Everything About Advanced Web Analytics

The basics of web analytics for law firms can be tough to master.  But once you already know about your conversion rates and your unique site visits, you may be confused about which web analytics report gives you the results you need to really change your website's effectiveness.  If you want the best results—20 to 30 percent conversion rate increases, doubling of web traffic—you'll need to use advanced web analytics.  Going beyond the basics of your tools can ensure that you're getting exactly what you want out of your web analytics reports.

Why Standard Web Analytics Reports Aren't Enough

Looking at your first web analytics report can be tremendously confusing, but as you've used web analytics reports more frequently, you've probably familiarized yourself with the statistics that are important for your law firm.  You may also start to notice problems—blind spots in your statistics, things you can't figure out from a standard web analytics report.

When you started investigating your web traffic, you may have been surprised at the sheer number of web analytics reports available with your reporting tool.  What you may have learned through trial and error is that one great web analytics report can often be more useful than a thousand that don't give you exactly what you need.  

Quantity is much less important in advanced web analytics than quality.  Many analytics professionals refer to standard web analytics reports as “data pukes.”  It's easy to see why: in spite of the amount of data provided in a web analytics report by Google, Yahoo, or other tools, it can be hard to know how to translate that data into the kind of real-world results that matter.  

For example, your standard web analytics report may report your conversion rate and which keywords are bringing traffic to your site, but you may not know how to figure out which keywords are bringing in the best potential clients.  Advanced web analytics can help you differentiate between keywords so that you can focus on the ones where there is the most potential for improvement.

The important thing to remember is that your business is unique.  Google didn't set up its web analytics reports to help your company specifically.  If you want the best results from your web analytics report, you'll need to use advanced web analytics that keep your firm's goals in mind.

Custom Web Analytics Reports

Creating great advanced web analytics reports means that you'll need to understand exactly what you're looking for.  What are your goals?  What frustrates you about your web analytics report tools?  What information would make your web analytics reports more useful to you?

For example, you may be frustrated by how many bounces are included in your web analytics reports.  While some companies focus on eliminating these bounces altogether, maybe they don't matter as much as you think—especially if you're getting bounces from search engine results, not paid clicks.  This can happen if, for instance, you're highly ranked in search engine results for a topic that involves multiple types of results.  The bounces you're getting may not be possible to convert into paying clients—so why focus on them?

If this happens, You may want to create advanced web analytics that can focus only on your non-bouncing site visitors, so that you can understand how they interact with the website.  You can design a custom web analytics report that helps you focus on the clients who may be most interested in your website—for instance, those who have looked at several pages or watched at least one of your law firm's videos.

Social Media Web Analytics Reports

An increasing amount of web traffic today comes from social media like Facebook and Twitter.  When you want to increase the conversions you get from social media sites, you need advanced web analytics to understand your social traffic.  A standard web analytics report about social media can give you part of the picture, but if blogs, Twitter and Facebook are a major part of your marketing strategy (and they should be), you need to go deeper.

A custom web analytics report can tell you a great deal about how your firm is perceived on social media sources.  You may want to know if a new social media strategy—for instance, starting a new Twitter feed about your law firm's results—has paid off.  When you use advanced web analytics, you can produce a custom web analytics report that details exactly how much value each Twitter or Facebook click has had for your firm.

When you're using custom web analytics reports, it's much easier to keep your goals in mind at all times.  A narrowly tailored web analytics report can give you much more granular information much more quickly than using basic reports, so remember to use advanced web analytics techniques instead of just using what Google or Yahoo provides.

Using Advanced Web Analytics for Redesign

Once you've got your custom web analytics reports, you may want to look into redesigning your website for better traffic flow and increased conversions.  You may, for example, want to use a custom web analytics report that shows which of your pages are generating the most conversions and which are driving clients away from your website.

