Fluent Simplicity

Law.com’s story, How to Increase Traffic to Your Web Site, provides a list of tactics to improve site visits. The article discussed wikipedia, content linking and search-widgets, all of which are somewhat useful. However, there’s an even more powerful tool available to increase web traffic: a formal strategy.

Web stats have a certain utility. What most people fail to mention is that you can’t tell anything about your users unless there is a transactional component to the site. This doesn’t apply to certain organizations… what biglaw firm would “sell” M&A representation on a Web site? If I send a proposal to a company, can I see if they looked at the Web site for more information? No. Even if you could trace back the IP to the company’s headquarters, who’s to say it was even the right department?

A Web strategy will help focus your firm (or organizations) desires into a series of objectives that can be reached with a series of tactics. The follow list covers some important elements:

• Develop a comprehensive Web strategy document, focusing on SEO. I have yet to see any vendor execute this properly, so don’t blindly trust their “expertise.”
• Usability will continue to be important. Make sure site features, including search, are easy to use and provide relevant information.
• Begin to monitor and maintain your online reputation. Make sure your firm has a Wikipedia page that is checked periodically, but don’t become obsessive. The open-edit model has it’s share of problems. Setup google alerts for news and blog posts on your firm.
• Recognize that the importance of relationships will eventually extend into the digital realm for law firms. Social networks or blogs come to mind, but also realize this is with technology as well. Integrating different sustems will have a major impact on a major Web project currently underway at my firm.
• Instead of looking exclusively at numbers, look at the relationships within the stats. When I started several months ago, I put together a Web strategy that included a heavy focus on SEO. Within two weeks of implementation, site visits went up 20% and have remained stable over the past few months.
• Get Google analytics for your site(s). I’ve had vendors give me webtrends reports, along with livestats and other products. Google beats them all, and best of all, it’s free.