Web SEO Analytics

Everything About Web SEO Analytics

Most website visitors—up to 80 percent—find law firms using organic searches, not paid results. If your firm is considering switching from pay per click advertising to search engine optimization marketing, you need SEO web analytics to make sure that your strategies are working to deliver the clients you need. This guide will help you get started with web SEO analytics and enhance the quality of your website's search engine optimization strategy.

Taking Your Time

When you start using SEO web analytics tools, you'll need to give the tools some time to gather data about your website. Results from just a few days for a new website won't give you good data, and could lead to making big web SEO analytics mistakes. Even though you may be excited to see whether your new strategy pans out, the first step is always hurry up—and wait.

Once you've gotten a large enough amount of data to do SEO web analytics (you'll want data for several hundred visitors, at a minimum), you'll have a better view of what visitors to your website are actually doing and how they interact with your content. If you know from past experience that your visitor count varies strongly depending on the season, you may want to let your data accumulate for several months or even a year before doing web SEO analytics.

Which Tool Should I Use for SEO Web Analytics?

Before you can even begin to gather data for your web SEO analytics, you'll need to decide on what tools you want to use. The most commonly used tools for SEO web analytics are made by Google, and are called—quite appropriately—Google Analytics. If you're new to analyzing web traffic, using Google's services can be a great place to start. Not only are these tools relatively robust, they're also free, and many tutorials online can help you get started if you're stuck.

Other search engines, like Yahoo (recently merged with Microsoft's Bing), also offer web SEO analytics tools. You can also find SEO web analytics tools designed by other third party companies. Often, these latter tools are specialized for some particular aspect of web SEO analytics: for example, some tools focus very strongly on conversions and landing page optimization, while others focus on keyword performance.

Because of the abundance of SEO web analytics software, it's critical to keep your goals in mind when shopping for your software solution. Don't feel like you're confined to just using one web SEO analytics tool, if the one you've been using hasn't worked as well as you wanted. While every additional tool you use will require additional training and time to use correctly, you may find that several tools in tandem can provide a much better solution than just using one piece of software.

Outsourcing Your SEO Web Analytics

If you feel unprepared to handle your own web SEO analytics, you may want to start talking about outsourcing. For many law firms, outsourcing SEO web analytics is a much more attractive solution than doing analytics in-house. Nearly anyone can use basic reports with analytics software, but really achieving your goals may require advanced web SEO analytics and custom reporting. This can require the touch of a programmer, not a marketer, to get right.

If you do decide to outsource your SEO web analytics, try to find a service that lets you keep any data that you accumulate. This may not seem important if you're not sure what to do with your data, but keep this in mind: the company you hire to do your web SEO analytics now may not be our outsourcing solution forever. When you switch outsourcing companies, you want data continuity and a streamlined transition—and you definitely don't want to have to start gathering your data all over again.

Targeting Keywords

One of the biggest uses of SEO web analytics is figuring out which keywords are working for you. If you're using search engine optimization, you're probably already paying a lot of attention to which keywords are driving traffic. What web SEO analytics can do is help you figure out which keywords are actually getting you new clients.

You can engineer custom reports with SEO web analytics tools that show you not only which keywords are working best, but also what keywords are similar enough to generate more traffic. Finding a keyword family can make your website copy more readable and less repetitive than simply sticking to a few simple keywords.

Making Your Website Engaging

No matter how good your website is at drawing search engine traffic, you need to drive conversions. To do that, you need to keep your clients on your website—but what way is best for your particular firm? What works for one firm might not work for others, so you will want to do real, data-driven web SEO analytics to make sure that your strategies work. Here are a few strategies you may want to try to increase visitor engagement:

• Calls to action can often turn visitors into clients—you can experiment with SEO web analytics to figure out which calls to action are working and which are falling flat.

• Videos can make your clients up to 60 percent more likely to contact your firm. Whether you're new to video marketing or already have a lot of videos on your site, you can use web SEO analytics to make sure that your videos are drawing in clients instead of sending them away. You can also identify topics that would be good for future videos.

• Mobile traffic will account for up to 25 percent of web traffic by 2016. This means that if your site isn't mobile-friendly, you could be losing clients every day. SEO web analytics tools can see whether your mobile traffic stays or goes.

• Social media is the name of the game for marketers today, and you need web SEO analytics to make sure that your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts are doing what you want them to do. SEO web analytics can also help you manage your reputation and ward off potential public relations crises within social media circles.