A simple, yet profound question, that every person with a website is asking. The obsession with website traffic is enormous.
While it is useful to know if your site is doing well, it is also important to remember that not all traffic is the same.
Sometimes you can even have better results with fewer visitors than your competitors. Everybody is worried about how to get more and more visitors but converting them into clients can be an even more difficult goal.
There are factors that affect how website traffic your law firm should attract for you to sign up a new client.
Before we share the numbers, let’s examine these factors.
Here are the two things that influence your website and search traffic on a massive scale.
In digital marketing, when it comes to lawyers, we look at two competition determinants: location and practice area. If you’re in a major city like Chicago, you have a lot of direct competitors, people browse more websites and talk to more attorneys before they make a decision, so you’ll need more visitors to sign up for one client.
The same goes if you’re a general practitioner or have chosen a high-in-supply practice area. All other variables held constant, attorneys who focus on a narrow practice area (think trust litigation) will need fewer visitors to get one client, than general practitioners, or those in the highly competitive niches (think personal injury).
User experience refers to the overall quality of experience your website delivers to the visitors and how it compares to that of your competitors’ websites. In essence, your website is supposed to match or exceed prospects’ expectations. However, we often see law firm websites that do anything but match visitors’ expectations.
If your website is outdated and under-developed; if it looks worse than your competitors’ websites; if it’s difficult to understand what is it that you do or there’s no proof that you are good at what you do (links to reviews, testimonials, case studies), then you could be getting a lot of traffic, but struggle to sign up new clients.
Now, when we understand basic factors affecting website traffic stats we need a way to actually look at them. As a website owner, you have only one real way to check how much website traffic do you get and it’s to utilize a website traffic checker.
These analysis tools can work with two types of traffic data:
Using the website traffic checker tool right can reap huge benefits for your company, give you the right direction you should push your digital and content marketing activities, show engagement metrics regarding your visitors, and much more. Some of the best website traffic checkers include Ahrefs, Flippa, and SimilarWeb. Also checking in on your Google Analytics page is always a good idea.
According to WordStream — a software that simplifies online advertising and a company that’s an authority in online advertising statistics — an average law firm website converts at 2.07%. To simplify calculations, let’s round that down to 2%.
High-performance websites for lawyers, on the other hand, can convert at 10% or even higher. We know this because we have clients whose websites convert visitors at that rate. However, WordStream tells us that top legal websites have a 6.4% conversion rate, which we accept as a reasonable top-tier performance for most great websites.
Now, let’s do the math and see what this means for you.
Say you get 2000 website visitors per month. If your website converts at 2%, this means 40 people will contact you: either by calling or by filling out a contact form.
Of these 40 people, around 75% won’t be a good fit. Statistically, it’s just the way it is in any professional services industry. Whatever may be the reason (I bet you heard them all before), now you’re down to 10 genuine qualified leads that are interested in working with you.
Out of those 10, if you’re good on the phone and answer all their questions, you’ll manage to convert 2-4 clients. So, an average attorney website would need 2000 unique visitors to sign up 2 to 4 clients.
If you have a high-performance website, then you can aim to convert at a 6% rate — rounding down the 6.4% conversion of top legal websites, according to WordStream — you’d around 12 clients signed up from 2000 website visitors. The difference is projected revenue is likely to be in tens of thousands of dollars, monthly! There are numerous web design agencies for law firms. If you specialize in real estate, here’s the list of the top real estate website design companies that can increase your law firm conversion rate significantly.
Here’s what you can do to ensure you make the best of your digital marketing investment.
Your website should always look at least as good as the website of your biggest and best competitor. People do judge every book by its cover and for underdeveloped sites, even if you offer the best service in the sector, the bounce rate will be high. Your website has to deliver the right first impression or you’ll be out of the race before you start.
We won’t get into details about what makes a website perform better than an average here, as you can find detailed info here. If you’re serious about growing your firm and personal prosperity, I do recommend you get familiar with this.
It’s good to have very ambitious goals, but you must know whether they are realistic. Here is how you can determine that: speak with your marketing experts, tell them your goals — say you want 10 or 20, or whatever new clients every month — and then they can check the potential of the market online and tell you if that’s feasible.
Yes, marketing agencies can do that, they can tell you how many people have looked for your services in any given area, for any given period.
Once your goals are validated through research, your marketing agency should craft and present you with comprehensive marketing strategies for achieving them.
They should send you monthly performance reports so that you can track progress and hold them accountable for the money you spend and the results they should have delivered — and they can optimize your strategy for maximum results.
If you want us to look at the numbers in your market and assess where your website is now versus where it could be, contact us here, and let’s discuss!
Comrade is a Chicago-based digital marketing company that specializes in website design and marketing for attorneys. Read more about our content marketing service for law firms.
On average, 2.17 pages are viewed per session on a local business's website. Just 1.88 pages are visited on average per session by mobile-only users. Goals aren't set up on 54% of websites in Google Analytics.
It varies depending on the sector, but a decent return visitor rate is about 30% on average. And if you can achieve a 50/50 split between new and returning guests, you'll be in great shape.
A decent conversion rate is greater than 10%, with some companies reaching an average of 11.45%. Earning a high conversion rate puts the company in the top 10% of global advertisers, which means your conversion rate is two to five times higher than the average.
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