This question comes up in just about every client engagement we have, “How many hits should I expect my website to receive?”
The answer is “It depends”. This is true because expectations have to be based on the type of site you have, the purpose of the site, the target audience scope, the physical target area, whether your site has a brick and mortar presence, your marketing budget, your social media exposure, the size of your online footprint etc.
For this article, lets focus on Law firms and what their expectations should be regarding web traffic and lead generation from their web presence. We have spent the last several years working with different sized law firms across the country in varying sized markets. Therefore, we have a solid understanding of what traffic should look like for law firms, regardless of geographical location or the size of the firm.
1,000 This is the general number you will see discussed throughout the internet regarding the absolute lowest number of unique visitors your website should be receiving each month if it is a business related website focused on a relatively small demographic, such as a City and it’s surrounding areas.
I agree with this number in principle. I think that if you can get around 1,000 unique visitors a month to your website, you aren’t doing half bad. Think about if you had a brick and mortar establishment and received 1,000 potential customers each month walking through your doors. For most small businesses that would be an acceptable target. The question is are all those visitors to your website actually potential clients?
What I want to do now is look at those 1,000 visitors and see how their actions translate to the goals of your site. This is the most important part of traffic analysis. If you get 1,000 visitors but no leads, you might as well had 0 visitors. Likewise if you only get 20 visitors a month to your site but everyone of them turns in to a client, then maybe all you need is 20 visitors. 2% is the average typical conversion rate websites should be expect to see. (I’ll write a more in depth article about conversion rates in the future).
In order to understand if your visitors are actually in your target audience, you have to have data to look at. This is where a strong analytic platform is really important. We use Google Analytics for most of our clients and it has a suite of features even in the free version that every website owner should learn to utilize.
We regularly review all our client’s traffic to ensure the traffic sources and regions the visitors come from are inline with the client’s target audience. Again, the goal isn’t as many visitors as possible, if those visitors have no chance of converting to a new client for the law firm. One of the goals is to obtain as much organic traffic as possible (Free hits) verse paying for traffic. These free hits tend to come from social channels and search engines. The keywords visitors searched for that led them to your site are very important to review. This can shed some light on the viability of that visitor to turn into a cient.
For example, if your law firm only handles consumer law cases and not criminal law, you do not want visitors coming to your site that stemmed from a criminal law search. By routinely reviewing keywords that generated traffic to your site, you can identify gaps in your content and messaging that is contributing to the false leads.
As a law firm, we know you are busy. You should partner with an IT Firm that understands your space and can drive the results you need to capitalize on your online presence. By finding the right partner, you can focus on your clients and we can focus our IT skills on bringing you new clients to help.
As promised, below are a few of our clients snapshots from the previous month. You can see with our techniques, we more than double the industry baseline of 1,000 unique visitors a month. (We also smash the accepted 2% goal conversion rate average, but that will be showcased more in a future article) If you are law firm anywhere in the United States and your numbers aren’t looking like some of our client’s below, contact us. We can help you increase traffic and convert those new visitors to viable client leads at a rate that surpasses the industry average.
I should point out the bounce rates for the clients highlighted vary. On the surface one might think that the higher bounce rates are indicators of poor design. In general this is usually true, but in the clients highlighted this is not accurate as the goals and site designs contribute to that number as a false indicator as shown by the more important goal conversion metric for those clients. I have included a few of the goal conversion charts to show this point.
