client questions on these top-level pages to provide an even better user experience.
Make sure you investigate your bounce rate for your top-trafficked pages. A “bounce” is when a visitor lands on your site but does not click onto another page. It is important to understand that your bounce rate percentage can be misleading because of this. For example, if visitors are converting directly from the page they land on, and then they leave, it would be considered a bounce even though they turned into a prospective client. Comparing the goals set up on top-level pages (which track conversion rates) with your overall bounce rate will give you a more comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of these top-visited pages.
Last, but certainly not least, ensure these “first impression” pages make it easy to contact your firm through a prominently displayed phone number (with a tap-to-call feature via your mobile site), email, chat, and a simple form.
Next Month I will discuss:
• Understanding How Visitors Find Your Site
• Determining the Effectiveness of Your Blog
• Understanding the Devices that Commonly Used to Access Your Site
• How to Combine and Filter Data in Google Analytics
And More…
