Today, social media marketing is the fastest growing area of internet marketing.  Most law firms have stopped sending a lot of direct marketing e-mails and have instead replaced them with pages on social networks and internet directories.  If you're looking to improve your social media ROI, you've come to the right place.  This guide will teach you ways to really get more for the money you're spending on social media marketing for your law firm—and all without sacrificing your reputation for the sake of getting new clients in the short term.

 

#1: Don't Waste Money on “Bad Fit” Social Media

 

One of the mistakes many firms make when they're new to the world of social media is getting into every new social trend without really evaluating whether that trend is relevant to their typical client base.  Let's say that you're an attorney who primarily works on wills and estates for older people in a small town.  If that's you, using a service like Foursquare—which trends toward younger and more urban people—is probably not going to generate the social media ROI you were hoping for.

 

Instead, make sure that the customers you're trying to reach really do exist on the social media sites you're using.  Keep in mind that your social media ROI for a particular website can vary significantly depending on where your law firm is located, so don't just assume that because a few law firms have had success with a social media platform that it's the answer you've been looking for.

 

#2: Target Customers, Don't “Shotgun” Advertise

 

If you want to give yourself the worst social media ROI possible, the best way is to waste money on paid impressions that will only be seen by people who have no interest in what you're offering.  Many attorneys who are new to the social media advertising game decide to show their ads to people indiscriminately.

 

One of the best ways to target clients on social media websites in order to get the most out of your social media ROI is to use features allowing you to market exclusively to people who are connected to your already-existing connections.  That means that when your advertisement is seen by someone, they'll also see that a friend of theirs has already connected to you—which makes you seem much more trustworthy.

 

#3: Don't Try To Be Something You're Not

 

Too many companies try to do things that really don't play to their strengths in the hopes of enhancing their social media ROI.  If you aren't a particularly funny place and don't tell a lot of jokes in your office, that's a fine way to be—but you probably shouldn't attempt to make your comedic debut in your Twitter statuses.  If you're a place that trends younger and has a tendency to be more laid-back, don't try to dress up your language so that you sound more like what you think an attorney should sound like.  Keep it professional, of course, but don't make yourself sound stilted.

 

#4: Engage With Customers Through Free Techniques

 

Not every way of marketing through social media costs any money at all.  One of the best ways to increase your social media ROI is to make the most of the ways you're able to get in contact with people for free.  Consider monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions of your firm, and responding (always politely) to people who give you a mention.  This can be a great way to nip potential public relations problems in the bud—responding thoughtfully to criticisms without being peevish or unapologetic can increase the level of respect you get in the web world.

 

#5: Network With Other Attorneys Through Social Media

 

Maintaining a high social media ROI is even easier when you don't constrain your social media presence to one that's all about consumers.  While consumers should definitely still get the bulk of your social media marketing, you can also talk to attorneys in order to get more client referrals sent your way.  Some networks, like Facebook, allow you to only make some updates visible to some lists.  When someone connects to you on Facebook, you can classify them as a consumer or as an attorney, and make sure that the updates they see from your firm are the right ones for them.

 

#6: Keep In the Loop About New Advertising Trends

 

The cheapest time to jump on a new advertising bandwagon is before everyone else has done it too.  After markets become oversaturated, it's much harder to generate a high social media ROI from a particular strategy.  That means that to get the best return on investment in the social media world, you need to do your homework.  If you're not learning about trends in new websites, new features, and user statistics, you aren't doing enough to increase your social media ROI.  Social media is a fast-changing universe—take Myspace, for example.  Years ago, its meteoric rise was followed by an equally rapid fall.  You don't want to be the person still spending money on a social network after everyone else already knows it's played out and has left.

 

You can keep up on the newest trends in increasing your social media ROI by keeping up with the articles here at lawfirms.laws.com, or by reading blogs or listening to pod casts about the types of social media advertising and marketing you're interested in doing.

 

#7: Learn from Your Competitors

 

While it's not a good idea to duplicate a competitor's strategy in social media—you should find your own voice instead—there's no reason to ignore them.  Paying attention to what your competitors are doing right and what they're doing wrong can give you a better idea of how to do a better job for your clients and potential clients in the future.  If you notice that your competitor's Facebook page has been seeing more comments than usual, check them out—maybe they're using a new strategy for developing topics, or are helping to keep conversations going.  If you see people outraged about something a competitor (or any other company) has done with their social media presence, you need to find out what they're mad about and think about how to avoid a similar scenario for your law firm.

