Everything About Web Traffic Analytics

Up to 95 percent of visitors to your law firm website may not comment, inquire, or do anything else as a result of their visit—they just click on your website, then disappear.  How can you find out more about this silent majority of customers?  Using web page analytics can help you figure out where your traffic is coming from and how to convert more page views into paying clients.  Web traffic analytics doesn't have to be tedious: with the right attitude and the right web analytics dashboard, you may be surprised at how easy it is to understand the traffic for your firm's website.

Start With Your Goals for Web Page Analytics

While it can certainly be interesting to tinker with a web analytics dashboard in order to get a better idea of what's going on with your website, the best web traffic analytics depend on having strong goals before you start.  Obviously your end goal is to get new clients with your web page analytics, but what do you actually want to analyze?

Your goals should depend on what kind of advertising you already use to drive traffic to your website.  For example, let's say that the majority of clients who contact you from your website arrive because of a pay per click ad campaign.  You'll want to use web traffic analytics to determine which of your ad groups and keywords are generating the best client leads.

Web page analytics for websites that primarily have a search engine optimization strategy will usually have different goals.  Your web analytics dashboard may reveal that one of your pages sees significantly more traffic than another, due to a high page rank for a term that is in demand with your target market.  Web traffic analytics will make it easier for you to identify the best SEO terms for your firm's marketing to focus on.

Your Web Analytics Dashboard

When you first get started with any new web page analytics tool, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the dashboard.  A web analytics dashboard is how you'll interact with a web traffic analysis tool, and while every dashboard is different, they share some key information.  

This dashboard is showing web page analytics for a full year.  Let's start by looking at some of the key terms involved in these web traffic analytics and what they mean.  Visits just means how many unique people (or computers) have visited your website in a certain amount of time.

You'll notice that this web analytics dashboard shows over 62,000 pageviews and only 16,000 visits.  Dividing these two numbers gets you your average pages per visit—about 3.9.  What we can see from the top several numbers in the web analytics dashboard is that the average potential client who sees this website visits for about 3 and a half minutes, and looks at four web pages in that time.

Every web page analytics service offers a different dashboard with different information.  The best way to familiarize yourself with the specifics of your service's web analytics dashboard is to just play around with its various reporting features.  Try to find out where your web traffic is coming from, and what search engines seem to be generating the most clients for your firm.

Web Page Analytics Services

Deciding which web traffic analytics service to use depends on your needs and—to put it simply—your comfort level.  Think very carefully about whether you consider yourself to be a beginner to web page analytics or a more advanced user.  If you're just starting out, you may want to use one of the more basic web traffic analytics tools, with a great deal of information online about these tools in case you get stuck or aren't sure what to do with the data you find on your web analytics dashboard.

If you're an advanced user, choosing a web page analytics service will depend on your goals.  Some web traffic analytics tools focus very strongly on maximizing page views through your advertising, while others emphasize conversions.  You may want to use a basic web analytics dashboard to figure out where your greatest strengths and weaknesses are, then pick another web page analytics tool that will help you arrive at your goals.

On-Site and Off-Site Web Page Analytics

There are two different types of web traffic analytics you may have heard a lot about—on-site and off-site.  But what's really the difference, and which is more useful?  Off-site web page analytics try to help you get information about potential clients and how people online are interacting with similar websites.  On-site web traffic analytics look at how visitors behave once they're on your website.

While you may want to know more about what potential clients are doing before they arrive at your website, the truth is that on-site web page analytics are usually much more robust and can drive traffic better than off-site analytics.  It's important to look at your own website before analyzing your close competitors and looking at the demographic information that off-site web traffic analytics usually includes.

How To Learn More About Web Traffic Analytics

It's not always easy to understand the tools you can use to analyze your website.  If you're new to web page analytics, you may want to look for online seminars that can teach you how to use the tools you have.  If you are using a leading web analytics dashboard like Google or Yahoo, there are many online tutorials that can guide you through the numbers you see and explain what they mean.

You may also want to sign up for classes.  Classes with an experienced instructor are one of the best ways to ensure that you understand how to get the most out of your web analytics dashboard.  If you've been having problems understanding web tutorials, classes are a great way to interact with an instructor and ask the questions you've needed to ask.