Next, you can begin to analyze the differences between those pages.  A key part of advanced web analytics is getting inside the minds of your clients by looking at which pages drive your traffic.  If a particular type of content—for example, video—seems to keep people looking at your website for longer according to web analytics reports, you may want to include more video.

Keep in mind that once you've redesigned your website, you shouldn't stop using advanced web analytics.  Using the same type of custom web analytic report can keep you on top of trends that are affecting your client base.  By being proactive with your advanced web analytics, you'll be able to anticipate changes to demographics and site traffic before your competitors using standard web analytics reports even know what's going on.

 

 

Everything About Hosted Web Analytics

With over 50% of Fortune 500 companies using hosted web analytics tools, you may have begun to think about what kind of web analytics you need.  There are a wide variety of hosted and self-hosted solutions that can help you track and analyze visitor data, but trying to figure out which tool you want can be a hassle, especially if you're not familiar with the basics.  There's no one right solution that works for every firm—this guide will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of hosted and self hosted web analytics so that you can make the call that will work best for your clients.

What's the Difference?

The terminology surrounding web analytics and hosting can be a bit confusing.  In general, web analytics refers to tools that gather data, analyze your website traffic and make changes based on the data you've gathered.  Hosted web analytics are the most common type of tools available for the novice analyst.  These are tools that are “hosted” on another website, like Google or Yahoo.  In order to work, these tools need your computer to be connected to one of their host servers.

The opposite of hosted isn't non-hosted, it's self-hosted—in other words, a piece of software that you run on your machines.  Self hosted web analytics are software packages that don't require you to be connected online at the time when you use them, and they keep your data on your machines instead of sending it elsewhere.

Hosted Web Analytics: Pros

There's a reason that the majority of companies use web analytics software hosted by other companies.  Google and Yahoo each have significant market shares for hosted web analytics because these search engines have already put a great deal of work into making search results better.  Helping content producers create better, more user-friendly content is in the best interest of these websites, and they can use the data to make the search user experience better.

One of the biggest advantages of using hosted web analytics is cost.  It may sound too good to be true, but the vast majority of these analytic tools are actually hosted completely for free.  You won't have to pay for expensive software licensing if you use hosted web analytics, and it's also free to upgrade when these web analytics tools get new features.

These tools often offer the widest range of standard reports.  If you're new to using analytics, hosted web analytics can be your best bet because they give a tremendously wide range of data.  There is also more training available for this type of analysis software—not because it's more difficult to use, but because it's so much more common than using self-hosted analytics.

Hosted Web Analytics: Cons

While using another company's hosting has benefits, it also can present problems depending on what your firm's goals are.  An increasing number of law firms don't want a company like Google or Yahoo to have access to all of their data, fearing that it could actually help competing firms as much as their own.

While the range of information available through hosted web analytics can be intoxicating to a new analyst, people with more experience often find that a wide range of standard reports just creates vast amounts of irrelevant data.  Creating custom reports using hosted web analytics can sometimes be difficult, and will usually require additional training.

Self Hosted Web Analytics: Pros

If you choose to use a self hosted analytics application, you can get software that includes a “dashboard” of basics like Google or Yahoo, or a very narrowly tailored program that works on specific types of custom reports.  This flexibility lets you choose analytics that are designed to work for problems exactly like yours.

Self hosting also eliminates any problems with giving up your data.  Instead of having your website traffic data stored off-site and being analyzed by search engineers, you can maintain total control over your information.  The value of maintaining your data depends on what you expect that it will be used for—many law firms simply don't believe their reports need to be kept in-house, and are quite comfortable with using hosted web analytics.

Self Hosted Web Analytics: Cons

If you're using a self hosted solution, you should probably already have a grasp on what metrics are important for you and what your firm's website traffic and conversion goals are.  That's because most self hosted web analytics software costs money—and sometimes a lot of it.  Because analytics are a long term, ongoing process, choosing the wrong tool for your analysis can cost a lot of time and money.  You will want to carefully research reviews of any self hosted web analytics software before you make a purchase.

