I Paid To Rank High On Google, How Do I Know It's Working?
Firm Issues
By Bob Weiss
February 2010
In my last column, I explained that our national marketing survey reveals that most commercial firms found ranking on Google and other search engines create new work, directly and by referral. But how do you measure the success of that effort, what is commonly known as search engine marketing or SEO?
Like all marketing return on investment (ROI), monitoring your return from SEO will be imprecise. The reason: clients and referral sources may do a search and wind up on your site—an SEO success—but then send emails, forward links to third parties or call you on the phone. None of that will be traced back to their original search. And even if you ask how you were found, we all know the problems of witness recall.
Witness recall aside, you still should measure your SEO efforts as best you can. Here are some basic indicators to consider reviewing.
For each area of practice, use a program to determine where your firm ranks on Google, Bing (formerly MSN), and Yahoo for the phrases for your key types of work. Those three search engines comprise 90 percent of all searches on the Internet. There’s a tool to create a report, called Rank Checker, which can be downloaded and used for free through the Internet browser known as Mozilla Firefox.
To evaluate your Web site’s general performance, make sure you have an analytics program in place. Google Analytics is an industry standard, and it’s also free.
Most all analytics programs will give you more information about your site than you can digest. Focus on the following trends over time for:
- the number of unique visitors (a large and growing number of people visiting your site is not the goal. You want the right people to come to your site and take the right action, that being to contact you about doing challenging legal work at your prevailing rate. One thousand visits to your site by people who never engage you is uneconomic. A few dozen visitors several of whom engage you is. You want buyers not shoppers).
- what keywords your visitors use when they search. This list will tell you a lot about the value and effect of your firm’s memberships, sponsorships, advertising and other marketing activity.
- from what sites visitors come to yours. Among other things, how often do you get site visits from martindale.com or lawyers.com, often the single largest (and most controversial) expense in the budget? This report will tell you.
- average time spent viewing. A few minutes is ideal. They enter, they like what they see and they are prompted to make contact—that’s what you want, not lookey-loos. They enter and immediately leave – bounce out of your site.
- bounce rate. A high bounce rate means the visitor wasn’t a real prospect or that your Web site did not give them what they wanted right away.
SEO and site performance are complex subjects beyond the scope of this article. Wikipedia has excellent detailed postings on these topics.
ALYN-WEISS & ASSOCIATES, INC.
Marketing | Business Development
1331 - 17th Street, Suite 410
Denver, CO 80202
For Email Marketing you can trust
"I know the attorneys found your session most helpful, and I appreciate the contribution it made in the success of our seminar."
-Nancy Holston, Mass Torts Made Perfect
Subscribe to the American Bar Association’s monthly e-zine on marketing, management, technology and finance which includes Weiss’ Monthly Marketing Brief.