Data, data, data. While a law firm might have the prettiest website of its competitors, those good looks are all for nothing if you don’t keep track of your website’s key performance indicators. The ability to understand user behavior on your website and to adapt the website to best serve them will get the most value out of that gorgeous website.
Law Firm Website KPIs You Should Be Tracking:
- Session duration – Knowing how long visitors spend on your website is extremely important. If on average, visitors only spend 15 second on your site, it could mean you are lacking content, functionality, or call to actions that can help convert those who use your website into leads.
- Pages per session – One of the best ways to understand engagement with your website is through average pages per session. If users are visiting three or more pages on your website, this indicates your website has the content they are looking for and that content is easily accessible.
- Percent of new users – New versus returning users can tell you several important things. You should look for a healthy percentage of returning users, which indicates your site is memorable and worth coming back to. However, the majority of visitors to your website should be new users in order to continually generate new leads.
- Referral sources – Referral sources reveal how people get to your website. This metric measures the effectiveness of inbound marketing efforts, including social media, backlinking, and paid search advertising campaigns. Most of your traffic will probably come from organic search engine results, which can be improved with search engine optimization. Ideally, we like to see at minimum one-third of all inbound website traffic coming from organic search.
- Contact Form Submissions – Contact form submissions are important because they are one method of obtaining potential new client inquiries, but these submissions also provide important additional information. If you have a contact form on every page (which you absolutely should) take note of the pages generating the highest number of form submissions. While the contact page will likely have the most submissions, understanding how each page gets users to submit a form could help you increase submissions.
- Contact Page Visits – The contact page should always be one of the most popular pages on your website. It contains crucial law firm information including email addresses, phone numbers, and office locations. While contact form submissions can tell you who decided to reach out to you, contact page visits can help you understand users who were on the fence about contacting you, but inevitably decided not to reach out. These on-the-fence users are incredibly important. If contact page visits increase, but contact form submissions stay the same or decrease, you’re losing business and need to figure out why.
The hard truth of having a law firm website, is that websites require a lot of ongoing work. Getting a website launched can seem like a monumental task, with significant time and energy invested into designing, developing, and launching your firm’s website. Monitoring website analytics and continually adapting the site to better fit your users’ needs is a long-term, if never ending, commitment. Your website is the best online tool to generate new business for your law firm. If you neglect it, it won’t flourish, but if you nurture it, your website can grow into a lead generation machine, outranking your competitors, making your pretty website pretty useful.