Because your data is only being stored on-site, you'll need to take special care with backups if you are self hosting.  Hosted web analytics are substantially less likely to experience major data loss problems.  Give some thought to what you'd do even in the unlikely event of a natural disaster, and consider secure off-site data storage or cloud storage.

Which Hosted Web Analytics Software Is For Me?

Everyone's preferences are a bit different when it comes to web analytics.  While Google Analytics is sometimes considered the gold standard of hosted web analytics, other hosted services offer great all-around analytics and specialty analytics as well.

The best way to find out what software you like best is to simply experiment.  Just as the process of analyzing and editing your website involves trial and error, feel free to try out several different services until you find one that you feel comfortable with.  You may find that the graphical interface of one dashboard seems more intuitive and easy to use, or that the tools of another are particularly robust for letting you look at a particular interesting metric.  Because upgrades to hosted web analytics software occur all the time, you may also want to check out different tools periodically just to see if they have anything new and useful.

 

Everything About Blog Advertising Rates

Studies show that because blogs are so much more targeted than other types of websites, blog advertising results can be up to 50 percent better than results for advertising on social media sites like Facebook.  Keep reading this guide to find out more about the kind of law blog advertising rates that you can expect to charge for people wanting to advertise on your blog, and how to get the best blog advertising results when you start to use ads on your website.

A Word of Caution: Things To Avoid

When some bloggers hear that they can start seeing money from blog ads, they set their blog advertising rates and just accept anyone who can pay them as an advertiser.  Law firm blogs need to be especially careful to maintain a professional image when accepting advertisements.  

While ads from other law firms in different geographic areas might be a good idea, there are some types of advertisements you should avoid at all costs.  Try to keep politics and political campaigns off of your blog, even if they are offering to pay your full blog advertising rates.  Campaigns can see great blog advertising results, but will all of your readers want you to take a side on political issues?

You should also ask to see any advertisements that will be placed on your website.  Your blog advertising rates should generally be set high enough that get-rich-quick schemes and belly fat advertisements stay off of your blog, but you'll also want to avoid any ads that could be potentially disturbing to the intended viewers of your website.  

For example, if your blog is about drunk driving, you shouldn't accept any advertisements from liquor or beer companies.  If your blog is about stillbirths or maternal death, your blog advertising results for maternity clothing could be not just dismal, but also generate complaints to your firm.

Setting Your Initial Blog Advertising Rates

Typically, the amount that you will be able to charge for blog advertising depends on the number of page views that your blog brings in in a typical month.  The term that you'll see repeated a lot in discussions of blog advertising rates is “cost per mille” or CPM.  This refers to how many thousands of page views an advertisement gets.

If advertising on your blog brings in great blog advertising results, you will be able to charge a higher CPM.  Blog advertising rates on typical blogs right now are less than $10 for a thousand page views, and often less than $5.

Because blog advertising rates can vary significantly from blog to blog, you may want to ask other law bloggers in your area what kind of blog advertising results they've seen and what you should charge initially.  The trend in recent years has been for CPM to steadily decrease, so you should make sure not to charge rates that will strike advertisers as too high for the level of blog advertising results they can expect.

Adjusting Your Blog Advertising Rates

As your blog grows, changes and becomes more popular with your intended audience, it's likely that blog advertising results for your advertisers will change.  When this happens, you need to be able to adjust your blog advertising rates to continue making as much as possible from your blogging efforts.

Don't ever move your blog advertising rates too much at once, as this is likely to scare away your existing advertisers and make it difficult to find new ones.  If you want to increase what you're charging, you'd better be able to show your advertisers blog advertising results that are really different—keep in mind that for many blogs, ad rates are currently decreasing.

If you're not getting enough advertisers at your current blog advertising rates, you may need to consider decreasing them.  However, before deciding that your rates need adjusted, you may want to ask a professional marketer for help—they may be able to help you improve your website and make changes that can help you improve blog advertising results so that your rates can stay the same or even increase.

