SEO for Lawyers: Why and How to Implement a Search Engine Optimization Strategy for Your Law Firm

Part VI: Measuring Your Law Firm’s SEO Results

Last Updated on July 8, 2021 by

Part VI: Measuring Your Law Firm’s SEO Results

SEO is a great option for law firm marketing. But just like any other marketing method, you have to measure its performance.

Since there are so many tactics you can use, it’s important to know which ones bring you the most results.

Fortunately, measuring your law firm’s SEO results doesn’t have to be hard.

A Three-Step Process for Measuring Your Law Firm’s SEO Results

It all comes down to your goals, tactics and your data:

1. List your goals, timeframe, metrics, and the tactics you will be using
2. Gather SEO data
3. Analyze SEO data

1. Your SEO Goals and Tactics

Your SEO efforts have to be coordinated, even if you’re doing everything on your own.

While you can technically do everything at once, you should still prepare a list of tactics you plan on using within a given timeframe.

For example, you may decide that this month, you’ll be focusing on link-building because you want to increase the number of quality backlinks to 5.

Similarly, you could decide to focus on keywords.

Make sure you focus on keywords that are going to bring you the most traffic and conversions, at least in the first few months of executing your SEO strategy.

Then, you have to note which metrics you’ll track.

With SEO, there are plenty of them:

• Organic traffic
• Number of appearances in search
• Dwell time
• Bounce rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversion rate
• Local visibility
• Indexed pages
• Ranked keywords
• Crawl errors

As you can tell, it’s easy to get lost.

The most important SEO metric you should be tracking for your law firm is your organic traffic.

To put it simply: you need organic traffic. So if you’re not getting it, even if a significant amount of time has passed, whichever tactic you’re using is not working.

If you measure just one thing, measure your organic traffic.

2. Gather Your Law Firm’s SEO Data

Now, this is where we come to tools.

Google Search Console

First of all, you should add your website to the Google Search Console.

It’s going to show you:

• Errors
• Backlinks
• Penalties
• Indexing and crawling statuses
• Keyword rankings, views and clicks

And so much more. It’s a one-stop SEO shop.

When you submit your site and log into your dashboard, you’ll be able to monitor the performance of different keywords.

Now, GSC doesn’t let you select keywords for which you want to see performance, but it will show you the keywords and search queries leads use to get to your site.

That in itself is extremely beneficial – you could find a new legal keyword you hadn’t thought of before.

Google Analytics

Secondly, integrate Google Analytics with your site.

It’s a great traffic reporting tool, straight out of Google’s laboratory.

Google Analytics helps you measure:

• Your SEO ROI
• Your website traffic (organic and paid)
• Referring channel performance
• The quality of your traffic
• Demographics of your website visitors
• The behavior of your website visitors
• Conversion rates and acquisition channels

And so much more!

GA even lets you filter by keywords and landing pages, so you can see what kind of influence they have on the quality and amount of traffic you are getting.

You can also set up phone and live chat conversion tracking with Google Analytics.

Simply navigate to the “Goals” section in your dashboard and select your conversion type.

Additionally, if you’re advertising with Google Ads, you can connect GA with Ads and understand every step your leads take on their way to conversion.

If GSC is your command center for all things search, then Google Analytics helps you understand everything about your law firm’s traffic.

Both are completely free.

When you use both Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of your traffic and your results.

For example, if you recently placed a backlink in a guest post, you’ll see how many visitors you got from it by checking out Google Analytics reports.

Similarly, if you filter by “Audience – Geo – Location – Primary Dimension: City,” you’ll know if you’re getting the traffic you want from your target area.

Your law firm doesn’t just need traffic. It needs targeted traffic.

3. Analyze Your SEO Data

Finally, once you’ve got your data, you need to make sense of it so you can use it to improve your SEO strategy.

Fortunately, even free tools like GSC and GA are robust enough to provide you with basic insights about your audience and your tactics.

For example, if a backlink from a seemingly reputable site didn’t result in any click-throughs, it may be time to reevaluate the sites you’re getting backlinks from.

Maybe your content is being read by people in a different state. In that case, you should increase mentions of your area.

SEO Audit Tools for Your Law Firm

If you need help, you can always contact legal SEO professionals, or use SEO auditing tools such as:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ tool gives you a complete SEO website audit:

• Evaluate individual pages
• Identify high-performing pages
• Understand your top-performing keywords

It’s a robust tool that can show you everything you need to know about your law firm’s SEO performance.

Woorank

If you want to find more opportunities for optimization, Woorank’s auditing tool will come in handy.

The tool provides in-depth reviews and competitive analyses to help you identify low-performance areas, and areas that could perform even better with a few tweaks.

Finally, Woorank even provides you with a marketing checklist so you know exactly what you need to do next.

BuzzStream

If you need a little help with link building, BuzzStream can help you identify the most important people and websites to reach.

It’s like a customer relationship management software for outreach and link building.

You’ll see every entity’s domain authority, relationship stage, domain, and request status.

Moz

Moz Pro is a SEO toolset trusted by millions, and for a good reason.

It gives you all the tools you need to understand your SEO results completely and improve them as you go.

Some of the features include:

• Site audits
• Backlink analysis
• Rank tracking
• Keyword research

Moz also has a tool for local SEO, which can be extremely useful if you’re managing multiple practices.

SEMRush

SEMRush is another useful SEO toolkit. It digs deep into your (and your competitors’) SEO performance to help you shape new, more effective strategies.

If you want to use the Skyscraper Technique for your content creation, SEMRush will even run a gap analysis.

This way, you’ll easily create better, more comprehensive content than your competitors.

Speaking of competitors, SEMRush has great competitive analytics.

If you’re in a particularly saturated market with a lot of practices using SEO, SEMRush can show you what they’re doing, how their tactics are performing, and what you can do to rise above them.

You can even find out which websites are linking to them, and get new outreach ideas.

Ready to Start Measuring Your Results?

The key to successful law firm marketing is appearing where your leads are.

Search engine optimization is just a natural extension.

By understanding the (key)words your leads use, the content they want to read, and by making sure that you’re building up your online reputation, you’ll become an SEO expert in no time.

If you need help implementing your SEO strategy, reach out to us! We offer law firm seo services since we are a full-service digital marketing agency.