Key performance indicators are essential to the success of a growing marketing program. If you’ve read our previous article, you know that tracking is one of the most important parts of an impactful marketing strategy. Although KPIs are situational and depend on unique circumstances, some are universally useful. Studies have shown that these KPIs are most helpful in improving lawyer SEO.

SEO for Lawyers

1. Customer Lifetime Value

This metric measures the revenue each customer brings in throughout their relationship with your business. When it comes to SEO, understanding CLV can indicate which activities add the most value. CLV is a powerful metric for the entire marketing and sales function because it provides a holistic view of what’s happening with customers and how profitable they are.

2. Content Effectiveness

Thought leadership is essential to legal marketing. However, not tracking metrics around content leaves a lot of opportunities on the table. Understanding the effectiveness of content as it relates to SEO for lawyers can help you optimize content for search engines as well as achieve business goals. For this metric, document the specific goals you have for your content. Then, for each item, determine the percentage of goals that the specific content achieves. You also need to factor in the cost of content production, to drill down and get 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’s Guide to Content Marketing.

3. Average engagement time

Google Analytics offers a wealth of information, including almost any metric you want to track. Google Analytics 4 offers a way to track user engagement with a website. The average engagement time reflects the typical amount of time the site focused on the user’s browser, meaning they were most likely viewing it.

4. Precise Search Visibility

Assessing search visibility can give you a clear view of what is happening with the SERPs and how your pages appear there. You can see some of this in Google Analytics, but you can also use a tool like MobileMoxie to compare traditional ranking to real ranking, which counts everything in the SERPs that can lower an organic ranking, including PPC, Knowledge Graph, Answers and other Google items in search. It’s a way to find out how visible a search position actually is to a searcher.

5. Brand Visibility in Research KPIs

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

6. Information about new users and old users

In Google Analytics, it is easy to separate visitor information into new and returning visitor segments. This provides key information about which pages are most useful for different segments of your audience. New users tend to outweigh returning visitors, but returning visitors are more likely to convert into leads or engage with your business. Viewing your traffic this way will help you 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 lawyers, it helps to see how long visitors spend on your pages. However, there are a few caveats to consider. It is important to consider other data in light of time spent on the site. You need to make sure people don’t spend 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 Mile (RPM)/Average Position

The RPM metric is a way to calculate the value of your traffic. Average position is a keyword ranking metric provided by Google Search Console. Taken together, these KPIs can be used to identify keywords and web pages that need improvement. By leveraging RPM and average gig position, 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, note your average position. As it changes, does your RPM change at all?

Carry:

Only you can determine which KPIs are most relevant to your business. Think about what matters most to your business and what would be most beneficial to measure. This list is a starting point for thinking outside the box when it comes to measuring SEO effectiveness for lawyers. Tools like Google Analytics provide many metrics that can help you gauge performance. I hope you can analyze these metrics to get deeper insights and new inspiration.