How to Improve Your Blog Advertising Results

The single best way to improve the results of the ads on your blog is to make sure that your blog and its advertising are relevant to each other.  Does the same group of people want to read about the topics in your blog and the topics being mentioned by your advertisers?

If you're not having a mismatch, perhaps the reason that your blog advertising results aren't what you want is that your content isn't keeping people on your blog long enough.  Consider using some new techniques to bring new viewers to your blog and keep them there longer.  For example, you may want to get some new guest bloggers to write engaging posts about areas of the law you personally aren't as familiar with.

Analyzing Your Blog Advertising Results

If you want to be able to change your blog advertising rates for your existing advertisers, you'll need to start using analytics tools to make sure that their results have been great.  Google Analytics allows you to look closely at web traffic, including the route that people tend to take through your blog.  

Using analytics can help you decide which advertising positions are most valuable and which may need to be revised so that they aren't wasting your advertisers' money.  Often, analytics will give you some valuable clues for redesigning your blog in a way that makes visitors more likely to stay longer and participate more—both of which are likely to improve your blog advertising results.

If you're not sure how to use analytics tools, it's a great idea to talk to a company that specializes in web analytics.  These companies can analyze your traffic so you don't have to, and give you a report about your blog that helps your firm decide what it's doing right and what it's time to change.

 

 

Everything About Advertising on Blogs

Once you've started a blog for your law firm, you may start to hear family members, colleagues, and friends start to talk about other ways to monetize your blogging.  With over 156 million blogs currently operating, though, you may wonder how to get advertisers on your blog, or whether you can really differentiate yourself.  Keep reading this guide to find out ways to encourage advertisers to advertise on blogs for your firm.

How to Get Advertisers on Your Blog: Critical Mistakes to Avoid

Many companies now advertise on blogs every day.  While it can take months to get advertising on blogs working for you, you need to know right away that it's much easier to scare advertisers away than it is to attract them.  The first thing to remember when you're considering how to get advertisers on your blog is that you're not the only game in town: with so many other bloggers eager to have companies advertise on blogs, one major mistake can wreck your advertising strategy for a long time.

The biggest gaffes related to advertising on blogs involve bloggers who aren't thinking about what kind of advertising content they're getting.  You can't let people advertise on blogs that your law firm is sponsoring if they're advertising unethical products or products that seem very disconnected from your practice.  Political advertising should also usually be avoided when you are accepting advertising on blogs, because not all of your readers will agree with a political message and this can turn viewers off.

Any discussion of how to get advertisers on your blog would be incomplete without a few words about transparency.  While the line between advertisement and organic content has blurred on a number of websites, you should always make sure that advertising on blogs for your firm is clearly delineated.  If someone wants to advertise on blogs without divulging that their product is being given paid placement, you should turn that offer down—transparency is key to building a loyal audience.

How to Get Advertisers on Your Blog: Setting Your Own Rates

If you're a do it yourself kind of person, you may want to let people advertise on blogs you own by selling your own ads.  Because blogging advertising rates are changing all the time, you'll need to research current average rates for advertising on blogs like yours.

This is really only a great way to get advertising on blogs if you already know how to get advertisers on your blog.  If, for example, you already have people who have asked to advertise on blogs for your firm, or if you have an email list of people you suspect would be interested, you might try setting your own rates and placing your own advertising on blogs for your site.

How to Get Advertisers on Your Blog: Using Networks

Not everyone knows how to get advertisers on your blog just by soliciting ads directly.  If you are having a tough time getting companies to advertise on blogs by your firm, you can use advertising networks that will find advertisers for you.  Ad networks are responsible for most advertising on blogs today, because they take away ad billing responsibilities and let you focus on running your website.