Google, with its nearly 67 percent market share, is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the search engine marketing world.  It's no surprise, then, that Google profile directories are some of the biggest and most relevant directories for law firms to become a part of.  If you're not already using the Google profile directory as part of your marketing strategy, there are several reasons that you may want to change that.  Keep reading to learn more about how Google profile directories are already helping attorneys across the United States, and how you can get onboard.

What the Google Profile Directory is For

Google's goals involve becoming a market leader in a huge variety of tasks involving information gathering.  Google profile directories were made in a way that makes them scalable all the way up to becoming a sort of giant global telephone book.  By creating a Google profile directory entry, you make your business more easily searchable by people looking for you.

Google profile directories also are a valuable source of link juice for many businesses.  Because Google's own pages are often relatively high Page Rank pages, and because the search engine ranks its own pages higher in its search results, you can give yourself a search boost by becoming part of the Google profile directory.

Local Search and the Google Profile Directory

One of the most innovative aspects of the Google profile directories is that they allow businesses not only to include their location, but also to have those location results displayed on a map.  This means that Google profile directory users can find the businesses that are closest to them and that would be most convenient for them to drive to.

Currently, Google profile directories including Google Places have been renamed to Google+ Local.  However, Google+ has not been as successful as the tech giant had perhaps hoped.  This means that there's a strong possibility the Google profile directory could go through another name change in 2013 in order to better reflect the ways users are actually using the site.

Local searches now represent about 30 percent of overall searches, and a higher percentage of searches for attorneys.  You're much more likely to get conversions from clicks you get through Google profile directories and local search than from clicks you get from traditional search engine rankings.  This means the Google profile directory is a great time investment for any law firm that primarily draws its client base from a small local area.  Firms that have a very specific legal field but nationwide geographic practice focus may have a harder time drawing in users from Google profile directories.

Creating Your Profile

When you create a profile on the Google profile directory, you'll be asked for a substantial amount of information.  There's always a temptation to put in only barely as much as is required and say “we'll come back to it later and fill it out more completely.”  However, that's not really putting your best foot forward, and this kind of short-sighted thinking is no way to get started on your search engine marketing campaigns.  Fill out all the information in a way that makes your website inviting for potential clients to click on.  You want to portray yourself as informed and professional, but not too stuffy for people to contact freely.

Also, this should go without saying: double check all of your data before you submit the profile to Google profile directories.  You don't want to have your Google profile directory entry accidentally direct people to an incorrect phone number or address.  If people make a mistake based on the entries you've placed in Google profile directories, they're unlikely to become a client of your firm—who would want an attorney who wasn't detail oriented?

Maintaining Your Profile

If any aspect of your law firm changes, from the name to the phone number to the focus of your niche marketing efforts, you should update your Google profile directory entry.  Google profile directories aren't somehow updated automatically, and you will need to manually input any changes to your firm in order to make sure that your directory entry stays current for prospective clients.

Monitoring Reviews in the Google Profile Directory

One of the more interesting aspects of Google profile directories is that business profiles allow people to actually write reviews about businesses they've patronized in the past.  You should check your reviews in the Google profile directory at least once a week after you have created your directory entry.  Keep in mind that even one or two negative reviews, if they're particularly harsh, can make it much more difficult to get clients.  People today have a tendency to look for reviews before purchasing any products or services, especially when those services are expensive.

There's always a chance that some or even all of your negative reviews are not written by disgruntled clients, but rather by your disgruntled competitors.  If you suspect that a review is not actually from a customer, you can report the review.

Keep in mind that not all negative reviews are just from the jealous competition.  Be smart enough to respond in a positive and optimistic way to genuine negative reviews.  There's nothing that looks worse for a company than loading off all of the blame onto a client who had a bad experience.

Incorporating Google Profile Directory With Your Marketing Campaign

One of the smartest things you can do with Google profile directories is encourage your best past clients to post reviews.  If you've received negative reviews from real clients, this is your best way to make those reviews irrelevant.  Enough positive feedback will start to overwhelm the negative reviews until prospective clients simply don't listen as much to the negativity.  Ask your social networking contacts to give you a positive review if they've had a good experience at your firm—this can be a great way to help you generate inbound links and great reviews.  You can re-post the call for reviews every few months, so that new followers see it.
 

Everything About Web Analytics Strategy

Up to 90 percent of law firms today have web analytics available for their use.  Getting the most out of web analytics reporting, though, requires creativity and experimentation.  Designing your firm's web analytics strategy can help you to get more clients and a better overall return on investment for your marketing budget.  In this guide, you'll find out how to use web analytics reporting to change your firm's website, and how strategies for web analytics have changed over time.

