Below are 7 of the most important KPIs for Personal Injury Law Firm Marketing that you should be measuring so you can determine your law firm website’s effectiveness, and some tips on how to start tracking them.
Successful Legal Marketing in today’s market means having a website that maximizes engagement — and helps you turn prospects into clients. While it isn’t the only tool you need in your Personal Injury Law Firm Marketing toolbox, it is a foundational driving force. Even if you have well-performing organic, paid social media, and/or loads of 5- Star Google Reviews, if your website isn’t cutting edge and up to date, you are losing cases to your competition.
Your website isn’t something you can create and then forget about — or update every few years.
Your Personal Injury firm’s website is critical to your law firm’s relevance and success in today’s market. It needs to work for you — driving traffic and generating more leads, conversions and cases.
With that in mind, here are the The Top 7 KPIs of an Effective Personal Injury Law Firm Website
The following KPIs will help you make your website work for you — driving traffic and generating more leads, conversions and cases:
- Conversion Rate: This KPI is the percentage of visitors to your website that take action, and become your clients, or contact your firm, download material from your site, etc. (The conversion rate is probably one of the most common KPIs that any business should track)
If you see that that you have quite a few new visitors coming to your website, but not taking any action once they get there, you know you need to take action to increase your conversion rate. At this point you can see that you are doing something right- that is drawing traffic, but that there’s something to tweak once the visitor gets to your website.
Perhaps you need a clearer call to action button. Perhaps you need bolder colors, less copy or the addition of video testimonials. Perhaps you need to change your headlines.
But unless you are actively tracking and reviewing your conversion rate, you won’t even be aware of your problem areas. And you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken, can you?
- Number of Qualified Leads: Some lawyers are easily excited about the wrong things, like the number of website visitors. These are commonly referred to as “vanity metrics”. What you really want to know is how many of these visitors are actually qualified leads, meaning they meet the criteria we consider to be a “good lead.”
In order to obtain the number of qualified leads you are receiving; you need to use a Customer Relations Management (CRM) software. If you have a CRM Platform in place, then when a user fills out a lead generation form and clicks submit, Google Analytics then transmits that data to your CRM platform. With this important data, you can score and rank your general leads to determine which are qualified leads. If you are paying for leads, it is critical to determine whether they are qualified, so that you aren’t paying too much for worthless leads.
- Awareness Level: Brand Awareness takes time and builds upon multiple interactions/contacts that a prospect has with your firm. While it takes time, and certainly doesn’t happen overnight, you need a means by which you can track how effective your efforts are at pushing your brand out there.
There are several factors that indicate more people are becoming familiar with your brand. To help you track brand awareness, Google Analytics breaks down site traffic based on source. If you examine these results over time, you will be able to get a sense of the percentages of web visitors who are already familiar with your brand by the time they arrive at your site. Once you start tracking your current stat sheet, you can begin working on reaching your website’s traffic based on your results.
You can also use SEO tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs to track your rankings and see how your brand awareness compares to that of your key competitors.
- Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate = the rate at which a visitor goes to a specific internet page and leaves without doing anything.
Although some view the Bounce Rate as a bad thing, the truth is that it is neither good nor bad. Instead, this important KPI lets you know how often visitors stay on the same page from their initial entry. Ideally, you want to strive for a bounce rate of 60 percent or less-
Obviously, you want visitors to your website to stick around and engage with your site, taking some action – such as calling you to schedule a meeting or at least raising their hand to obtain a free download in exchange for their email/contact information.
When your Bounce Rates are high, you know that you need to tweak something on your website that will entice the visitor to stick around.
Perhaps your page contains irrelevant information, and you need to add an engaging short video.
Again, maybe you need a clearer call to action button.
Perhaps you need to make sure your mobile site is optimized and user friendly.
Boring content, or slow page loads can often lead to high bounce rates.
The bottom line here is that the Bounce Rate is a KPI that clues you in that you are doing something right in driving traffic to your page but doing something wrong since too many visitors won’t stick around once they get there.
- Pages Viewed Per Session: Why would you bother to track the number of pages a visitor views per session on your page/site? This KPI is important because it measures interest and curiosity about your law firm. This idea is that if a visitor is looking through a number of pages, then they are either highly interested and engaged with your content- or they are searching for something they can’t yet find.
It’s important to evaluate both the pages viewed and the bounce rate together in order to determine what is likely happening with your visitors.
A site with a high number of pages per session, low session duration and a high bounce rater can indicate a user cannot find the relevant information they are looking for. A site struggling with low numbers of pages viewed per session, and a low session duration and high bounce rate can also signal low quality content or user engagement.
As with any digital marketing endeavor, you must be continually looking for ways to increase engagement and continually modifying your site as necessary.
- Average Time on Page: This KPI measures the amount of time a website visitor spends on a specific page. Obviously, you want your visitors to stay on your page as long as possible engaging in your content, and ultimately deciding they want your law firm to handle their case.
The industry standard goal for time on a site is 2-3 minutes, although the longer the better. The average per page time is only 62 seconds!
While 2-3 minutes may not seem like a very long time, it is usually enough time needed to read basic content and interact with a website. The longer the session duration, the greater the likelihood that a user is more engaged with your content. Engagement leads to conversion.
- Load Time/Mobile Friendly Pages: Your website needs to load quickly and be optimized for mobile phone users. This is mandatory for effective law firm marketing! All the beautiful website designs and engaging content in the world become immediately irrelevant if the prospect must wait for your site to load. They just will not do it. They will scroll straight to the next firm.
** Ideally, your website load time should be 1-2 seconds for mobile sites. Over half of your prospects will abandon your site if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load! Even a 2 second delay in load time can result in bounce rates of almost 90%.
CONCLUSION
Successful Personal Injury Law Firm Marketing in today’s market means knowing if your website is working for you. And you cannot truly determine this unless you are tracking the above KPIs, at a minimum! Be sure to review these KPIs with your SEO Vendor. Otherwise, you are pouring money into Marketing Campaigns without any sense of whether or not your efforts are hitting the mark.
