This is Part Four of my tell-all series of blog posts about the website redesign project for IMS President Kyle Krull’s law firm. (You can read Part One here: How Good Websites Go Bad; Part Two here: Why Redesign Kyle’s Site When It’s Still Working?; and Part Three here: Website Design and Strategic Fit.)
In Part Three, we finally got Kyle’s approval on a beautiful, contemporary website design with perfect strategic fit for Kyle’s practice. The website is responsive, which means it will automatically re-size for the best viewing experience on any device, whether desktop, tablet or any size cell phone. Visitors have a clear path to conversion, as well as ample educational material for those who want to browse and read.
You might think we’re done and ready for the “And they lived happily ever after” part. A lot of agencies would be done right there. But Integrity Marketing is not like a lot of agencies. For us, the real work is just beginning. So far, we have only built a solid structure. Imagine the steel framework of a skyscraper: essential to the building, but you really cannot get much business done until the offices, staircases, ceilings and walls are built out, electricity turned on, plumbing installed, etc. As important as that framework is, it’s not enough. No one is going to start making money in that building until it’s finished and people start using it! Your website is exactly the same.
Search Engine Optimization 
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what ensures your website can be found when consumers go looking for your services on Google or Bing. We optimize your website for what’s called “local search,” which simply means we want the search engines to deliver your website to people who are searching for your services in your locality. In other words, we don’t care if your site shows up for searches in New York if you practice in Kansas.
IMS owns a subsidiary company called Local Search Authority which focuses exclusively on market research in the booming local search industry. This research division gives us an SEO advantage: organic search optimization is not as easy as you might think. Google is constantly changing their algorithms, keeping us on our toes.
Additionally, it can be difficult to determine what is “local” for your firm. For example, Kyle’s law firm is located in Overland Park, a large suburb of Kansas City. Overland Park is pretty huge, and we definitely want his website to show up whenever someone searches for estate planning in Overland Park … but there are other important local markets within driving distance of his office, too. Leawood is an upscale area contiguous to Overland Park. Olathe is another nearby suburb, but not as wealthy as Leawood. And what do we do about Kansas City – a huge metropolitan area that spans across the state line between Kansas and Missouri? These are all questions to be researched, considered and finally tested with careful tracking and tweaked for performance.
Call Tracking and Google Analytics
Getting top performance from a digital marketing program requires sophisticated tracking and analytics. We want to know more than just the volume of traffic to your site and how often a new client says they found you on the internet. While these measures are important, they are rudimentary and often lead to faulty analysis and poor decision-making. Relying solely on traffic measures and self-reporting to manage your digital marketing would be like a commercial airline pilot trying to fly by dead-reckoning. Oh sure, lots of people did it “back in the day,” and some people are pretty good at it. But there’s a reason it’s called “dead” reckoning. Seriously, all of those gauges, dials and gadgets in the commercial cockpit are not just window dressing. They give essential, precise feedback that greatly reduces the chance of disaster and makes commercial flight one of the safest modes of transportation today.
Our Certified Google Analysts installed sophisticated coding on Kyle’s website that lets us track, not only how many people visit his website, but where they came from, which pages were most popular, at what point they left the site, and the most common path visitors follow through the site.
We also installed a call-tracking number, which is a line of script that displays a trackable phone number to website visitors. This number is not published anywhere else, can only be found on the website, forwards directly to Kyle’s office, and is recorded as a “conversion” in his analytics.
The Customer Journey
Further, and this is key, we map the Customer Journey: the path Kyle’s new clients take from online search, through his website, blog, and/or social media, and eventually to his office. We want to know how they are interacting with his entire program, define the key touch points, and enhance their experience and his marketing performance.
All of this information helps us continuously improve performance – not just of the website, but of the entire marketing program. This type of analysis is what creates the Rock Star performance Kyle gets from his online marketing.
Did I mention that Kyle’s digital marketing generates approximately 70 percent of his new business? And have I mentioned lately that research shows those professional firms who generate more of their new business online are more profitable and growing at a faster pace than those whose business comes from more traditional sources?
Now you really might think we’re done: we’ve got a beautiful, strategic website design that is optimized for local search and we’re all set to track our key performance indicators (KPIs).
But wait! There’s more to Kyle’s Secret Sauce. Stay tuned tomorrow.