Using Google Analytics to Understand and Improve Your Law Firm SEO

Want to assess the performance of your law firm website’s current SEO strategy? Google Analytics can help! Keep reading to learn more.

Approximate Read Time: 9 Minutes

Plan, implement, evaluate, and adjust could be the unofficial motto of most professional marketers! Marketing experts spend significant time planning and creating a new campaign or marketing strategy. They implement the new ideas. They gather data, evaluate performance, and adjust, if needed, to improve that performance.

Similarly, you should follow the implement, evaluate, and adjust rule when it comes to your law firm’s digital marketing plan. Search engine optimization (SEO) is integral to your law firm’s overall digital marketing strategy. It helps you improve your website visibility, connecting you with more potential clients in the process!

For lawyers (many of whom are self-proclaimed allergic to numbers and math), the evaluation stage can often seem overwhelming and the most difficult to tackle. How do you know if your SEO strategy is working? Luckily, plenty of the SEO tools on the market aid in this analysis – no significant algebra required (but maybe a dose of comparing numbers).

In this post, we’re discussing how Google Analytics, one of the most readily available, free tools, can help you better measure and evaluate your website’s SEO performance.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is primarily intended to help people understand the customer journey through their websites. You want to know what users are doing on your website, and Google Analytics allows you to monitor, track, and analyze data from your site, such as traffic and devices used.

Many people do not immediately think of Google Analytics as an SEO tool. However, with the right knowledge, you can use Google Analytics to extract valuable, actionable insights that improve your website’s overall SEO performance. After all, the more you know about your website visitors, the better. By accessing, assessing, and acting on the right reports within Google Analytics, you can boost your SEO performance and increase your ROI (return on investment).

How Do I Use Google Analytics to Measure Your Website SEO Performance?

Google Analytics offers a wealth of information and data about your website’s SEO performance. One of the most important metrics for understanding your SEO performance using Google Analytics is your website’s organic traffic numbers. You also want to look at what is driving that traffic and referring it to your website pages. When analyzing this data, be sure you investigate which pages are performing well and which pages leave room for improvement. With this analysis, you can identify the pages on your site that are bringing you more leads. Be sure to also check out the types of devices (mobile phone, tablet, or desktop) used to access your site. We’re offering more in-depth details on analyzing your website and addressing potential concerns below.

Monitor Organic Traffic Trends

Your law firm website’s organic traffic is one of the most basic data points you can extract from Google Analytics. While there are many different forms of website traffic, such as PPC and other paid ads, social media, and direct visits to your URL, organic traffic is an indicator of how much traffic you get from organic search results and offers a direct correlation between your SEO strategy and visibility on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Accessing the Data

Need to know how to see your organic traffic? We have answers!

1. Go to the left navigation area.
2. Click on “Acquisition”.
3. Select “All Traffic”.
4. Choose “Channels”.
5. Click on “Organic Search” in the report.

Once you open the report, be sure to adjust the date range using the drop-down located in the upper-right side of the report. To analyze the trend in organic traffic, you will want to select at least three months worth of data.

Interpreting Your Data

Once you are looking at the data, you probably are wondering what it all means! While this is not a comprehensive analysis of what the data may show, we do have some generally positive and generally negative indicators of SEO performance you may be able to glean from your data.

If you are unaware of any changes in the Google Algorithm, you’re happy with your current visibility and the number of leads you are receiving, and your organic traffic is steady, then your SEO strategy performance is generally positive. Likewise, an increase in traffic following an algorithm update would be a positive factor for your SEO performance.

Whenever you add new high-quality, relevant content, refresh your current content, or acquire more backlinks to your website, the traffic may increase. This is also a good thing! However, do not expect these changes to immediately translate into increased traffic.

If you are seeing a consistent decrease in organic traffic (more than something tied to a brief time period like holiday seasons or weekends), it is generally a negative sign. A decrease in traffic could be signaling a need for a change in your SEO strategy. This downward change could be due to an algorithmic update, improvements in your competitors’ SEO strategy, increased competition in your area, manual penalties, and more! Remember, you don’t need to panic about small downturns or even a consistent decrease. It just means it is time to revisit and reoptimize your SEO strategy.

