The Right Metrics to Track your Law Firm’s Blog Performance

by Vondrae McCoy • June 7th, 2021 • Content Marketing | Blog

Your law firm likely has a few different goals for your blog. Brand awareness, lead generation, and displaying thought leadership are a few places to start. But how do you know if what you’re doing is working? No matter what it is you’re hoping to accomplish specifically, you need a way of measuring your blog activity. Luckily, there are several tools out there that can make this easier on you. Keep this list handy so that you know you’re collecting the right data to help you improve decision-making when it comes to your blog.

Track These Blog Metrics to Keep an Eye on Traffic

The number of people who come to your blog can help you understand a few different things. Keeping tabs on visitors is helpful for driving traffic to your website and also understanding demographics.

Page views – This is any time a user visits a page of your website. You can find this number in Google Analytics (GA) and likely on your hosting platform’s dashboard. Your goal is to see a slow but steady increase over time. You’ll need to dig deeper to get more specific information, though.
Traffic by channel – Look at this metric to understand the path visitors take to get to your website. Do they come through website content, organic search, or paid advertisements? In GA, filter your page views by channel to obtain this data.
Time spent on page – GA provides a pretty solid breakdown of the averages per page on your blog. If the time spent is low, you may need to look at the type of traffic you’re pulling in, or the content topics. If it’s suddenly or surprisingly low, look for a technical issue such as a too-slow loading time.
Bounce rates – How many people reached a blog post and didn’t do anything else except click off of the site? Bounce rate tends to be a very effective measure of reader interest. A high bounce rate could be a reflection of content that doesn’t resonate, or it could be your traffic sources aren’t good, leading the wrong demographic to your blog. A bounce rate of 25-40% is great news, but above 70% means serious changes are necessary.
Pages per visit – To get this number, begin with an average of the number of pages viewed over a given hour or day, divided by the number of site visitors during that same time frame. If the pages per visit average is on the lower end, try adjusting your linking strategy to encourage more internal linking.
Returning visitors – It’s important to break down traffic into new visitors and returning visitors. Go to Behavior > Overview > +New Segment in your Google Analytics dashboard to find this segment of traffic. This is another number that should grow over time. If the returning visitors segment doesn’t increase, you’re not properly grabbing the attention of readers or cultivating engagement over time. Develop new strategies for doing both.
Top traffic posts – What kind of content is resonating with readers? Which topics garner the most interest? These insights provide opportunities to not only improve your blog, but create new content and campaigns around the subjects that are truly relevant to your targets.

Law Firms Can Track These Blog Metrics to Keep an Eye on SEO

SEO strategy involves several tactics that work together to improve your site’s rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). To know if those tactics are in fact working, take a look at the following metrics.

SERP rankings – This refers to the list of website results returned by a search engine query. Each of your blog’s pages will have a different SERP position depending on keyword relevancy and a few other factors. You’ll need a third-party tool like SEMRush Position Tracker to track these rankings, but it’s worth the time.
Average inbound links per blog post – Here you’re looking for links to your blog from other websites (for example, if another blog links to some of your content, or a social media post links to a resource on your blog). These links are important because they increase your domain and page authority. You can look at the Referrals section of GA for this information, or you can get more precise data with a tool like the Moz Link Explorer.

Metrics for Engagement

Deciphering engagement on your blog is critical, since connecting with your law firm’s target audience is one of the key reasons for maintaining a blog.

Average amount of comments per blog – One of the most significant forms of engagement is the commentary on a blog. You can simply count these manually, but there are also tools that can track these for you.
Social shares – Social media engagement is really important for your blog, and for your firm’s branding overall. Again, you can log into your social platforms and simply count the shares on each post, but a third-party tool (such as HootSuite) can give you more insight into the big picture of overall social media engagement.
Clicks from social platforms – Use referral links (mentioned above) to measure user engagement. Simply use GA to pull data on how many users are coming to your blog via your social media profiles and posts.

Metrics for New Client Acquisition

One of the biggest tasks your blog must perform is generating new leads. Your blog activity should contribute to the bottom line by bringing in and nurturing new prospects. Pull this information to understand how your blog affects new client acquisition.

New blog leads – How many leads are generated by your content? This can be difficult to comprehend in an integrated marketing strategy. Use some of these measurements to pin down numbers. You should also use trackable links with specific UTM tracking codes throughout the blog, particularly for CTAs, as well as forms that are unique to blog content.
Posts that bring in the most leads – Once you’ve figured out how best to capture the leads from your blog, break down the number by page so that you can see which posts and topics are the best at generating leads.
Lead source breakdown – You want to find out not only what sources or channels are leading readers to your blog, but which ones are ultimately generating the most qualified leads. Look at your overall lead nurturing program and find out which areas need to be optimized.

Metrics for Email Marketing

Email marketing is a channel that is highly complementary to your law firm’s blogging efforts. It also generates a lot of trackable and helpful data!

Total email subscribers – Developing a newsletter to distribute blog content will help you to reach more people. Use a third-party provider to create campaigns that can be tracked alongside your blog’s website analytics. The first thing to look at is the number of subscribers. An exact number isn’t important, but a steady incline is.
Email open rates – How many recipients actually opened your email in their inboxes? Mailchimp says you’re looking at 15 – 28%, depending on industry. One note: to track open rates, you really need email-specific tools.
Email click-through rates – This number shows how many people not only opened an email, but clicked on a link within it. A decreasing CTR means you need to develop stronger CTAs or more relevant content.

Takeaway

By digging into these metrics, you learn about the strengths and potential weaknesses of your law firm’s blogging efforts. Empowered with this data, you’ll be better equipped to craft content that delights audiences and surpasses expectations every time. When executed properly, blogging can help your law firm connect with and engage new clients, create strategic relationships as well as establish your reputation as a thought leader in your practice.