Every blog network varies in how much you'll be paid per thousand impressions of an ad.  Advertisements on blogs can usually be vetted so that you can ensure no ads would appear that make your firm appear unprofessional.

How to Get Advertisers on Your Blog: Use E-Mail Lists and Social Media

If you have a list of clients or any other mailing lists for your law firm, you may consider sending those email addresses a brief email about advertising on blogs for your site.  This is usually only effective for B2B advertising on blogs.

You can also post to your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn feeds that you now have space available for advertising on blogs for your firm.  You should have your rates ready before you ask for people to advertise on blogs—uncertain rates or last-minute changes can cause potential advertisers to look elsewhere.

How to Get Advertisers on Your Blog: Adjusting Your Prices

If you've been trying to get people to advertise on blogs for your firm for several months without much success, you should probably focus first on developing content and a larger reader base.  It will always be easier to find people to buy advertising on blogs that have a great deal of traffic—if you're only receiving a few visits an hour, it may just not be worth it for most advertisers.

Once you've built your readership up by presenting great content and getting your name out in any way you can, you'll have an easier time asking people to advertise on blogs for the price you want.  You may want to start with promotional pricing to get advertising on blogs initially.

How to Get Advertisers on Your Blog: Keeping Your Advertisers

Once you have learned how to get advertisers on your blog, the next step is keeping them!  This next section doesn't apply so much if you use ad networks, but if you're personally approving advertising on blogs, you should keep communicating with your advertisers.  Just a quick phone call with some questions about how a campaign is going can make a big difference to whether an advertiser stays or goes.

If your advertisers aren't getting the kind of results they want from advertising on your blogs, you can dig into the meat of your analytics.  Analytics can help you figure out whether it's the content of your blogs or the design or placement of an advertisement that is leading to less than optimal performance.

When campaigns are going well, don't just settle for “good enough.”  Keep up with trends in advertising—consider allowing targeted video ads to run on your website, for example, to bring in more conversions and more value for your advertisers.  In an increasingly competitive blog market, you can't afford to lose the advertisers you've already developed a business relationship with.

 

 

Everything About Online Web Analytics

 

 

The first online web analytics started almost with the dawn of the World Wide Web.  In 1996, a new service, “Web-Counter,” started counting the number of hits a website received—the first web analytics metrics that could be seen and analyzed by site owners.  These hit counters gradually became more complex, and several services started looking deeper into the data.  

 

 

As the web has evolved, the online web analytics industry has exploded.  Hundreds of companies have sprung onto the scene, all designed to help companies analyze their web traffic and make modifications to their content and marketing strategies based on their traffic data.  Online web analytics have been a boon to law firms who know how to use them—if you want to know more, keep reading this guide.

 

 

Everybody's Got A Story

 

 

When you start working with online web analytics, you might find one curiously gross term mentioned by analytics gurus: “data pukes.”  This refers to the fact that when you use standard reports and web analytics metrics, you often end up seeing large quantities of data, but that data might not hang together.

 

 

Every potential client who visits your website has a story and a reason for landing on your site.  If you're too busy looking at the web analytics metrics in standard reports, your online web analytics may lack a sense of this story—you'll see a lot of numbers without knowing what brought people to your site or how to keep them there.

 

 

That's why good online web analytics can be customized and adapted to answer your questions about your website.  If you're not sure why one keyword is working and another isn't, remember that your visitors aren't just numbers, they're people with needs and desires.  Experiment with different keywords and content, and keep your eye on web analytics metrics the entire time.  As you become more experienced, you'll start to understand how numbers can represent the story of your site visitors.

 

 

The Forest and the Trees

 

 

With thousands of different report types available for your viewing, and hundreds of separate web analytics metrics being examined, it's critical to keep your goals in mind.  If you aren't goal-oriented when doing online web analytics, you'll have knowledge about the reports themselves, but not the wisdom to improve them.

