The journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step (paraphrased Lao Tzu), but how do you know you’re heading in the right direction? If you’re an injury law firm, it may take many months to drive your first lead, and even if you sign the case, the settlement is still a long way down the road.
Law firm SEO is a very long-term commitment and business model. The longer the journey, the more difficult it can be to get your bearings and know you’re headed in the right direction.
So we want to provide you with a compass, a means of knowing that you’re on the right track. Injury lawyers are especially important here. They have a low-frequency/volume high-impact business model. You can’t control when someone is in a car accident with severe injuries. The market’s interest can swing against you, and you go through a dry spell.
Here’s how you will know that you’re still heading the right direction, regardless of whether or not you’re getting leads.
Bearing 1: Rankings
Rankings are the core fundamental metric. Every SEO campaign should have a keyword list, and that list needs to be tracked. We use MOZ, the industry standard for SEO/inbound analytics and ranking tracking. If your SEO provider can’t provide you a ranking report, then they are a con artist.
If you’re in the early stages, you’ll be looking to have your rankings start tracking either top 100 or top 50. There are 10 natural “organic” rankings per page, so if you’re ranked 45, you’re halfway down on page 4.
Ranking trackers show progress with charts and stock ticker-like signals about keyword performance. Continuing to see long-term growth is important as your campaign begins to get traction. Just like stocks, however, watching this too often can be a little crazy. The reports can have some variance week-to-week, but the monthly and quarterly motion is more indicative of keyword performance. If you have had keywords sliding into worse positions for three straight months, that isn’t noise. That’s a signal that something needs to change.
Once you’re page one, it’s about climbing to the top and maintaining as many page one keywords as possible.
Bearing 2: Engagement
Engagement metrics measure whether or not your website is actually what the end users want. Sometimes you may have inflated organic traffic signals, because people are finding your firm for cases that aren’t relevant to your desired practice areas. That is a relatively harmless cause of people wanting to “bounce,” or leave your site without having digested more than a single page.
The “bounce rate” (the rate at which people “bounce”) is a very standard engagement metric. Other metrics include pages per session and time on page. HOWEVER, engagement can be very, very tricky when it comes to law firm websites.
I have personally driven huge cases where the end user converted on the first page they clicked. They didn’t read the attorney bios. They didn’t see your AV rating. They simply converted on the spot into a lead.
By normal engagement metrics (conversions aside), this would look like it wasn’t a very good lead.
I prefer a two-step alternative to those standard metrics.
First, try and assess the site visually from an end-user perspective. Poke around some of the websites that are ranking, and make sure that you’re not missing anything big. If your site is good enough looking, and the content is informative and relevant to what people are searching, then it should be okay. If the visual test shows that you’re fine -- aesthetics are subjective, but you can reasonably assess it you’re fine -- then you need to run the next step.
Test your page load speed. Pingdom is the core page load speed tester. Pull up your website, copy your address, and paste it into Pingdom’s page speed tester. Make sure that the “test from” box to the right of where you put in your website’s address is set to a server close to where you practice. Don’t test from Melbourne, Australia. Pick New York, Houston, or San Jose, or any option closest to you.
If your page load speed is over 3 seconds, you’re in the danger zone. There are plenty of articles out there indicating that you are losing people when your page load speed is over 3 seconds. If you see a 6-second page load speed, but your keyword rankings are fine, you need to fix some fundamental issues with your website.
Note: if you’re getting really bad numbers, test again at a later time. Sometimes Pingdom has shown some pretty bad signals, but when testing later the numbers were back down to where they were expected.
Bearing 3: Conversion
The entire point of your SEO campaign is to position you to convert visitors to leads that sign with you or your law firm. Law firm websites will typically convert via contact form emails, direct dial phone calls from website buttons or live chat boxes.
If you’re just starting out on a campaign, and you’ve had page one rankings for months with no conversions, something might be up.
In this case, take a hard look at your website from the end-user’s perspective. Have you made it as easy as possible for them to connect with your office? Are there free consultation contact forms? Can they press buttons from their mobile phones to directly call your office? If so, are you using a phone number that’s specific to your website, so that you know it was a web-driven call? Have you looked at all of the above on an iPhone? Sometimes the mobile user experience is bad, even though your desktop experience is great. Most users are mobile now.
If you are doing all of the above, and the user experience of your contact forms, call buttons and live chat are fine, then test your market interest. Head over to Google Trends, enter your primary keyword, and see if perhaps there is a dive in recent search interest for what you provide.
Otherwise, things should be fine, and you may just have to hang on for the ride.
If you are further along a campaign and you’re seeing a decline in conversions, check your traffic to see if your conversion rate is also going down. If so, has someone changed anything lately that would adversely affect the user’s experience?
It can be very tricky deciding to implement changes with a site that is doing well. I generally advise against unnecessary changes. I don’t care if every SEO industry article says you’re dumb if you don’t do it -- if your site is killing it on rankings and driving cases, those industry article authors can continue writing about SEO, and you can keep making money. After all, if you have been following our big picture to SEO, you’re already doing well in Google’s eyes, and minor SEO tweaks aren’t needed to risk big revenue drops.
Drops in conversion during moderate to mature SEO campaigns are almost always due to some changes. When near-term tests to correct the issue don’t solve the problem, it’s time for your SEO company to do a full-on audit report. It could always be the market’s interest, but it is critical to know without a doubt that a wide range of technical bases are still covered, particularly if any major changes or tweaks were implemented.
Triangulation Gives You Confidence
SEO can have its ups and downs, particularly for lower-volume injury-only firms versus firms that practice a wider range of practice areas with higher volume.
Using our SEO compass allows you to take your bearings, triangulate and have the peace of mind to either know you’re heading in the right direction or to narrow down to specific action-items to provide a course correction if needed.
SEO campaigns aren’t a “fire and forget” solution. The industry changes, your competitors may change or increase in volume, and best practices or best technology can change. After all, the iPhone and iPads revolutionized the way we use the Internet in a brief span of time.
We hope this at least helps you rest easy with the confidence knowing you’re pointing in the right direction and making any tactical or strategic changes to get your site back on the right track.
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If you’d like to schedule a FREE consultation with a law firm SEO expert, shoot us an email using our online contact form, and I will personally reach out to you as soon as possible.
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