 

Everything About Search Engine Marketing Blog

One of the most powerful tools for driving new traffic to your law firm's website is a search engine marketing blog.  Search engine marketing blogs are now maintained by over 60 percent of America's largest law firms.  Whether your law firm is large or small, this guide can help you get started with blogging and avoid some of the pitfalls faced by owners of search engine marketing blogs.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #1: Be Prepared

Some of the biggest problems with search engine marketing blogs are caused by a simple lack of preparation.  When you decide to install your blog, you should discuss the impact of a search engine marketing blog on your web traffic with your web hosting provider.  

Because search engine marketing blogs can drive a great deal of traffic to your domains, it's critical to have a web hosting solution that will fit your needs.  If the new traffic is too much for your hosting, you could suffer from downtime, and depending on how your search engine marketing blog is designed, this could take down your main website as well.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #2: Participate in Other Blogs

Too many people who start search engine marketing blogs just write in their blog without thinking about commenting on other people's blog entries.  One of the best ways that you can improve your visitor count is to comment on someone else's search engine marketing blog periodically.

When you comment on other search engine marketing blogs, don't just post an advertisement for your blog.  This will lead to you being perceived as a spammer, and your search engine marketing blog may be dismissed as spam.  Instead, try to find search engine marketing blogs that are talking about topics that interest you, and make comments that engage you in the blog's conversation.

Commenting on someone else's search engine marketing blog may not deliver results right away, but often, this person will look at your blog and may link it in a later post.  This is one of the best ways to network with other people who maintain search engine marketing blogs like yours, and linking to other people's blog entries is also a great way to get reciprocal links.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #3: Get Your Message Out

When a search engine decides what page rank various search engine marketing blogs should have for different queries, it's relying on several things to make that decision.  One of the biggest factors in search engine rankings is the number of inbound links you have, and whether those inbound links are from websites that are, themselves, popular and well-respected.

When you write a great entry for your search engine marketing blog, you should try to make that entry appear in more places than one.  Owners of some search engine marketing blogs have found that their search rankings improve when they post blog posts, with links back to their blog, to press release or article submission websites.  These websites help you build large numbers of inbound links quickly.

The other way to build inbound links for search engine marketing blogs is to use social media.  If people in your social media contacts like your search engine marketing blog entry, they'll link to it.  Using this method means that you'll have to be very careful to keep your keywords looking like natural language—but for optimum search engine results, you'll want to do that anyway.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #4: Facilitate Conversations

The best entries on search engine marketing blogs are often the ones that leave room for discussion and questions.  You can facilitate conversations on your search engine marketing blog by asking open ended questions at the end of your blog entries.  

For example, let's say you're using your search engine marketing blog to market to other attorneys.  You write a great article about handling difficult clients, and you think that your methods definitely work.  You can either end the article with your observations, or by opening the floor: “This has worked for me, but what works for you?  Tell me your best strategies for helping clients who aren't easy to work with.”

If you want your search engine marketing blog to be conversation-friendly, you'll need to keep an eye on comments to delete anything that involves name-calling or spam.  Don't delete comments that just involve a vocal disagreement—search engine marketing blogs that do this are stifling conversation, not encouraging it.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #5: Make Your Blog Mobile Friendly

In just a few years, traffic from mobile devices like smartphones and iPads will be more common than traffic from traditional laptop and desktop computers.  What does this mean for search engine marketing blogs?  

Well, for one thing, it means that you need to make sure that your blog install displays correctly on mobile devices.  If your blog is jumbled or squished with impossibly tiny margins whenever it's displayed on an iPhone, you'll lose out on that traffic.

You should also try to keep at least most of your blog entries relatively short.  Because it can be a pain to scroll a lot while using a mobile device, search engine marketing blogs with short, concise posts that still show insight will be most successful in the mobile market.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #6: Experiment!

If something isn't working, many owners of search engine marketing blogs make the mistake of just stopping their blogging experiment.  Before you shut it all down, consider changing up what you're doing with your search engine marketing blog.  Sometimes, search engine marketing blogs just need to change who they're marketing to, or what their posts are about.