 

 

One of the easiest mistakes for people to make when they're not experienced with online web analytics is to get swept away in the sheer quantity of information that is available.  After hours, days, or even weeks of looking at web analytics metrics, though, you may find that you're no closer to your goal than you were before you started—and that your brain just can't handle more numbers.

 

 

Any time you look at a report, keep asking yourself: “Does this get me closer to my goals?  How?”  Not all web analytics metrics will be relevant for your current project.  If you see something odd while doing online web analytics, follow your hunch—but don't keep heading down dead-end paths.

 

 

Zeroing In On Differences

 

 

You have two landing pages that couldn't be performing more differently.  One is attracting new clients on a daily or near-daily basis, keeps visitors on the page for several minutes, and shows high levels of engagement.  The other is showing a bounce rate of over 50 percent and hasn't yet converted a client.

 

 

A talented beginner to online web analytics changes the second landing page to look more like the first, in whatever ways they can.  Change the site, change the traffic—right?  An intermediate user adds in some other research, making sure that pay per click keywords were well calibrated for the landing page, and that the text of a sponsored ad link looks properly targeted.

 

 

All of these actions will probably help you to make your web analytics metrics for the second site look more like the first.  But if you're the kind of advanced online web analytics user who wants to know not just what works, but why it works, think scientific method.  Try changing just one aspect at a time to find out which alterations change which web analytics metrics.

 

 

This kind of experimentation takes longer, it's true—but the online web analytics data you'll get will be much more useful for revising your site in the future.  This kind of experimentation is key if you want to beat your competitors in key web analytics metrics, so you should try to get comfortable with slow, steady changes and constant monitoring.

 

 

Finding Your Blind Spots

 

 

One of the best ways to increase your client base is to figure out where your website is currently weak.  In order to do this, you may want to look at web analytics metrics not for your own firm, but for the firms of your competitors.

 

 

If your competition has seen huge increases in web traffic and client conversion through a website that includes a great deal of video, you need to know: this kind of research can help you know what hypotheses should be tested next when you work on your online web analytics.  You may also find a new way to leverage social media websites by looking at a competitor's Facebook or Twitter feed.

 

 

Keep in mind that researching your competition doesn't mean you have to become more like them in every way.  The best way to attract clients is to differentiate yourself from competitors, and your web analytics metrics are likely to suffer if you become too similar to another local law firm.  Competition research can help you to know where your competitors are weak, so that you can take advantage of any weak spots in their web marketing strategies.

 

 

Looking Ahead

 

 

Your data will be most effective and illustrate broader trends when you keep monitoring web analytics metrics over a long period of time.  The goal of online web analytics for your law firm should be continuous improvement, not a one-time redesign.  By maintaining constant monitoring of your website's traffic trends, you can keep your marketing strategies fresh, current, and always data-driven.

 

 

 

Everything About Web Marketing Analytics

With two thirds of legal clients using the internet to find a lawyer, and web traffic diversifying into social media and mobile websites, it can be hard to know what marketing strategies are working for your firm.  Fortunately, there's no need to guess.  Web analytics marketing can give you solid, reliable information about your web traffic so that you can understand where your clients are coming from and how to get more business for your firm.  If you're new to web marketing analytics tools, read on to find out how to make the most of your data—usually without spending any money on software.

Why Should My Firm Use Web Analytics Marketing?

Whenever someone visits your law firm's website, they leave a digital trail.  Think of a web marketing analytics tool as an experienced tracker, following those trails to find out where your site visitors go and what they do.

A decade ago, technology for web analytics marketing was still in its infancy, and many sites only kept track of how many visitors their website had. Today, web marketing analytics tools have become a huge industry, with thousands of available reports that look at various aspects of your web traffic.  What has become clear for most firms is this: the “old” metrics of site visits and pages visited are not useful for understanding how your website can better help you meet your goals.

Instead of focusing on irrelevant statistics, web analytics marketing helps you figure out what parts of your website are generating clients and which parts are underperforming.  The best part about using web marketing analytics is the immense potential for customization: no matter what your needs are, you can generate reports that tell you what you want to know.

