In today’s day and age, producing top-of-the-line content is of the utmost importance. Additionally, it’s perhaps just as vital to understand the factors that will help drive traffic to your website, engage readers, and attract qualified leads. In order to monitor these relevant performance metrics, you’ll need an excellent content strategy.
If that’s your goal, your law firm should focus on these objectives:
- Positioning your website in search queries in order to produce qualified traffic
- Becoming an authority on your topic, informing and instructing visitors, and cementing the website as a trustworthy source for search engines
- Offering excellent, professional material on a topic and citing other websites in order to produce organic backlink acquisitions and higher recognition online
Achieving even one of these points is tough. Finding success with all three requires years of devotion and perhaps hundreds of pages of top-of-the-line content.
Constructing a content strategy entails focusing on quality lead generation. The other aspects are simply a helpful derivative, which is totally fine. Writing an article like this, for instance, involves first focusing on becoming an authority on the topic. Garnering backlink acquisitions would be a valuable offshoot if the internet allowed it!
When your law firm is just starting, you’ll focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand whether you’re going down the right path. KPIs can include website engagement, keyword rankings, and traffic. If your KPIs are reaching applicable standards—like a spike in traffic for pages that have intent—you’ll be in the driver’s seat when it comes to getting leads.
First, analyze your traffic. The best tool to utilize, in this case, is Google Analytics. Begin by sorting by time, as shown in the example below:
This is where you’ll regulate anything that needs to be modified. It may be in your best interest to weigh your results from the preceding period when you make any changes.
The simplest way to look at the headway you’ve made toward hitting your benchmarks—especially on a page level—is to utilize this feature (shown in the image below).
You’ll want to observe your site’s data from two perspectives: organic and pages. Understanding your organic traffic is vital to differentiate. Likewise, sorting your website by pages is important if you want to see traffic on the website broken down this way. To do so, follow these steps (I will list two ways of getting to the same result):
Filter by Organic:
Then click Landing Page:
At this point, you’ll see a button that reads “Show Rows” with a dropdown. Choosing the highest number will provide you with a catalog of every page on your site as well as the traffic each has acquired during the time period you’ve chosen. Keep in mind that you can only observe 5,000 rows. If you have more pages than that, all I have to say is “wow.”
Another way to achieve the same result is to go to Behavior → Site Content → Landing Pages. At this point, while you should have the landing pages selected, it will be inclusive of all traffic. You should limit this scope by adding additional filters, like “organic traffic.” To do so, observe the image below:
At this juncture, you’ll see a “Source” for Google. Click on “Medium” from the dropdown (found under “Acquisition”), and you’ll find the organic filter.
Both methods achieve the same result, so it’s up to whichever technique you prefer.
In terms of KPIs, traffic will always be one of the most important. The amount of traffic your site acquires indicates whether or not you’re attaining the right amount of visibility. Linking this data from what you can glean from Google Search Console will help you verify the keywords for which you’re beginning to rank. Making use of both tools will allow you to double-down on the keywords you’re beginning to rank for and accelerate the outcome of the content you’re creating.
When it comes to keywords, you’ll also want to utilize tools like keyword.com to pursue the useful and advantageous keywords you’ve established. Likewise, other websites like SEMRush will help you understand how your content is ranking without having to understand and track the keywords on your own.
Engagement is another KPI that you’ll need to understand. Looking at your engagement data will help you comprehend whether people are truly interacting with your site or just visiting it.
When it comes to engagement, SEOs typically observe metrics like pages per visit, bounce rate, and time on site. However, it’s not uncommon for that data to be twisted, especially when considering pages like your landing page. For example, if a visitor finds your website and clicks on the landing page, whether they stay for five seconds of two hours doesn’t change the fact that, if they leave, the bounce rate is 100%, the pages per visit are zero, and time on site is zero. These benchmarks are only substantiated when a different page is interacted with. Not too helpful, huh?
You may have the perfect landing page. It could have high intent, answer the viewer’s queries, and inspire a call-to-action that they follow. The viewer, in this case, would leave your site without interacting with it. If you just look at the data, you may think your page isn’t successful. A workaround is to set up goals, which we’ll look at last.
You may still be able to conclude that a viewer found success if you randomly filter the page more precisely. For example:
At first glance, the above benchmarks don’t look pretty (I double-checked the page—no updates needed). You can update to see a better idea of the behaviors of people that may have more intent.
Setting Up Tracking for Goals
Ultimately, while it’s important to have a high number of visits and views, you eventually need conversions if you want to find real success. The best way in which to accurately understand your conversions—such as your website form submissions on a landing page—is to head over to Google Analytics and create conversion goals. The quicker you create these goals, the better. Being able to access the historical legacy data will be important. Fortunately, creating goals in Google Analytics is a relatively simple task and can be done pretty quickly. Here are the steps you’ll need to know:
1. Craft a post-conversion landing page, like a Thank You page.
2. Redirect the form on your page or post to the destination URL (Thank You page). For this tutorial, we’re utilizing Gravity Forms.
- Open up your Gravity Forms in WordPress
- Under Settings, go to Confirmations
- Click Add New
- Under Confirmation Type, select Page, type and select your Destination URL
- Then click Save Confirmation
- Test the form to verify that it forwards to the proper destination URL
3. Create a goal in Google Analytics
- Go to Admin in the bottom left corner of the Google Analytics dashboard
- Under View, select Goals
- Select New Goal, and then select Custom
- Provide a name for your Goal through the Goal Description
- Select the Goal Slot ID. (Since this is the first goal for this view, I selected Goal ID 1/Goal Set 1. Google Analytics allows a maximum of 20 goals per view.)
- Select Destination for the goal type and then click continue
- Enter the page slug for the conversion landing page (Thank You page)
- Note that the URL must precisely match the page slug, so make sure to select “Equals To”
- Confirm that the page slug you’ve entered works by clicking Verify This Goal.
4. Test your goal
- In another window, fill out the form you are using for the conversion tracking and then click Submit
- In your Google Analytics account, go to Real-Time → Conversions
- Here you should see a hit for your goal on the real-time conversions report, which will look something like this:
Craft Your Ideal Content Plan
Posting top-notch content on a consistent basis will help your law firm generate authority on SERPs over time. Likewise, exploring trending topics within your industry will help earn your website traffic that will convert. Utilizing the right method when it comes to writing content will confirm that the material you post is attracting qualified leads. At Market My Market, we understand how to cultivate the perfect content strategy. We even have the data to back it up. Contact us for a free consultation.