Blog / Five website marketing metrics that every law firm needs to know -Part I

Measurement is what makes marketing a science, rather than a superstition - Forbes magazine

Your website is the single most important and most influential platform for your marketing content that you have at your disposal - and the most controllable. In our last post, we looked at the importance of measurement to the success of your law firm's content marketing initiative and how it correlates to the growth of your practice. Now let's understand the website metrics that every law firm should track and why they are important.

The best and least expensive way to track website metrics is to create a free Google Analytics account and include the Google Analytics code snippet in your website page headers. Even the least technical of us should find Google Analytics easy to use and powerful.

Today we will discuss two of the key website metrics: channels and landing pages. We will cover the other three in our next post.

Channels

Channels are the paths that lead visitors to your site. By tracking these channels, you can learn whether content that you post on third-party sites or link to from social networks is doing its job to drive visitors to your firm's website.

Look at the sources of your website traffic and you will see which websites and social networks deliver the most visitors. For example, if you offer a white paper for download that you link to from your blog, from your firm's latest Lexology article and from your firm's LinkedIn page, and you find that Lexology sends three times as many potential leads to your landing page, you know that your marketing investment is paying off.

Channel data also can tell you how your website content is attracting potential clients via online search, also known as organic search. If a particular legal issue draws a substantial number of new visitors, you will want to focus on producing more content about it.

Channel data also informs as to which search engines are sending the most visitors your way. While Google tends to be number one, your site should also be optimised for the other search engines that are doing the job.

Landing pages

Landing pages are the pages that visitors see when they first come to your website. They are often standalone pages that are separate from your main website navigation. For example, you may create a landing page from which to download your latest white paper.

Landing page data provides insights about several things. First, it tells you which topics are driving the most traffic to your site. For example, if your firm has several practice areas, analytics can show which are most commonly searched, as well as which sections of your website may be better keyword optimised to rank highly in search results.

You can increase landing page sessions by researching keywords and including them in your page title and content. Moz.com and Google AdWords have tools that can your help you to identify which keywords will work best based on average web traffic.

In our next post, we will discuss other website metrics that are important for law firms to track and how to utilise them for optimal results.