Web Analytics Strategy: An Art Becomes Science

The first websites ever designed were implemented in the early 1990s.  These primitive websites contained mostly (sometimes exclusively) text, and had very few ways of tracking visitors.  By the mid-1990s, traffic counters had begun to track how many hits a website had received, but the science of web analytics reporting was still in its infancy: usually, all that a website owner knew about his or her site was how many visitors had arrived in the last month or even year.

Because so few statistics about visitors were tracked, trying to figure out what made one website successful while others failed was considered more of an art than a science.  Websites were viewed as creative projects, and heavy data analysis and number crunching were nearly absent.  However, as search engines became more robust, a number of web analytics reporting tools became useful.

Perhaps the biggest change to web analytics strategy came when Google announced that it had bought a web analytics reporting company and would now host free analytics software for websites.  Google Analytics brought hard numbers to websites that had previously been designed based on guesswork, and within a few years, hundreds of other web analytics companies had sprung up all over the world.  What had once been a purely artistic endeavor now required statistical analysis to understand.

The Scientific Method and Web Analytics Strategy

Because web analytics reporting has, indeed, become a science, it's critical to look at your website in the way a scientist would: hypothesizing, then testing hypotheses.  When you develop your web analytics strategy, it's not enough to just look at your most successful pages, then designing the rest of your website to look more like them.

When you're doing scientific experiments, it's absolutely critical to change only one variable at a time.  When you change more variables, you might change the result, but you won't know why.  Learning why one part of your website works while another doesn't is the most important part of web analytics strategy. 

Your web analytics reporting tools can only go so far—if you change too much, too fast, you won't be able to identify what made the biggest difference.  While it may be hard to wait for results, the best web analytics strategy involves making slow, gradual changes and carefully analyzing what works.  Keep in mind that even if one of the hypotheses you develop doesn't work, you still know more than when you started.  Not every experiment pans out—that's part of the science of web analytics reporting, and it's perfectly okay.

Strategizing for Continuous Improvement

Every experiment you do can help you to optimize your web analytics strategy.  If the results of a test show that a new type of landing page is dramatically lowering your bounce rate and you've done your experiment right, you'll be able to duplicate the results with several different landing pages.  Once you've got the bounce rate down, though, what about conversions?

Whenever you've hit one goal, it's time to revise your web analytics strategy to seek new goals.  What's critical about these new goals, though, is that they directly relate to the results of your previous experiments with web analytics reporting.

Web Analytics Strategy For Visitor Segmentation

Your web analytics reporting may reveal some interesting things about your website visitors.  For many law firm websites, different types of visitors are looking for very different things.  If your attorneys have several different practice areas, for instance, the content that would be relevant to a visitor looking for an attorney to represent them in divorce proceedings would be quite different from what a prospective adoptive parent would be looking for.

When two groups of clients want two different customer experiences, you can use web analytics reporting to figure out traffic flow and keep them looking at different pages.  This web analytics strategy is called visitor segmentation, and may even involve creating multiple websites for different aspects of your law firm.  Visitor segmentation isn't just useful for large firms—you may be able to increase key performance metrics for your web analytics reporting even if you're a solo practitioner, just by making sure different types of clients see different sides of your practice.

Web Analytics Strategy For Mobile Content Development

One way to get ahead of competitors in today's web searches is by developing a mobile-friendly website.  Many law firm websites are not easily viewable by visitors using smartphones, and if your site requires a potential client to scroll or zoom for good information, it's likely that they'll fly directly into the arms of your competition.

When you check out your mobile site, it's important to make sure that it's compatible with all types of phones.  Remember that you can redirect mobile users to a separate, mobile-friendly site, so there's no need to abandon your main website if it's meeting your current goals.  You may want to engage in different web analytics strategy for your mobile site, especially because it can be much easier for mobile users to make a phone call than to fill out an online form, making it harder to keep track of conversions.

Listening To Your Clients

Don't get so wrapped up in the website analytics reporting numbers that you lose sight of your clients and their stated needs.  Some of the best website analytics strategy can come from really listening to client feedback about your website.  For example, if you keep hearing that clients want more information about a particular topic before they call, you may have a new experiment to try.

