You’ve recently upgraded your website. The site is live and you’re fairly happy with the results. You’re paying a lot more money than you were for your previous web site but its worth it as your new site has better content and a better look than your previous site. It is worth it…isn’t it?
It seems like you might be getting more calls, but you’re not sure, and you still have a nagging feeling that those calls aren’t necessarily translating into new cases. Meanwhile your website provider is talking about what a great deal you got and how successful your new site is. But the provider is also telling you that in order to get even better results you might need to invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you do now? Is your site performing to your expectations? Is it actually bringing in new cases? Do you need to invest in SEO?
The only way to know how well your site is performing is by checking your “web stats” on a monthly basis. So what are web stats, how do you check them and what are you looking for? Web stats refer to the data collected from a website. At a minimum, this data typically includes web traffic (i.e. how many people have visited your website), how long they stayed on your site, which pages they viewed and how they found the site. Web stats will also show trends over time.
Using just this information can give you a basic understanding of how well your website is performing. How many unique visitors are coming to your site and are the number of visitors growing month after month? Are they finding the types of information they are looking for? Are there spikes in the number of visitors and do these spikes correlate with other marketing activities that you are doing? Are the visitors looking for specific practice area information and are there specific sub-practice areas that get most of the attention? Are they finding your website through specific search phrases and are these popular search phrases consistent with the types of information that you have on the site, and the types of cases that you are looking for? These are just a few of the questions that your web stats can answer.
Your web provider tracks the statistics of your website, and has tools to help you to review these stats. If they haven’t provided these stats, ask your web provider for access. You should be looking at these stats on a monthly basis, at a minimum. This is the only way to know how your website is performing. And once you have a good understanding of how your website is performing, you can then start to correlate this performance to what really matters – your new case intake.