Whenever you experiment with your search engine marketing blog, you should give your experiment some time to work.  Changing the focus of a blog repeatedly can give your existing readers whiplash, and you want to maintain a core of readers who are promoting and linking your entries.

 

Everything About How To Advertise Your Blog

Over 100,000 blogs are being created every day, and lawyers are six times more likely to be bloggers than the average person.  In this sea of newly created blogs, you'll need to figure out how to advertise your blog if you want to stand out.  Keep reading this guide to find out handy tips that can help you advertise your blog.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Word of Mouth

The most old fashioned way to advertise a blog is just to tell someone you know.  Of course, in the modern world, word of mouth has transformed.  You can use targeted small email lists to send out links to your blog entries when you think that an entry might be of interest to a particular subset of your friends, colleagues, or acquaintances.

Don't discount face to face interactions when thinking of how to advertise your blog.  You can advertise a log simply by including a blog URL on your business cards.

If you want to advertise your blog with word of mouth, you should get a URL that is short and to the point, and easy for people to remember.  It will be much harder to advertise a blog if its URL involves several slashes, numerical sequences, or long phrases.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Social Media

You can advertise your blog more easily if you use social media contacts.  By posting links to your blog in Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, you'll advertise a blog to some of the people who are most likely to strike up a conversation or post a link: the people you know.  Think of social media as a way to extend traditional word of mouth strategies.

Even though you want to advertise your blog with social media websites, don't make your links sound overtly like direct advertising.  You want to make posts with value to the people you're connected to—that's how to advertise your blog most effectively on any social media website.  

Clicks aren't worth anything if they don't take your visitors to quality content.  Think of making your content available to your closest professional colleagues and people you know more distantly—in addition to making it easier to advertise your blog, this can keep your content high-quality.  You'll be less likely to skimp on quality in favor of search engine optimization if you advertise a blog consistently in your Facebook or LinkedIn feed.

Other blogs are another form of social media you should use to advertise your blog.  It's easy to advertise a blog by making comments in other people's blogs.  If you're linking to a post you've made, don't make it look like an ad: instead, you need to learn how to advertise your blog subtly, with posts that contain real, relevant information and not just buzz words.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Joining a Blog Network

Reciprocity is key to understanding how to advertise a blog on the internet today.  One of the best things you can do to advertise your blog is to join a network made up of blogs with similar themes.  If you advertise a blog from your network, they will generally respond by offering you similar advertising for your blog.

Let's say that you offer a guest blogging spot to a blogger who writes about a related legal area to the one you cover in your blog.  If they're in a blog network with you, they can offer to reciprocate by letting you do a guest entry for their blog.  This reciprocity extends your reach as a firm and can help you build the inbound links that are the foundation of good search engine optimization for your law firm website.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Blog Directories

One of the first steps you should take to advertise a blog when you've just started posting is to get your name into as many blog directories as possible.  This requires practically no computer knowledge, and most blog directories make this way to advertise your blog quick and intuitive.

After you learn how to advertise your blog more effectively through other channels, it's likely that blog directories will bring in less traffic to your blog than advertising your blog with other methods.  This doesn't mean that it's a step you should skip if you have a long-term strategy—just that it's only a first step.

Some blog directories may not allow just any blog.  To advertise a blog on these directories, you'll need to have a history of quality posting, preferably with other qualified attorneys linking to your entries and discussing them.  In general, you'll get more quality hits when you advertise your blog with these more selective directories.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Paid Advertising

Readers of other law blogs may be interested in posts like yours, so other attorneys you know may have blogs that are a natural place to advertise your blog.  You may want to ask some blogs you like whether they have advertising rates available for new advertisers.

If a blog has an audience with demographics you want to capture, you can start advertising your blog there.  Learning how to advertise your blog with paid advertising can have a bit of a learning curve: it can be much more expensive to advertise a blog on some websites than others, and it can be confusing to figure out where you're getting your best traffic from.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Mobile Advertising

If you want to advertise a blog that has mobile friendly content, you may want to send direct SMS advertising that links to your blog posts as part of your blog advertising strategy.  Advertising your blog this way will yield the best results when you use targeted lists of mobile numbers.

It won't do any good to advertise your blog with mobile direct ads if your blog's formatting appears off when it is visited with Android or iPhone devices.  Keep your blog entries short and to the point, easy to read during someone's commute or a quick break when you send an ad by SMS.