Yelp is one of the biggest websites for posting reviews of services all over the world, with over 50 million visitors a month visiting the site to check reviews while researching their purchases.  Yelp for lawyers can help with your law firm marketing and make it much easier to get new clients converting just based on your web presence.  This simple guide will help you understand some basic things to do and things to avoid when you're becoming part of the Yelp lawyer listings for the first time.

DO Take Charge of Your Own Yelp Destiny

Keep in mind that even if you're not among the legions of attorneys who have already become Yelp lawyers, clients can still post reviews of your firm on Yelp.  If you are a Yelp lawyer, on the other hand, with a full profile, you'll be able to check your reviews more easily and make sure that any reviews you get are the genuine article.

Don't let other people get to your profile before you do.  Yelp for lawyers works best when attorneys are taking charge of their pages and making sure that they contain correct information.  Yelp lawyer listings should be updated on a regular basis if your firm has any changes that could affect the accuracy of the information already contained in your profile.

DON'T Ever Post False Reviews on Other Profiles

When first using Yelp, lawyers often notice that some reviews are posted that don't appear to actually be from real clients.  This is one of the most deleterious parts of Yelp lawyer listings for attorney marketing, and you may think that posting reviews like that for your competitors would help you get ahead.

However, if you're found to be posting fake Yelp lawyer reviews, you could face severe disciplinary action from your state bar association.  This kind of conduct is considered extremely unethical, and on Yelp lawyers are expected to work only on their own profile rather than on profiles belonging to other firms or attorneys.

DO Solicit Reviews for Your Services on Social Networks

If you're already using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, you probably have some friends and followers who will click on just about any link you post.  If this is the case, try asking your social networking friends whether they'd be willing to contribute a Yelp lawyer review for you.

Often, the people you're connected with on a social network will be more willing than other clients to help you by giving positive reviews to help you better compete with other Yelp lawyers.

DON'T Solicit Reviews from Non-Clients

Even though your great aunt Sally and your roommate from college want very much to see your legal career succeed, it's never a good idea to solicit reviews for your Yelp lawyer profile from people who've never actually been on your client list.  Make sure that it's clear when you make your social network call for reviews that you're only looking for reviews from real clients who can speak to your legal decisionmaking abilities.  Yelp lawyers who knowingly allow positive reviews from non-clients to continue being posted on the website may face disciplinary action, the same as if they had created the reviews themselves.

DO Ask for Misleading Reviews to Be Deleted

If you have received a negative review that sounds like it's not from any client you've ever had, you can immediately notify Yelp to let them know that someone has posted a false review.  Yelp lawyers find that this happens relatively frequently, and it's often difficult to track down which Yelp lawyer posted the negative review to defame you.

Generally speaking, the best way for Yelp lawyers to deal with receiving a false negative review is to report it, have it removed, and move on.  Trying to get a competitor disciplined is a waste of time unless you have very good proof of who created the false Yelp lawyer reviews for your firm.

DON'T Respond Unfairly to Real Criticism

When you see something negative said in your Yelp lawyer reviews, some attorneys have a tendency to get defensive.  But when reading reviews on Yelp, lawyers should look at negativity as giving an opportunity for improvement.  If you comment on a negative Yelp lawyer review, your comment should be constructive and contrite, rather than defensive or aggressive toward the reviewer.

If potential clients see that someone is giving extremely vitriolic feedback to negative reviewers, they won't be very likely to contact your firm.  The best web presence for Yelp lawyers is to look collected and professional, even if someone's saying things about your law firm that are deeply negative and hurtful.

DO Monitor Your Reviews Frequently

By finding that your Yelp lawyer profile has received a negative review early, you can do a lot to mitigate the damage.  You can, as many of the best Yelp lawyers do, respond in a thoughtful and kind way to the negative review, which will improve audience perception of your practice.  You could also make sure that you now solicit positive reviews from some of your best clients, in order to drown out the voices of the disgruntled clients who had posted a review.

DON'T Panic Over One Negative Review

It's easy for Yelp lawyers to become panicked at the idea of a negative review if they've never received one before.  Some attorneys with Yelp lawyer profiles have even gone so far as to sue for defamation.  However, as long as the reviews were posted by actual clients, it's very hard to collect on this type of suit.  Most businesses, including law firms, that have tried to sue due to Yelp reviews have had the case thrown out and been forced to pay the attorney fees for the defendant.

