Latest / The Jon and Marc Podcast / SEO in 2025: Why Everything Changed (And What Law Firms Must Do Now)

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SEO in 2025: Why Everything Changed (And What Law Firms Must Do Now) · The Jon and Marc Podcast

0:00
You want to hot take me again? Hot take.
0:01
Alert coming in. In narrative with AI is not
0:04
controlled by you anymore. Direct response is becoming
0:08
branding. It's becoming the first step in
0:10
the discovery funnel and it's not the conversion point anymore
0:13
like it used to be. ChatGPT may have been first, but
0:16
Google is going to win. Hot take We're putting a stake
0:18
in the ground. Google's going to win when the
0:20
largest corporations in the world is going to beat ChatGPT.
0:39
Welcome to the podcast. We have a fun episode.
0:41
It's just going to be John and I today and what we want to talk
0:44
about is SEO in 2025. Every few years somebody says
0:49
SEO is dead. We've been hearing that for
0:52
probably over a decade, but it's not dead, it's just different.
0:55
We realized earlier this year that the way people find and
0:59
evaluate law firms has completely shifted, and we can't
1:02
think about SEO the same way we did even 12 months ago.
1:06
So today we want to talk about how our SEO offering has
1:10
evolved, what we've changed, why it matters, and what we've
1:15
learned along the way. And what you should do if you're
1:19
listening and you're still doing the same things that you were
1:22
doing 6 months ago, 12 months ago, and there's just a lot of
1:26
opportunity to improve. Take advantage of the way that
1:29
people are now identifying what law firm they should be hiring.
1:32
Let's start with what change SEO used to be about ranking on
1:36
Google, The journey from discovery to conversion with a
1:40
pretty direct path, and now it feels it's all about reputation
1:44
and perception. When did it click for you John,
1:46
that this wasn't just another Google update, but there was a
1:49
full shift on how no search works?
1:51
Once it started really hitting the mainstream media, to be
1:55
honest, right when you're starting to see news stories on
1:58
your morning national news that Open AI has made an update and
2:02
people are now using ChatGPT to do things that were never
2:05
imaginable before. We knew that this was something
2:08
that was completely different, right?
2:10
ChatGPT came out, hasn't even been two years and the
2:13
advancements that we've seen over that 18 to 24 month period
2:18
are astronomical. Like we went from people with
2:20
like 7 fingers in images and like text that didn't make
2:25
sense. And suggestions about glue on
2:27
pizza. It's kind of like a party trick
2:29
when it first came out. Yeah, right.
2:31
Like it. It was like asking the question
2:34
of Google, but a little bit deeper with less trust, right?
2:39
It definitely was a joke. I used it like rewrite this
2:42
e-mail. Yeah, right.
2:43
And that and you were lucky if you got something that like
2:46
wasn't going to embarrass you. It definitely wasn't something
2:48
that could be utilized and trusted without additional
2:51
verification. And now here we are less than
2:55
two years later and and things are are very, very different in
2:58
your question about like, when did it really click?
3:01
Well, the big click for me happened when we had our clients
3:05
start asking what they can do to optimize for it, not because
3:09
they were hearing the buzzwords, but because they were hearing
3:11
real people tell them when they asked, hey, how did you hear
3:14
about us? Or where'd you get our number?
3:16
And they were saying, oh, I looked at perplexity or ChatGPT
3:19
recommended you. Then it's real, right?
3:22
It's not just that that party trick anymore.
3:24
Yeah, it's. Interesting too, I, I will harp
3:27
on this a lot. I believe the biggest shift has
3:29
happened not only because the tools have gotten better, but
3:31
ChatGPT was the first of the game.
3:33
But now that Google's like really good, they've kind of
3:35
pulled in a lot more widespread adoption because they're forcing
3:38
it in front of their entire user base or ChatGPT.
3:40
You still had to go specifically to that site.
3:42
It was a new experience or motion for people to do who had
3:46
never used the tool, but everyone knows how to use
3:48
Google. It's built into your iPhones as
3:50
the default search approach, any cell phone nowadays, the default
3:53
search. So it kind of really, it pushed
3:56
it to the forefront. We're definitely in an
3:58
interesting spot with AI because ChatGPT was pretty much the
4:03
first widely adopted LLM. And then we started seeing like
4:08
all these other things happen in the AI space and everybody knew
4:11
that Google was going to do something like they've been
4:13
talking about machine learning and AI for a long time, but it
4:15
hadn't manifested to the mainstream.
4:17
Gemini existed as this sort of side project that they had and
4:22
when AI overviews first came out or search generative experience,
4:26
whatever you want to call it, that was Google saying, hey,
4:29
we're acknowledging that this is actually a thing, right?
4:32
We're baking it into our search results eventually winds up, you
4:35
know, effectively replacing featured snippets, right
4:37
Featured snippets being the previous answer that used to
4:41
show up at the top of the search result page, different font when
4:44
someone would ask a query. Now we've got these AI overviews
4:47
on over 60% of searches. It's effectively Gemini, right?
4:51
They're taking this thing that they did on the side and now
4:54
saying, well, it's not just for developers anymore.
4:56
It's not that party trick. This is the future of search.
4:59
So you've got AI overviews, you've got AI mode, and you've
5:02
got people who just use Gemini as like their new homepage,
5:06
right? The Gemini app is very, very
5:08
commonly used, right? I saw, I see people who I would
5:11
not think using AI, using Gemini, not using ChatGPT,
5:15
right? I'll be in the airport and I'll
5:16
see like older people who are on their phones, like talking to
5:20
Gemini, we're actually on their phones talking to Gemini too.