Web Analytics Marketing: An Ongoing Process

When firms start looking into web marketing analytics, they may have a clear one-time goal in mind, like a website redesign.  For example, let's say your website hasn't been updated regularly or redesigned since 2008.  Some parts of your site may still be working and drawing in traffic, and you need to know which parts those are and why they're working in order to make the best possible redesign.

Having this kind of short term goal for your web analytics marketing is fine, but it's important to understand that this type of marketing is always more effective when you use it continuously over a long period of time.  Web marketing analytics tools provide you with a valuable way to see trends as they happen, and there's no reason to ignore your analytics just because you achieve one or more of your marketing goals.

When you start to budget for web analytics marketing, then, consider it a permanent part of your business.  The internet certainly isn't going away any time soon, and if you're not monitoring your web traffic and analyzing it appropriately, you could miss the next big trend while your competitors capitalize.

Reports and Dashboards and Tools, Oh My!

One of your biggest choices in web marketing analytics is whether to hire a marketing service to handle your analytics or whether to have your own personnel working on analyzing your web traffic.  While there are advantages and disadvantages to both routes, the smallest firms may not be able to afford either a full-time web analytics marketing specialist or an outsourcing solution.  Solo practitioners may find themselves having to do their own web marketing analytics with very little guidance.

If you do choose to do your web analytics marketing in house (a good choice if you want to keep control over your data and custom reports), but don't have a full time analytics staffer, you can take web seminars on analytics tools and reporting.  Seminars can be a great way to familiarize yourself with new reports and creating custom reports.

Making Sense of Your Data

Once you've got the data from your reporting tools, web marketing analytics depend on thinking like a client.  The numbers you find are only a small part of your web analytics marketing solution: what you really need to understand is why those numbers are happening and what's making your clients leave your site or come back for more.

For small law firms, figuring out how clients work with your site can be difficult.  If you're having problems seeing why one web page is working while another isn't, try asking a non-lawyer acquaintance to enter your site at a landing page that isn't working and tell you what they see.  Alternately, just try something new, or even several new landing pages, and see which works best.  Continuous experimentation can lead to great web analytics marketing data.

Deciding Your Marketing Strategy

Your web analytics marketing tools can also help you decide what marketing techniques you can still tap into.  For example, if you're getting very few visitors from social media websites, you may want to integrate more social media content into your site.  If video search engine optimization seems to be working well for your website, you may want to include more videos or even start making a video blog series.

One of the biggest decisions for law firms is whether you want to emphasize pay per click (PPC) or SEO (search engine optimization) traffic.  While up to 80 percent of web traffic for law firms depends on organic search results, paid search may be more effective for your firm in particular—and your web marketing analytics can tell you exactly what the situation is..  You should use web marketing analytics to learn more about where your search traffic is coming from, then decide whether to concentrate on playing to your strengths or improving on your weaknesses.

Remember that you can always change your strategy if your web analytics marketing doesn't seem to be effective.  No matter what, though, you should give any new strategy some time to work: search engine optimization strategies, in particular, can be slow to pick up steam.  Being too impatient could lead to abandoning what might have been a successful strategy if you'd simply stuck with your first web marketing analytics solution.

 

Everything About Web SEO Analytics

Most website visitors—up to 80 percent—find law firms using organic searches, not paid results.  If your firm is considering switching from pay per click advertising to search engine optimization marketing, you need SEO web analytics to make sure that your strategies are working to deliver the clients you need.  This guide will help you get started with web SEO analytics and enhance the quality of your website's search engine optimization strategy.

Taking Your Time

When you start using SEO web analytics tools, you'll need to give the tools some time to gather data about your website.  Results from just a few days for a new website won't give you good data, and could lead to making big web SEO analytics mistakes.  Even though you may be excited to see whether your new strategy pans out, the first step is always hurry up—and wait.