Monitor Locations Driving Organic Traffic

Understanding your organic traffic volume is a great start to analyzing your SEO performance but, for most law firms, the location factor is equally as important. For instance, if you are a lawyer in Michigan (and aren’t working in a national or global firm), you likely want to connect with clients in Michigan or other nearby midwestern states. Traffic in Hawaii, South America, and beyond is unlikely to be driving new business to your firm.

Google Analytics can help you understand which localities are driving your website traffic. This will in turn help you understand if your SEO strategy is appropriately targeting the right audience.

Accessing the Data

Accessing your location data can be simple!

Just click follow this chain:

1. Visit the left navigation area.
2. Click “Audience”.
3. Select “Geo”.
4. Then, view “Location”.

Once you open this report, you may see different location levels by drilling into the “Country” and “State” levels as desired by clicking the items in the report.

Interpreting Your Data

Again, this data can help you see positive SEO performance indicators, as well as potentially negative signs.

When your website traffic is primarily coming from the location(s) in which you are working to get clients through your law firm’s website, it is a good sign! If you have high traffic volumes coming from outside of this targeted area, you may be receiving “fake” or fraudulent traffic, or there may be an issue with your SEO strategy’s location optimization techniques.

Monitor Your High-Performing Pages

Learning which website pages are most popular for your firm can give you greater insight into the types of questions your potential clients need an answer to and the legal problems they are trying to address. When you have high-performing web pages, it is often a signal that the topic is important and should be included in the main user flow for your site. In other words, these pages should be readily accessible to your future website visitors.

Accessing the Data

Explore the data about your top-performing website pages by following these steps:

1. Visit the left navigation area.
2. Click “Behavior”.
3. Select “Site Content”.
4. Then, view “Landing Pages”.

Interpreting Your Data

When reviewing this data, there are some key indicators of positive and negative performance to watch.

If your website homepage is receiving the most traffic, that is a positive sign! SEO professionals generally expect your homepage to receive the most traffic because it is typically the strongest page on a law firm’s website. Following your homepage, you would typically expect to see individual attorney profiles receiving a high traffic volume. Likewise, your main practice area pages should have higher traffic.

If the previously mentioned pages do not have a high traffic volume relative to your other pages, then it is likely they are not performing well in Google and other search engine algorithms. You want these pages to be viewed as high-quality by these algorithms. Therefore, you may need to tweak your content and revisit your other optimization techniques. Additionally, if you notice your main pages tend to be performing well but you have unusual pages receiving exorbitant amounts of traffic, you could be experiencing an influx of “fake” website visits.

Monitor Your Top Devices

In today’s digital society, you want to ensure that you offer consistent, positive user experiences across various devices. Therefore, it is important to understand how people are using your website and the devices from which they visit. You also need to be cognizant of the shift from desktop to mobile browsing over the last decade. Google Analytics can give you insights into the number of users visiting your website from each device category: desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Accessing the Data

Follow the steps below to review your Google Analytics device data:

1. Visit the left navigation area.
2. Click “Audience”.
3. Select “Mobile”.
4. Then, view “Overview”.

Interpreting Your Data

While reviewing this data, you need to keep a few key points in mind to better understand what it means for your website’s SEO performance.

For consumer-focused practice areas, mobile traffic should be higher than desktop traffic. In the future, expect mobile traffic to continue to further increase as a percentage of your total traffic. Both desktop and mobile traffic should also dominate over tablet traffic in your breakdown.

If you do not receive a comparatively high volume of mobile traffic to your law firm website, then some of the technical aspects of your law firm website may have room for improvements that will benefit your SEO strategy. Responsive and adaptive designs provide the best user experience available today. A strong design will include improved readability and navigation across various device sizes with minimal resizing, panning, and scrolling. Also, add AMP pages to your website to improve your search result rankings in Google.

