How Google Analytics Can Inform Law Firm Content Marketing

As a law firm, there are various tools available to help you improve your content marketing strategies, including Google Analytics. One of the benefits of law firm content marketing is that it helps your website to appear in organic searches which then drives website traffic. To make the most of content marketing, however, you need to better understand how to use Google Analytics to your advantage – particularly given that many firms find the reports from Google Analytics to be confusing.

Understand Google’s Definitions and Their Impact on Your Analytics

Part of the trouble with Google Analytics as a way to view your content marketing success is how the system defines certain things. For example, Google counts any single-page session on your website as a bounce. This means that even if someone clicks a link to an article on your page and reads the full thing, the interaction will be logged as a bounce unless they subsequently proceed to another page on your site. Additionally, Google calculates time spent on a page based on the gaps between when a user clicked on different pages. If, for example, a user clicks on a page but then leaves the tab open while they go to lunch and returns without reading it, this will still register as 30 minutes of time on the page.

By nature, these Google definitions can be misleading for a law firm that is trying to use Google Analytics to check for user engagement and enhance content that encourages engagement.

Related: What Law Firms Need to Know About Google Analytics 4 [On-Demand Webinar]

Using Your Data to Inform Content Marketing

1. Use Google Analytics to Identify Content Gaps

Google Analytics will allow you to see where your visitors are going and how long they’re staying there. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer you might have blog posts about how to avoid certain types of injuries or you might have posts that discuss the process of legal claims. Which types of posts are receiving the most traffic? You can analyze your content to look for different patterns – which topics are of the most interest, what length or format keeps visitors on the page longer?

Look through the users’ journeys and identify what users are searching for that is leading them to your website. To identify content gaps, cross reference your keyword list with your page’s analytics. Pay attention to bounce rate, exit rate, and time spent on page.

Take a look at which posts tend to have higher traffic but with low engagement or conversions, as these posts will likely showcase an opportunity. You can use this with the comparison feature on the right side of the page after you visit “Behavior,” “Site Content,” and “Landing.” Based on your comparison, you can see which pages require the most work in your content strategy.

You can find your site search data by going to “Behavior,” “Site Search,” and “Search Terms.” In the case of a small list, go through and look for content ideas. If there are more terms, make a time comparison so you can see trends and get content ideas.  

2. Create Related Content Based on Your Top Pages

Take a look at which of your pages have a low bounce rate and a high time spent on page. Then, identify how these pages can fit into a content pillar system. Are there any subtopics you discussed in this blog that can be broken into their own pieces of content? You can even use Google Search Console to see which keywords each of your top pages are ranking for and go from there.

3. Identify Technical Areas of Improvement

Take a look at the data behind who is viewing your content on mobile and how high their bounce rate is. If mobile users have a high bounce rate on certain posts, this is an indication that those pages need to be better optimized for mobile. In general,  a high amount of traffic and a high bounce rate may indicate that your page does not have a great user experience.

4. Make Better Plans for Promotion

Through acquisition you can see which channels are doing the best at driving traffic to your website. If you see one channel remains low in bringing in traffic, consider improving your strategy for promoting content on this channel. For tips on how to leverage each channel, check out our blog where we post daily posts on law firm digital marketing channels.

5. Build Out Content Based on the Marketing Funnel

Under the conversions tab you can create Goal Flows where you can view how people are moving down the marketing funnel on your site in order to reach a particular objective, such as filling out a form. From there, you can identify which pieces of content are vital for your buyer’s journey and optimize them as needed.

6. Improve Titles and Meta Descriptions

Run a custom report to view how many clicks your blogs are getting. From there, identify which blogs have a low click through rate. Those blogs will need to have improved titles and meta descriptions. Make note of any blogs with great CTRs. What conventions do you use in their titles and descriptions?

7. Internal Linking Improvements

Take a look at which pages have a low time spent on page. Add more internal links to those pages to increase time spent on- page and improve the value of the content.

8. Improving Bounce Rates and Time on Page Reports

Now that you are aware of the issues, you can take a few steps to improve the bounce rate and time-on-page reporting accuracy. Assuming you use the standard code for Universal Google Analytics, add this to the tracking code:

setTimeout(“ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘nobounce’, ’60_sec’)”, 40000)

With this code in place, anytime a user remains on your page for at least 60 seconds, Google will no longer count it as bounced. You can adjust the ”60_sec” in your code based on the amount of time you feel is appropriate and can also adjust the ”40000.’

9. Best Posting Time

You can run an hours and days report in order to figure out which time and day is best for posting content. This will help you optimize your content and improve its performance by publishing it at the most optimal time.

Related: The Law Firm Guide to Content Marketing eBook

10. Better Keyword Selection

Use Google Analytics’ keyword analysis report to view the most popular keywords alongside visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each one. This can help you determine new content topics or which ones you’d like to revisit and re-optimize.

Takeaway:

By evaluating the metrics for your law firm content marketing, you will be informed on how to produce better content for your audience. By posting the right content, you will elevate your thought leadership position, engage your audience, and potentially convert more clients.

Are you in need of more assistance in leveraging and analyzing data to improve your firm’s content marketing? We’ve helped many law firms and legal companies improve their content performance through data analytics. Contact us today for a free consultation.

This post has been edited and republished from Jul. 23, 2018.