Tuesday, October 23, 2007

How Popular Is Your Web Site?

I’ve been running my Employment Law Website for seven years now.  I’ve learned many things over that period, but none more important than the willingness of web site operators to overstate the popularity of their web sites.  I still cringe when I hear someone say that their site gets a million “hits” a month.  A “hit” is a completely useless statistic that tells you almost nothing about the number of people that visit a particular web site (see hits vs visitors).

So, if hits aren’t important, what is?  That’s a tough question, and one subject to reasonable debate, but for lawyer web sites, the most important metric should be the number of unique visitors.  That is, how many different people visit your site each day.  Unfortunately, there is no exact method to determine unique visitors, somthing discussed in this New York Times article (October 22, 2007).  As they say, “nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.” Understandably, the lack of accuracy frustrates most lawyers because they see things like web site analytics and SEO as snake oil.  When you add all the marketing firms promising nonesene, like “we can get you the top search engine spots”, it only makes matters worse.

I would suggest that most lawyers concentrate on unique visitors measured over time (which is what I do).  This is particluarly important when you first launch your site.  If you’re doing the right things, you should see a pretty steady increase in traffic.  The upswing will probably flatten out over time, but it still should give you an idea as to whether you are making the right moves to attract new visitors.