Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for any law firm hoping to sign more clients online. The free software allows you to track how many visitors land on your website, which pages or resources are the most popular, and what percentage of people choose to contact your firm to learn more about your services. One report every law firm should consider using is Referrals.
What is a Referral?
A referral is a user who has found your firm by clicking on a link from another domain that’s directed to your website. Referral traffic is unpaid, so any PPC or PPV campaigns your firm uses will not affect your referral data.
To see your referral data, you will need to go to Acquisition → All Traffic → Referrals. Once here, you can see how many visitors you’ve received, which domains the traffic originated from, and how much the visitors were engaged with your firm.
Why are Referrals Important?
Monitoring your referral traffic is important because it gives you a good idea of how many unique domains are pointing to your site. Here are some key evaluations your firm can make from the Referral report:
1. How successful any link building or guest blogging efforts are.
If you are participating in any link building efforts for your law firm, you can view exactly how many new visitors you have getting to your firm’s website within the Referral report. If you publish guest articles on blogs with thousands of readers, you should see a steady trickle of referral traffic to your firm’s site.
2. If any sponsorship is leading to an increase in traffic.
Many firms, particularly PI firms, are able to sponsor related organizations to generate not only more cases, but also an increased awareness in the community. For example, a personal injury attorney may sponsor a local bicycling club to ensure that every rider has a trusted name to contact in the case of a crash. Many clubs who accept sponsorships will also link to a sponsor’s website, so you should see an increase of referral visits from the domains of organizations that you help out in the community.
3. If your content is “newsworthy.”
Guest blogging should lead to referral traffic, but if you’re publishing high-quality content, that in turn should receive organic links and referral traffic as well. If you find that you’re publishing a few pages of content every week for a year but no other domains have linked to your firm’s domain, this could mean something has gone wrong:
- Your content is not high quality. There are millions of pages online about legal issues, so if yours does not stand out, there will be no reason to link to it.
- Your content doesn’t contain the right keywords. Choosing keywords users will search for is vitally important; otherwise, nobody will be able to find the information you’re publishing.
- Your site isn’t authoritative enough to perform well on search engine result pages (SERPs) yet. This is often the case if your law firm has just purchased a domain. New sites have a harder time ranking until a fair amount of content has been added and backlinks have been established.
Once you evaluate your Referrals report, you can see what digital marketing efforts have been successful, and which could be improved upon.
Legal marketing is hard—we can do the work for you! Lead generation allows your firm to supplement your current marketing efforts. If you want to grow your practice’s caseload, give us a call today at 617.800.0089.