Use positive techniques to regain trust from your internet audience if you've lost some of it due to a negative review.  Suing typically just makes it so that the lawsuit is forever a part of the Google results when someone searches for your law firm.  That's not what any firm wants on the front page.

Link building isn't easy to learn—which probably explains why only about 60 percent of American companies are currently making any specific link building efforts.  When you're working a law firm, developing a link building campaign can seem stressful, but in reality there's much less to it than you'd think.  Keep reading this article, and other link building articles on lawfirms.laws.com, to find out how to establish link building campaigns that really work without sacrificing your reputation.

Creating a Link Building Tool Kit

Many of the tools you already use on the internet can be considered allies in your link building campaign.  For instance, let's say that you already have a significant presence in the blog world.  That's great—we'll consider that blog a link building tool that you can come back to and use at any time.

Your contact list is also a link building tool.  Building your contact list and making sure that many people on it are well-connected online can make your link building campaign far more successful.  

In addition to these kinds of tools, you'll need some software.  Use caution before purchasing any kind of link building tool online—make sure that you're getting the best deal for the functionality offered.  Some link building tools simply aren't worth it.  In some cases, there may be a way to obtain a free version of the same link building tool that you just paid for it, without sacrificing quality.  Try using search terms relating to the aspect of your link building campaign that you're working on, then find a tool that works for your purposes.

What to Avoid in Your Link Building Campaign

Not every link building tool works in a way that will actually lead to improved search engine performance.  In fact, if you mismanage your link building campaign by using unethical techniques or having your links show up on thousands of unrelated websites, you could actually see your search rank decrease.

Why?  Because when a link building tool works by putting your link on so many unrelated websites, Google takes notice.  Because of some recent algorithm updates, called Penguin and Panda, if your links appear to be the result of paid linking or article marketing programs, you may find these inbound links now impact your quality score negatively.  Because of this change, Google has seen requests for removal of over ten million links that were now hurting SERPs.

Now, some companies that want to sell a link building tool that uses these methods may claim that Panda and Penguin aren't completely effective.  This is true—websites that use bad linking methods do still appear in some searches.  But what will you do when the Google engineers get better?  Undoubtedly, Panda and Penguin aren't the only updates we'll see to change these types of results.  It's very likely that if Google engineers don't want people using those services, they'll rapidly move to make it harder and harder to use them effectively.

The truth is, paid linking and article spinning were always cheating—and everyone who did it knew.  As a legal professional, you don't want to look like a cheater, so avoiding any link building tool that works in these ways is a good idea.  Do you really want to risk your existing SERPs for the sake of a potentially unethical link building campaign?

What Does a Great Link Building Campaign Look Like?

If bad link building usually involves irrelevant and low-quality websites, you might guess that excellent link building relies on high-quality websites and highly relevant content.  You'd be right.  Instead of using a link building tool that promises instant results, you can use reliable methods to create a great (and more time-consuming) link building campaign.

For small law firms, some of the best ways to kickstart your campaign is to talk to people you know who already run websites.  If you can pitch a guest story for a blog, or an interview for a podcast or blog, you'll grab new inbound links.  Typically, these kinds of guest stories and interviews involve at least one mention of your website, and they can prove very productive for attorneys who know how to use them.

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

If you're looking for a resource beyond your Rolodex to help you build your link building campaign, try the folks you're connected to on social media.  Your social media contact list can be the most important link building tool in your entire arsenal.  You can make yourself clearly available and highly visible as someone to interview or to invite as a guest blogger, and you can promote your own blog entries in this way as well.

What makes these strategies work even better is the ease with which people can share a link they found originally on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.  This part of your link building campaign is actually killing several birds with one stone—in addition to making yourself more visible on social media and building link presence, the shares can expand your reach.  This means that on an hour for hour basis, spending time on your social media presence is probably one of the single best SEO strategies you can enact.

Long Term Link Building Campaign Strategies

To find out what the next big link building tool will be, you'll want to stay aware of blogs that are relevant to legal marketers and search engine optimization specialists.  Many blogs will actually discuss the results of a link building campaign, including what went wrong, so that you can learn from professionals.

You'll also want to look at optimizing your site for mobile viewers.  As more traffic goes mobile (it's already a quarter of web traffic today) you'll increase your conversion rate by making sure your website looks great to people accessing it from smartphones and tablet PCs.  These surfers are more likely than anyone else on the web to convert right away, as long as you're optimizing their viewing experience.