Key Performance Indicators in SEO for Attorneys

by Julie Lorson • January 18th, 2024 • SEO | Blog

Key performance indicators are essential for the success of a growing marketing program. If you read our recent post, you will find that tracking metrics is one of the most important elements of an impactful marketing strategy. Though KPIs are situational and depend on unique circumstances, some are universally helpful. Studies have shown that these KPIs are the most valuable when trying to improve SEO for attorneys.

SEO for Attorneys

1. Client Lifetime Value

This indicator calculates the total revenue each customer generates for your business throughout their engagement. Understanding CLV with SEO may help identify the most valuable actions. Because it offers a comprehensive picture of client behavior and profitability, CLV is a potent statistic for the marketing and sales team as a whole.

2. Content Efficiency

Thought leadership is critical to legal marketing. However, not tracking the metrics around content leaves a lot of opportunity on the table. Understanding content efficiency as it relates to SEO for attorneys can help you optimize content for search engines as well as for achieving firm goals. For this metric, document the specific goals that you have for your content. Then, for each piece, determine the percentage of goals that specific content is meeting. You should also take the cost of content production into account, to take things a step further and get to ROI numbers.

For a more in-depth look at how to measure the ROI of your content efforts, check out this free eBook: The Law Firm Guide to Content Marketing.

3. Average Engagement Time

Google Analytics offers a wealth of information, including almost any metric you’d want to track. Google Analytics 4 offers a way to track user engagement with a website. Average engagement time reflects the typical length of time that the site has focused on the user’s browser, meaning they were most likely looking at it.

For an in-depth look at how your firm can make the switch to Google Analytics 4, check out this complimentary webinar: What Law Firms Need to Know About Google Analytics 4.

4. Accurate Search Visibility

Assessing search visibility can give you a clear view of what’s happening with SERPs and how your pages appear in them. You can view some of this in Google Analytics, but you can also use a tool like MobileMoxie to compare Traditional Rank with Actual Rank, which counts everything in the SERPs that can push an organic ranking down, including PPC, Knowledge Graph, Answers, and other Google elements in the search. This is one way to discover how visible a search position is to a searcher.

5. Brand Visibility in Search KPIs

There is another way to track brand visibility that includes all of a brand’s assets, especially off-site brand assets. This can point to a brand’s overall representation in SERPs. That includes how much of the SERP is dominated by brand assets, including content on the main site, as well as other content, such as social media profiles and posts, YouTube videos, images, Knowledge Graph results, and everything else that could be a good representation of the brand, and help drive sales and awareness.

6. New and Returning User Information

In Google Analytics, it’s easy to separate visitor information into new and returning visitor segments. This provides key insights into which pages are most valuable to different segments of your audience. New users tend to outweigh returning visitors, but returning visitors are more likely to turn into leads or engage with your firm. Viewing your traffic in this way will help you to see how different each segment is and which users are most valuable (and why).

7. Average Time on Site

To determine the effectiveness of SEO for attorneys, it’s beneficial to see how much time visitors are spending on your pages. However, there are some caveats to be aware of. It’s important to look at other data in light of time on site. You need to make sure that people aren’t spending more time because they can’t find what they’re looking for. If you plan to use average time on site as a regular KPI, you need to justify it with other data.

8. Revenue Per Thousand (RPM)/ Average Position

The RPM metric is a way to calculate how valuable your traffic is. Average position is a keyword ranking metric provided by Google Search Console. When taken together, these KPIs can be used to identify keywords and web pages that need improvement. By leveraging RPM and Average position in concert, you’ll be able to identify changes over time and determine how one area affects the other, which should ultimately yield better results. As you make changes, take note of your average position. As it changes, is your RPM shifting at all?

9. Conversions from Organic Traffic

Important website actions like checking out, joining, or subscribing to a service are known as conversions. Most firms already track them for all of their traffic sources, including organic traffic. The easiest approach to link your marketing efforts to sales is through conversion tracking. In Google Analytics 4, setting up conversion monitoring isn’t difficult, despite what can appear complicated at first. To do it, you don’t need to know how to code. Ensuring that the correct conversions are tracked is crucial in this situation.

10. New Backlinks

One of the most crucial elements in SEO ranking is backlinks. Most firms pay close attention to this because the quantity and caliber of fresh backlinks pointing to their website typically reflect their efforts in SEO, content marketing, and public relations. Once you’ve completed the process of determining which backlinks to target through link prospecting, tracking the effectiveness of your outreach efforts will become much simpler. To indicate whether you received the link or not, simply include a column, note, or comment on your link prospecting sheet.

Takeaway:

Only you can determine which KPIs are most relevant to your business. Think about what matters most to your firm and what would be most beneficial to measure. This list is a starting point for thinking outside the box when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of SEO for attorneys. Tools like Google Analytics provide plenty of metrics that can help you to gauge performance. Hopefully, you can analyze these metrics to gain deeper insights and get new inspiration. For more ideas on metrics to track across your digital marketing functions, try reviewing some of our previous posts.

We’ve helped many firms track, analyze, and leverage KPIs to implement successful campaigns and improve their overall digital marketing performance. To learn how our experts can help you achieve your business and marketing goals, connect with us today.

This post has been edited and republished from Jul. 15, 2022.