How is your law firm website performing against your competitors in your region?

As the major destination prospects go to before they decide to contact you (and the main digital asset your clients interact with), accountant and law firm websites are a crucial marketing tool.

Larger, mid tier firms (and even some smaller firms) see 100,000+ unique visitors a year to their websites, dwarfing the number of visitors who walk through the front door of their offices.

Yet most firms don’t know how their sites compare to their competitors. Where are their overall website weaknesses and strengths?

Or at a granular level how many visitors are looking at your fee earner profiles or publications on your site versus other firms?

And if you are drawing less visitors that other firms do, what accounts for the difference? Are other firms performing better in attracting search engine traffic? Or in attracting social media visitors? And what sort of engagement are you getting once people visit your site – do prospective clients ‘bounce’ straight off your homepage where your competitors are retaining them better?

Traditionally these sorts of questions – which can be critical in an accountant site or lawfirm website redesign – are impossible to answer.  There are services like Compete which give broad metrics (‘number of visitors’) by sampling data going through internet service providers, but their data is only useful for very large websites like Ebay or Amazon. And they are not structured in a way which reflects the specific needs of professional services firms.

Gain a real understanding of your website’s performance

Over the last 5 years we have built up the largest global set of data specifically about professional services firm websites. And, although anonymised, the data is accurate because it is direct from current analytics (no sampling!).

Highly specific, it answers all the questions above and many more, like how you are doing on mobile visits to your website, or whether your authors are writing less than average versus other firms, or simply how fast your site returns pages to the user.

This is analysis you can use to prove your internal business case for a website redesign or to address website problems that in some cases you might not even have known existed.

Wait, but why?

Decisions about websites in professional services firms typically negotiate a wide set of internal stakeholders (partners!) so this sort of hard data is great to cut through the internal arguments – but we don’t stop there.

Having looked at hundreds of professional services firm websites and their analytics, we do more than compile these metrics for you: we brief you at the conclusion of the benchmarking on why your own website’s figures are different from the market.

For example, for a major national firm we identified through the benchmarking that articles on their website were not being correctly indexed by search engines.

For a boutique firm we identified that their homepage was problematic in retaining visitors and gave them the proof that they needed internally to push through a redesign.

For a global firm we identified that analytics tracking was missing from big segments of their site. So the figures marketing were presenting to the partnership were significantly understating the website’s real performance.

Most clients tell us that the post-benchmarking briefing is the most valuable element of the service.