 

Everything About Blog Ads

Ads for blogs are nothing new.  Today, blog ads can help you earn about $50 to $750 every month if your blog gets about 100,000 visits.  Keep reading this guide to learn several techniques for how to get ads on your blog.  You'll learn how ads for blogs work whether you decide to handle your own billing for advertising or not.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Doing it Yourself

If you're experienced with ads for blogs, you may want to handle your blog ads all by yourself.  Certainly, this route has some advantages.  If you don't know how to get ads on your blog and use a blog network instead, you'll have to pay a cut off the top to the network that is handling the billing.  When you do the work yourself, you get all the money—but you also have to deal with all of the problems.

Usually, before placing blog ads, companies will want to see some hard numbers from your website about the amount of traffic you usually get.  Ads for blogs usually cost more when the demographics reading your blog are more impressive.  If your blog has already established an audience of prominent lawyers and judges, you won't have to worry as much about how to get ads on your blog as a new blog for a solo personal injury lawyer.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Using Ad Networks

The work of finding blog ads isn't always worth it.  You should ask yourself before looking for ads for blogs: how much can you really expect to make?  While most blogs from small firm lawyers are attracting new business, can you really say that your articles see enough page views to make it worth learning how to get ads on your blog yourself?

If the prospect of saving a little money doesn't sound like it would be worth it, and you'd just like your blog ads to bring in some spare cash, you can sign up with a blog network.  Odds are, unless your blog really hits it big, ad networks aren't going to be a gigantic revenue stream.  However, you can make a modest amount of money consistently while doing very little yourself.

Ad networks can teach you how to get ads on your blog quickly, and will take care of all billing and analytics so that you don't have to worry about anything.  You can get ads for blogs running in a matter of days when using a blog network, and don't need to worry about blog ads taking over valuable time that you need to use growing your business in other ways.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Sponsored Blog Posts

Increasingly, sponsoring a blog post directly is considered a great way for companies to advertise products and services.  Some sponsored posts are ads for blogs—perhaps with a guest writer.  Other times, a company may offer you a free product or service in exchange for your discussion in your blog ads.

When writers don't make it obvious that sponsored blog posts are blog ads, readers can feel betrayed.  This is why it's important to note when a post is sponsored, so that people know that they're reading ads for blogs.  If the content is interesting enough, people won't skip over a sponsored post.  Just make it interesting and make sure that it looks more like your typical content than it does like typical blog ads, and you'll be well on your way to advertising success.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog Without Scaring People Away

When you start selling ads for blogs, you may try leveraging your personal and social media contacts only to find out that you're losing friends without getting more blog ads sold.  This is definitely one of the reasons that many law firms choose to outsource their blog advertising needs, but you can still learn how to get ads on your blog without an ad network and without alienating people that are close to you.

Don't use a hard sell approach for selling your blog ads.  Instead, make the rates for your ads available publicly on your blog and send a link to people who indicate an interest.  Ideally, you'll learn how to get ads on your blog by just getting people to click on your entries.  It's much better to get people interested in your ads for blogs by making quality content than by trying to engage in direct sales, especially if you've never done this type of marketing before.

How Much Will Blog Ads Make Me?

Unfortunately, the truth is that ads for blogs no longer make as much money as they used to.  If you learned how to get ads on your blog several years ago when law blogs were relatively new, you may have gotten a better rate on return.

Today, you should only expect ads for blogs to generate a large amount of money for your law firm if you're able to attract a huge audience.  There's no reason not to shoot for the stars, but you should realize before you get into the blog ads business that most legal blogs aren't going to be great advertising moneymakers.  

Your best chance for monetary success is to try to develop a great community for discussion.  You may want to consider a group blogging effort with several lawyers from your firm, because these kinds of group blogs lend themselves very easily to informed dialogue and discussion.  When you get more readers participating, commenting, and staying longer on each page, you'll be able to charge more for every blog ad impression.

Analyzing Results of Blog Ads

In order to get high-paying ads for blogs, you'll want to show that you can generate not just clicks, but high quality, high-conversion traffic.  Having good web analytics can help you to show advertisers that advertising with your blog is worthwhile.

You should take as much time, in general, analyzing a new campaign with web analytics as you did planning the campaign.  It's possible to learn a great deal from your existing web traffic—don't ignore it!  Too many firms waste data that could be shedding light on the best new ways to market your firm on the web and beyond.

 

 

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.