So, you have an SEO strategy, but how effective is it? To understand to what extent, you need to know which SEO metrics to track and what they mean for your law firm. And if you’re just starting out, you’ve come to the right place.
We’ve put together a list of 5 of the top SEO metrics every UK law firm should be tracking – but by no means should it start and end here. This is simply the beginning. For more tips on mastering SEO for your law firm, be sure to check out our ultimate guide to SEO for law firms here. But in the meantime, here are a few metrics to get you started.
Organic traffic
Firstly – and arguably most important of all the SEO metrics – is organic traffic. Put simply: this is the figure that will show you how many of your site’s visitors have reached you from organic search and provides an indication of your visibility for key terms within the search engine results pages (SERPs).
In a nutshell, if your SEO strategy is working, you should see an increase in organic traffic to your law firm’s website.
Top tip: when looking at organic traffic, it’s wise to review metrics such as bounce rate and session duration. This will help you to understand how effective and relevant your content is in relation to your visitors’ search queries and allow you to identify pages that may need updating.
Organic conversions
This is perhaps the SEO metric that law firms are most interested in. The most tangible of all the metrics, your organic conversion rate will show the real value of your SEO strategy.
For the legal industry as a whole, the average conversion rate is around 2.5%. For organic search, this jumps up to 4.3%. And it’s no surprise. Ultimately, the purpose of having a strong SEO strategy is to help your law firm target high-intent clients and create a long-term, compounding ROI. So whilst the results may not be instantaneous, rest assured that it will all be worth it in the long run.
Keyword rankings
Where does your website rank if you search for “Family law”? Or how far up in the SERP is your site when you Google “London law firm?” Perhaps these examples aren’t relevant to your law firm, but what they should provide is an idea of the types of terms you will want to improve your rankings for i.e. service, sector and location-specific phrases. And with the first five organic search results accounting for over 67% of all clicks, we’d say it’s pretty important to get to the top for the terms that matter most to your firm.
By ranking highly for relevant phrases you will increase the volume of quality traffic to your site. But to do this, you must start with keyword research. If you’re serious about driving traffic, boosting sales and increasing your ROI, you need to understand which keywords and phrases you need to target. It’s worth noting that there are both long-tail and short-tail keywords, with the latter being anything that’s three words or less. The difference? As the length suggests, long-tail keywords are far less broad meaning although they bring in less traffic, it tends to be a lot better qualified. But that’s not to say short tail keywords don’t have their use: they are great for bringing in a high volume of traffic and are useful in the awareness stage.
Find out more about keywords along with our top tools and tricks for selecting the right ones for your UK law firm here.
Inbound links
For the likes of Google, each inbound link pointing towards your site is the equivalent of a recommendation. They signal that your site offers high-quality content and help to build trust, credibility and authority for your brand – that is when they are used correctly, of course. To be effective, your links must be natural and should come from trusted, relevant sites. You can uncover some of our top tips for obtaining inbound links the right way here.
It’s also good practice to look at the referring domains so you can understand how many unique domains are pointing towards your law firm’s website. But why is this important? Generally speaking, links from new domains will have a bigger impact on your authority. Think about it like this: if one person recommends the same business to you four times, each subsequent recommendation is unlikely to make much difference than the first. On the other hand, if four different people recommend the same business to you, each recommendation will carry significant meaning and help to build more trust and authority for said business.
Organic click-through rate (CTR)
As the name suggests, your organic click-through rate or CTR is the percentage of users that click on your result in the SERP. So the higher your CTR, the more traffic your site will receive. To calculate this SEO metric, you will want to divide your number of organic clicks by organic impressions. As a general rule, you should aim for a CTR of 3-5%. Whilst this metric is mainly influenced by your site’s position in the SERP, things such as your title tag, URL and meta description will also play a role.
And if you have reviewed these SEO metrics and feel your results just aren’t where they should be, get in touch to organise your free consultation. With over 10 years of experience helping B2B and professional service providers succeed with SEO, you can rest assured that we can provide a solution for you.
