By: http://www.allgoodwebsites.com/
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRACKING In order to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts it’s important to track each channel to gauge its effectiveness. If you aren’t tracking you could be; Wasting money on channels that aren’t producing leads Producing leads at a very high cost Unable to improve campaigns due to absent data tracking would provide
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Many firms believe that since Google hides keyword data; that trying to measure SEO success is not worth trying, outside of monitoring keyword rankings. However, there are other metrics you should be looking at and measuring. Are you targeting the right keywords? You may be practicing sports law, but people who are searching are looking for a sports lawyer. If you practice area pages just discusses the type of law you practice and not how you can help people needing your services, your page won’t rank for terms that possible clients will be searching for.
Have you verified your site with Google’s search console? This is your direct connection with Google. You’ll gain some insight into how Google is crawling your site and what issues, if any they are seeing. You’ll also be able to discover what keywords your site is ranking for.
Once you confirm ownership in search console… Provide Google with your xml sitemap. Monitor the “search report” and keep an eye on the
number of pages that are indexed and the number of clicks from search. Over time these should both increase.
Check to see if there are any manual penalties against
your site.
Check to see if there are any sever or 404 errors and fix,
if necessary.
Are you tracking your page’s conversion rate? Once your pages start to move up in rankings you’ll want to monitor analytics to see if conversions or time on page increases. It’s also important to look at how well your content is performing. Visits with no or little conversions could be a sign of poor landing page optimization or it could be the page isn’t ranking well for its targeted term(s). Are you checking your NAP consistency? If your firm’s name, address and phone number(NAP) is
inconsistent it could hurt your ability to rank well in Google maps. Google looks at mentions of your business across the web. If there is data that is incorrect Google will be unsure if the address is your or that it’s accurate.
Google doesn’t want to provide users false information. See this
video for more insight into how NAP plays a role in rankings.
Paid search is expensive for law firms. Underperforming keywords, ads and poor quality scores could cause your cost per acquisition to be higher than it should be. Here are some of the easiest and basic ways to improve your PPC performance. I strongly recommend requesting a free PPC audit for starters.
Are you tracking conversions? If you aren’t tracking conversions, you’ll
never know which keywords/ ads are working for you. You could spend thousands of dollars on keywords that never convert.
Are you checking your search query report? The search query report will allow you to see
the exact terms your ads are being shown for. You’ll need to go through this report regularly to find new keywords.
This is also where you’ll find keywords you
may want to add as negative terms. This will help improve overall performance and allow you to grow your campaign more efficiently.
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Are you tracking calls? In our experience most people prefer to pick up the phone and speak to a lawyer ASAP. If you are only tracking leads from people submitting a request through your site, you’re making a big mistake. You may pause a keyword that doesn’t perform well with onsite conversions, but could be producing a large number of calls.
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More people search on a mobile device then on computers. If your site isn’t mobile friendly you’ll lose out on a lot of potential business. It will also impact your ability to rank on mobile devices. Google is more likely to show a mobile friendly site then no Does your law firms site load fast? Being mobile friendly isn’t enough. If your site is slow to
load users will leave your site before it even loads. Check your mobile site speed with this tool. This tool will show where improvement could be made on your site to improve speed.
Are your web forms easy to fill out on mobile? Short forms make it easier for users to fill. Long forms
especially on mobile will greatly decrease the chances your form will be completed. Only request the information you need to qualify the lead.
One way to increase leads is to ensure your form will allow
the fields to be pre-populated with the user’s information from forms they’ve filled out in the past. Google has recommendations on how to do just that.
Is your phone number clickable? If your phone number is in an image or in HTML but
written out in letters (i.e 1-800 –L-A-W-Y-E-R-S) people won’t be able to click to call. To ensure your number is clickable you can add this line of code.
Social media is something many law firms struggle with. They understand the need for social media management but struggle with content creation and how engage with followers. Are you engaging?  Sure, posting content is great on social, but it’s a two-way
conversation. Many law firms forget that. People may post comments, both negative and positive. You need to be able respond to them and manage your reputation in addition to sharing your knowledge.
Are you monitoring traffic and conversations?  Your conversions may be different than that of PPC or SEO.
Establishing what those are and track them. This goes for social media advertising as well.
I hope that these questions encourage you to think of other questions you should be asking yourself. Sit down with your partners and decide what other metrics are important to you. Maybe, you advertise online somewhere.
Are you tracking those conversions? Testing different channels is a great way to grow your firm. However, if you don’t know what your efforts bring, you could be wasting your money.
We offer free SEO and PPC audits to law firms. Get yours today!