Once you've gotten a large enough amount of data to do SEO web analytics (you'll want data for several hundred visitors, at a minimum), you'll have a better view of what visitors to your website are actually doing and how they interact with your content.  If you know from past experience that your visitor count varies strongly depending on the season, you may want to let your data accumulate for several months or even a year before doing web SEO analytics.

Which Tool Should I Use for SEO Web Analytics?

Before you can even begin to gather data for your web SEO analytics, you'll need to decide on what tools you want to use.  The most commonly used tools for SEO web analytics are made by Google, and are called—quite appropriately—Google Analytics.  If you're new to analyzing web traffic, using Google's services can be a great place to start.  Not only are these tools relatively robust, they're also free, and many tutorials online can help you get started if you're stuck.

Other search engines, like Yahoo (recently merged with Microsoft's Bing), also offer web SEO analytics tools.  You can also find SEO web analytics tools designed by other third party companies.  Often, these latter tools are specialized for some particular aspect of web SEO analytics: for example, some tools focus very strongly on conversions and landing page optimization, while others focus on keyword performance.

Because of the abundance of SEO web analytics software, it's critical to keep your goals in mind when shopping for your software solution.  Don't feel like you're confined to just using one web SEO analytics tool, if the one you've been using hasn't worked as well as you wanted.  While every additional tool you use will require additional training and time to use correctly, you may find that several tools in tandem can provide a much better solution than just using one piece of software.

Outsourcing Your SEO Web Analytics

If you feel unprepared to handle your own web SEO analytics, you may want to start talking about outsourcing.  For many law firms, outsourcing SEO web analytics is a much more attractive solution than doing analytics in-house.  Nearly anyone can use basic reports with analytics software, but really achieving your goals may require advanced web SEO analytics and custom reporting.  This can require the touch of a programmer, not a marketer, to get right.

If you do decide to outsource your SEO web analytics, try to find a service that lets you keep any data that you accumulate.  This may not seem important if you're not sure what to do with your data, but keep this in mind: the company you hire to do your web SEO analytics now may not be our outsourcing solution forever.  When you switch outsourcing companies, you want data continuity and a streamlined transition—and you definitely don't want to have to start gathering your data all over again.

Targeting Keywords

One of the biggest uses of SEO web analytics is figuring out which keywords are working for you.  If you're using search engine optimization, you're probably already paying a lot of attention to which keywords are driving traffic.  What web SEO analytics can do is help you figure out which keywords are actually getting you new clients.

You can engineer custom reports with SEO web analytics tools that show you not only which keywords are working best, but also what keywords are similar enough to generate more traffic.  Finding a keyword family can make your website copy more readable and less repetitive than simply sticking to a few simple keywords.

Making Your Website Engaging

No matter how good your website is at drawing search engine traffic, you need to drive conversions.  To do that, you need to keep your clients on your website—but what way is best for your particular firm?  What works for one firm might not work for others, so you will want to do real, data-driven web SEO analytics to make sure that your strategies work.  Here are a few strategies you may want to try to increase visitor engagement:

• Calls to action can often turn visitors into clients—you can experiment with SEO web analytics to figure out which calls to action are working and which are falling flat.

• Videos can make your clients up to 60 percent more likely to contact your firm.  Whether you're new to video marketing or already have a lot of videos on your site, you can use web SEO analytics to make sure that your videos are drawing in clients instead of sending them away.  You can also identify topics that would be good for future videos.

• Mobile traffic will account for up to 25 percent of web traffic by 2016.  This means that if your site isn't mobile-friendly, you could be losing clients every day.  SEO web analytics tools can see whether your mobile traffic stays or goes.

• Social media is the name of the game for marketers today, and you need web SEO analytics to make sure that your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts are doing what you want them to do.  SEO web analytics can also help you manage your reputation and ward off potential public relations crises within social media circles.