Google Analytics and Reviews for Law Firms: A Best Practices Guidebook
It used to be that a law firm could rely on word of mouth with minimal attention to their website and online presence to maintain and attract clients. This is no longer the case. In order for your law firm to succeed, understanding and utilizing the power of Google is key.
Google Analytics and Google reviews are the two most important aspects of Google that you must be able to manage. While analytics helps you best understand the successes and pain points of your website, incoming traffic, and user activity, Google reviews are a key driver of traffic to your site in the first place.
Using our team’s website and marketing expertise, we’ve gathered our most essential advice on how to use and leverage these two aspects of Google below.
Google Analytics for Successful Content Marketing
Content analysis is an essential facet of a solid content marketing strategy, and Google Analytics is one of the best and most-used platforms to perform these analyses. Note: this section is based Google Analytics 4, the latest version of the platform.
Analytics is the data to help guide your content decisions. The more data you have, the better you can fix or hone in on what you need for content marketing success. Below are some of the ways that Google Analytics can help you analyze this data to see if your content is performing the way you want it to.
Google Analytics helps you:
- analyze where your website traffic comes from
- understand if your marketing efforts are effective
- know when you’re performing well and the strategies that are working
- pinpoint high traffic and low conversion pages
- pinpoint what days/times are best to post or share content across all social media platforms
- obtainand automate web traffic reports, mobile and speed checks, and client information reports
- understand audience behavior, interests and insights on how they use your site, and how long they stay on your website
How to Use Google Analytics to Establish Relevant and Successful Content
So, how can you leverage Google Analytics’ power to reach all of these benefits? Let’s look at the most important measurements that GA offers and how to use them to effectively analyze your content.
If you are familiar with the Google Analytics Dashboard, you are aware that in order to start analyzing content, you have to add your website’s URL to the Property tab in order to create a View. . To analyze your content on Google Analytics, you will also have to add a unique ID for tracking and a global site tag to measure each page on your site. b.
Reading the Google Analytics Acquisition Tab
GA’s Acquisition report will show you how users have gotten to your site. There are two aspects of this: user acquisition, which focuses on user engagement, and traffic acquisition, which shows session engagement. For simplicity, we’ll be focusing on user acquisition.
Source: ahrefs.com
After opening “user acquisition,” when you select “all users,” you will see something like this:
Source: ahrefs.com
Depending on the mediums that you are tracking, you will be able to see how different users from different sources interact with your website pages. Note that you can change the time range in the top right of the page.
There are multiple variables to consider in the Acquisition section, but the most important are engaged sessions, average engagement time per session, and engagement rate.
An engaged session is the number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or viewed 2 or more pages on your website. The average engagement time per session is the time that an average user engages with the page as the primary window on the screen.
The engagement rate will show you a percentage of people who engaged with your website meaningfully (remember, GA’s definition of engagement: a user stayed on for more than 10 seconds on the site OR viewed 2 or more pages OR had a conversion event). . Usually, you want to see high engagement rates because it means that potential leads are interested in your content rather than leaving your site immediately. Note: Google Analytics 4 no longer shows the bounce rate, and instead shows the engagement rate. To obtain your bounce rate, simply subtract your engagement rate from 100%.
Always understand that a low engagement rate is not always a bad thing. If you have an instructional ‘how-to’ page, then maybe a lower engagement rate is a good thing, as the user needed to solve a problem, found your article, read it, and no longer needed anything else. However, if you are a law firm and have a page describing the services you provide and see a very low engagement rate, this is a definite indication that something needs to change.
Reading the Engagement Tab
GA’s engagement reports tell you what users do on your site. This includes page views, when users scroll slowly (to indicate reading), among other useful metrics.
Source: ahrefs.com
“Pages and screens” is important for understanding which pages work and which ones don’t. This report will show you a list of your pages, along with different metrics such as new users, average engagement time, and event counts.
Additionally, seeing your website’s pages in order of most visited to least visited can be a very useful tool for finding out if your site is guiding the user in the proper way. If you are selling a service, you may want the top content to be something like the homepage, followed by the services offered page and then leading to the contact page. If the users aren’t following the site as you intended, it may need new content. If the top content had been homepage, then services, then contact us, with a major decrease in the amount of people between the services page and contact page, it may be that the services page needs better or different content to guide the user properly to your phone number, email, or contact form.
In addition, “conversions” will show you which user activities are bringing you the most conversions. For law firms, this means you can track which events lead to a lead to contact you for your services.
On this report, you will find events listed by name, number of associated conversions, total users, and event revenue. Click on the name of an event to see more details about that specific activity (such as traffic source and number of conversions).
When creating a law firm website or business website, it is important to consider your site as a step-by-step guide to the user, with definite set benchmarks. Having a site where users always follow the same path will make your site much more effective and user friendly. This is why an easily navigable site and clear, concise content is king. If users are easily able to distinguish where they should be going, and when they get to the next step their questions are answered, then odds are you will have a successful website. And in order to understand what parts of your website are engaging users and how, Google Analytics is an essential tool to learn to use.
How to Share User Access to Google Analytics
It is also useful for multiple team members to have access to GA, since there is so much important information to analyze from the top to the bottom of your funnel. To give other people access to your site’s analytics, follow the steps below:
- Sign in to Google Analytics
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/ - Select the appropriate property/website
- Click Admin in the lower right corner
- Click “Account User Management”
- Click the “+” icon in the top right corner
- Enter a Google account as the email address
- Click the button to enable “Edit” permissions
- Then click “Add” in the top right corner
The Importance of Google Reviews
Google is not only beneficial for its powerful analytics platform — leveraging Google reviews is also an important aspect of a successful marketing strategy.
Why? Your online reputation as a business is now more important than ever. When you are looking for a new product or service, do you typically look at reviews first? Most likely, you do! This is the same scenario for your firm and your potential customers. Your visitors would like to see real testimonials from previous customers to help them make a better decision on selecting the best company or product for the job, and Google is the most popular place to look.
Put simply, the more positive Google reviews you have, the more likely someone is going to utilize your service. Below, we explore how to get more Google reviews for marketing success.
Your Online Business Reputation
We recommend that your firm obtains legitimate online reviews as much as possible. This helps prove credibility to prospective customers and boosts your authority. Positive reviews are a very important part of your reputation as a business and strengthen your internet marketing efforts. They set you apart from your competitors and are a strong authority signal to Google and other search engines.
Once a service has been completed, you should contact your client via e-mail and cordially ask them to provide feedback on your service. Here at PaperStreet, we also recommend adding a review page to your website to make things easier as it is a handy link you can send to your clients afterwards. This review page is a one-stop shop for your clients to see all of the websites they can leave a review for you on. We can either make the webpage accessible or keep it hidden and only visitors with the link will know about the page.
Google Star Ratings in the Map Pack
Once your Google business page receives more than five reviews, your overall star rating will be shown if you appear in a local map pack (example below). Wouldn’t you be more inclined to click on a company or firm that shows an abundance of great reviews? We would too, and that’s why we want to stress the importance of having legitimate online reviews. Please note, the map pack will only appear for localized searches as determined by Google.
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