Identify Which Pages Lead to Conversions

When assessing your SEO strategy using Google Analytics, you can also identify which pages on your law firm website drive the most conversion (new leads a.k.a. potential clients) to your law firm. In turn, this helps your law firm better understand the type of content that converts website visitors into your future clients.

Accessing the Data

Follow the steps below to review your Google Analytics conversions data:

1. Visit the left navigation area.
2. Click “Conversions”.
3. Select “Goals”.
4. Then, view “Goal URLs”.

Once you open this report, you will be able to choose the type of conversion you want to see in the report by using the “Goal Option” drop-down above the report line chart.

Interpreting Your Data

While reviewing this data, pay attention to the different website pages that generate the most conversions on your site. Compare your high-performing pages to similar pages that do not drive as many conversions. You may realize that pages generating more conversions generally have better content or perhaps are more visually appealing than other pages on your site. Based on these observations, you can determine potential adjustments that may improve conversion rates on your other website pages.

Keep in mind that some pages will naturally generate more conversions than others. For instance, the expected performance of a purely information page is generally different from pages focused on promoting your legal services in certain case types or practice areas.

Watch this Justia Webinar playlist on YouTube to learn more about Google Analytics 4.

Addressing Potential SEO Issues Identified With Google Analytics

Once you have spotted potential SEO concerns using Google Analytics, there are additional steps you can take to further analyze the situation, address the identified problems, and ultimately improve your website’s overall performance.

Checking for Google Algorithm Changes

A change to the Google Algorithm could impact the traffic you see in your law firm website’s Google Analytics account. Consider the dates where the decrease in traffic first occurred and compare them to known changes in the Google Algorithm. If an algorithm change is the cause of your change in website traffic, this would often be a sitewide event and not confined to a few pages.

If you suspect an algorithm update has caused the drop in your website traffic, consider your website content. Can you update it for better optimization? Maybe you need to revisit your keywords? Is there a technical aspect of your site that needs to change? Also if you have been involved in some nefarious link building, check your website in Google Search Console and see if you have received a penalty, and disavow any spam links your website might have.

Checking for Duplicate Content Issues

If you have duplicated your website content somewhere else, or someone else has copied your website content, this could quickly impact your search visibility. You can use the tools available via Copyscape to check whether this is the case.

If you determine duplicate content may be impacting your law firm website, determine whether you created the duplicate content or someone else did. Assuming you created the duplicate content, you should simply change the content to eliminate the issue. If someone else has copied your website content, then you can reach out to the website owner or submit a DMCA takedown request to attempt to have the content removed.

Checking for Technical Issues

A variety of technical issues could impact your website’s SEO. For example, implementing redirects improperly can result in SEO problems and cause a dip in your website traffic. Certain browsers may not support your website format. If the drop in traffic is related to one device type, it could be a problem with your website’s responsive design implementation. The list goes on.

To identify these issues, think about recent changes that have been made to your website. Did you have a design update? Move to a new website provider? Change your title tags? Do you have broken links? Check each of these things to try to trace the root of your problem. When you determine and correct a potential source of the error, submit a request for Google to reindex your website and evaluate again.

Watch this Justia Webinar playlist on YouTube.

Final Thoughts: Why Do You Care?

Google Analytics is a useful platform delivering tangible data that can offer direct insights into your law firm website’s SEO performance. Using these insights, you can evaluate and adjust your SEO strategy to further expand your law firm and promote growth! Regularly reviewing your Google Analytics information can also help you identify areas of improvement and potential problems early on, limiting future impacts that may hinder your law firm’s long-term goals.

Interested in a state-of-the-art law firm website that implements technical SEO best practices, while offering you the tools to further improve your website’s visibility for years to come? Contact us to learn more about Justia Elevate.

• SEO Basics for Lawyers: Keyword Research
• Optimizing Your Law Firm Website Practice Area Pages for Google
• The Relationship Between Mobile Searches, SEO, Responsive Design, AMP, and Your Law Firm Website

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