A Lawyer's Guide to SEO Metrics

A metric is a criterion that you measure to determine the success of something, so deciding what to measure is as important as measuring it. For example, think of all the metrics that people adopt as measures of success, to their own detriment. Measuring personal success by the amount of money in your bank account, your youthful looks, or the number of Facebook friends you have only makes you unhappy, but it puts plenty of money in the bank accounts of entrepreneurship coaches, cosmetic surgeons, and social media companies. A similar principle applies to search engine optimization (SEO) for law firm websites. You can spend lots of money improving your website so that it performs better on a given SEO metric, but if you choose a useless metric, it will not help your law firm increase its revenues. These are some of the SEO metrics that are useful for measuring the true effectiveness of your law firm website. Regularly updating your website with high quality legal blog content can help your site perform better on these metrics.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the raw number of clicks that lead Google users to your website from your link in the organic search results. It is an effective SEO metric because it shows that people are visiting your site and not only that they see the link to your site but that they choose it among the other links visible in the same search (which are usually your closest competitors). Likewise, it is useful in SEO to measure organic website traffic separately from paid search engine advertisements.

Keyword Rankings

Being obsessed with keywords and keyword rankings to the exclusion of other metrics is an SEO rookie mistake, but keyword rankings play an important role in the overall performance of your site. You should track how your keyword performs on general (as opposed to long tail) keywords, such as “Texas DWI penalties” and “New Jersey child support guidelines.”

Share of Visibility

Measuring the number of clicks your site gets is good, but measuring the percentage of clicks on law firm sites in your city that go to your law firm’s site is even better. This is known as your share of visibility. A mediocre website for a law firm in Los Angeles will get more clicks than an awesome website for a law firm in Augusta, Maine simply because of the populations of those cities. The Augusta law firm should concern itself with other law firms in Augusta, and the Los Angeles law firm should not assume that it is doing better than it is just because it gets X number of clicks, because these represent a small percentage of the total clicks of Los Angeles law firms in its practice area.

Keyword Value

Even if you aren’t participating in pay per click (PPC) advertising, the going rate for clicks still matters. The more it costs for a click on your website resulting from a given keyword, the more important that keyword is. That doesn’t mean that you need to buy clicks, it just means that you need to concentrate on competing for the same keywords that the suckers who have invested in PPC are paying for.

Let the Pros Help You Identify the Right SEO Metrics

Law Blog Writers does more than just writing blog posts. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can help you identify the most important SEO metrics on which to base your content marketing strategy.