Traffic Reports for your law firm website - very important

If your website already has a web analytics tool, I reccommend you become familiar with it. If your website does not have a analytics tool, you can always use Yahoo! or Google Analytics. I personally use Google Analytics for this site and others. I do not think there is a huge difference between the two.
Once you have your web analytics solutions live and ready to go, now comes the fun stuff. With a little playing around, you can start to see how successful (or not so successful) your blog or website is. Here are some metrics you want to look at:
1. Daily unique visitors aka how many people look at your site: This is a good overal guage on how well your site is doing. The higher the number, the more poplular your site is. (no doi)
2. Referring sites/links: If a visitor came to your site from another site, you will know what that site is. This is a very crucial measurment. Here you can see how successful that paid listing(s) is at Findlaw, Lawyers.com, or Justia. Are you getting the amount of traffic from these sites proportionate to what you are paying? Don't just take your sales reps word on how well these top listings work, test for yourself. You can track any pay per click campaing. Also, you can see how much return you get for you efforts on the whole social networking strategy. You can measure LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, and posts you make on other blogs.
3. Key words. These are terms or words that visitors typed into a search engine that eventually led them to your site. Most attorneys will see their name in various forms show very high on this list. This helps validate the fact that many web visitors know your name, and want to check you out. You can also see what other key words led people to your site. Search terms for a personal injury attorney may include "car accident attorney Grand Rapids " or "I slipped at a Kmart in Detroit ". If these key words are leading people to your site, you know that your content is being indexed and performing well on the search engines. If your are not getting the key words that your are looking for, then you can adjust and add to your website content appropriately. Write a blog post on an area of law that you are not getting alot of web hits on. More content can only help.
4. Trends. It is important to keep track of overall trends of your website. If you traffic spikes up or down, you need to be aware of this and be able to respond.

These are just a few of the things you should look for when analyzing your website traffic. The reality is, that very few attorneys take the time to look at their traffic reports. This gives the firms and lawyers that do look at their traffic reports and make adjustments a competitive advantage in securing that harder to get client. In today's times, an advantage, even a slim one, can mean all the difference.