/lawyermarketing101.com/Kevin Quinlan/ 12/22/2008
One way that Internet marketing differs from traditional advertising is that you don’t have to rely on your legal staff to track the source of new leads. All too often we have met with clients to discuss the results of a campaign only to find out that they either were ineffective at tracking or their new prospects could not remember where they heard about the firm. When you add additional advertising to the media mix it becomes even more difficult to quantify results. Many times I have heard clients say that they had a new prospect that was convinced they heard about the firm on the radio, even when they haven’t advertised on the radio. Certainly you can track advertising by having dedicated phone numbers in each TV spot or series of ads, but ultimately it does not completely eliminate the human factor.
The great thing about Internet marketing is that results can be tracked independent of intake staff or gatekeepers at the firm. Although Google offers a set of tools called Google Analytics that some web companies use, many law firms make the mistake of having no system in place at all to track the performance of their websites. We typically install a much more comprehensive web-marketing tracking system than Google Analytics and also place a web site specific phone number on our sites that generates its own range of reports for calls generated from web visits.
There is a wealth of data that can be captured from the analytics and it allows our SEO engineer the ability to be more certain of what is working and adjust underperforming pages on a site. Some of the data that can be acquired includes the number of new visitors to your site on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Unique visitors are the foundation for new business and by reviewing the traffic in different time frames trends can be more easily noticed.
Additionally, our tracking codes can tell how long visitors are remaining on your website and how many pages they visit on average. Information of this type can provide insight into whether there may be an unforeseen problem with the content or the design. If your site is less than compelling then that could be the reason why unique visitors don’t stay longer. The decision to stay or go is made in the first few moments of landing on your website.
It is also important to know where visitors have come from especially if you are paying for listings in legal directories, online yellow pages or legal referral services.
Perhaps the most important information available are the key words that are driving traffic to your site. Key words are employed to target specific areas of practice and for geo-targeting, so that you attract prospects in your locale. By researching and selecting key words and including them in the content on a site your law firm improve your site’s search engine rankings for the types of personal injury, family law, accident or any other type of injury case you would like to acquire. With the data captured a professional SEO engineer can determine what works and what does not.
So, what can an attorney learn from website analytics? Everything from who, what where, when and how unique visitors are coming to your site. Even more importantly, you can ensure that your marketing has the greatest chance for success and that your investment is done so wisely.
Press Release Contact Information:
Kevin Quinlan
Lawyer Marketing 101
208 East 51st Street
Suite 309
New York NY 10022
212-759-1126