5:24
It's a it's a very interesting time we're in.
5:26
I'm a big Gemini user. I will caveat that now over
5:29
ChatGPT. And it's interesting because
5:31
they've even made the job now where Profany goes.
5:34
Do you want your personalized Gemini experience or the regular
5:37
1? So that's doing it's a
5:39
remembering all my chats, building a profile and giving me
5:42
more customized results. This is just based on Gemini,
5:45
but as it pulls in more and more profile data about me, it's just
5:48
going to get better and better because Google has access to all
5:50
that today, all my search history from forever ago to
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really personalize the results moving forward.
5:56
It's going to be a game changer once they figure all that out.
5:58
I think they've already figured it out, right?
6:00
It it's This is why I mean, we, we talked about this this
6:04
morning, Mark, This is why Google is going to win, right?
6:07
ChatGPT may have been first, but Google is going to win hot.
6:10
Take We're putting a stake in the ground.
6:12
Google's going to win when the largest corporations in the
6:14
world is going to be ChatGPT. It's coming into my personal
6:17
life, right? I have a Nest security system
6:19
and I had the $10 a month subscription and I've got camera
6:23
in the front of the house, in the back of my house and Nest
6:26
sent me a push notification and an e-mail.
6:28
They're like Nest Aware is going away.
6:30
It's now being baked into Google's new Home Premium
6:33
offering. So now I'm paying 20 bucks a
6:35
month and I'm getting my Nest service and my cloud recordings
6:38
like I was getting before, but I'm also getting Gemini Pro and
6:42
I'm also getting a TB of storage in my Google One.
6:44
And they've bundled these offerings and Gemini is just now
6:47
part of the experience. It's going to be rolling out on
6:49
everybody's Google Homes at the beginning of 2026.
6:52
That's how they got me. I needed more storage and
6:54
they're like just upgrade, We'll throw in all this extra storage
6:56
and Gemini Pro and I was like, you got me.
6:59
You think all that data is not getting processed by them?
7:01
I haven't tried, but I could probably open Gemini and ask it
7:04
to pull up a picture of what's going on outside my house right
7:06
now on my nest Cam. I'll drop it later for the
7:09
editors to put in here. But leading up to this, I was
7:12
playing with the the new image stuff and I said put John and
7:15
Mark at a Coldplay concert and it's like you and I like having
7:20
the best time of our life at a Coldplay concert.
7:22
I send it the thumbnail that we use for our profiles and it just
7:27
perfectly did it. Gemini is much better at that
7:29
than ChatGPT is. Right?
7:31
You'll still get like the weird figures and then you get the
7:34
like I was playing with Sora yesterday and you'll get them
7:37
blocking the ability to put real people in things unless you go
7:41
through their cameo process where it like AI generates your
7:44
face within your specific Sora instance.
7:47
But Gemini, you can like literally upload a photo into it
7:51
and then just ask it to do something with the photo and
7:53
just comes to life. It's like magic right in front
7:55
of your eyes. It's getting good.
7:57
All right. Let's get into the parts of the
7:59
things that we're actually changing.
8:01
On the SEO side, one of the biggest changes we've made was
8:03
adding branded pages to almost every client site.
8:06
For anyone not familiar, what was the thinking behind that and
8:10
talk about how we started using AR itself to find the weak
8:13
spots? A branded page is just a page
8:17
about your brand that you control, right?
8:19
The the narrative with AI is not controlled by you anymore.
8:24
You can do things to influence it, but previously, like SEO
8:27
would lead to your website, right?
8:28
And someone would click on your website and you have 100%
8:30
control of that narrative with AI.
8:32
They could be pulling things from all over the place that
8:35
you're aware of or that you're not aware of.
8:37
What we started doing was when we would run prompts and our
8:41
clients weren't showing up for certain prompts.
8:43
Give me an example of a prompt we would search for this.
8:46
I know we've done this exercise a bunch so.
8:48
Who's the best car accident lawyer in X state and Y Right?
8:52
That's just something that someone who gets in an accident
8:55
may search or who gets the best results for car accidents,
8:59
settlements in this city. There's a lot of different
9:02
things that people search it. That's a whole separate
9:05
conversation about like the changing landscape of like the
9:07
queries that people are making. But when you run those searches,
9:11
inevitably it's going to provide some sort of generalized
9:14
information about choosing a lawyer and like taking it upon
9:16
yourself and don't rely on everything that we're saying
9:19
here. We can't give legal advice.
9:20
And then it actually gives you firms that you should
9:23
potentially call. If a client of ours didn't show
9:26
up for one of those terms, we would then just try and reverse
9:29
engineer the response and just ask why didn't you include this
9:33
firm in your response? And inevitably that gives you
9:36
the playbook on what is missing in the world's understanding of
9:41
your brand that you need to fill that gap.
9:44
The bigger a brand you are, the more likely you can influence
9:49
these signals than a smaller brand.
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Here's an example. Let's talk about the branded
9:54
pages, right? If someone runs a prompt and
9:58
doesn't show up and the reason why ChatGPT says they're not
10:02
showing up is because there's a lot of bad reviews about clients
10:05
or former clients say that communication is not great or
10:09
the end result is not what I expected, or they don't answer
10:14
the phone when I call or they pawned me off on a paralegal,
10:17
right. We can come up with all these
10:18
different specific things that it may say because it's pulling
10:22
some random review from Reddit from 2015, which that is not
10:27
hyperbolic in any way. That is actually something that
10:29
we saw happening. Someone just wrote a nice post
10:32
on Reddit, got a bunch of up up likes, up votes, and we wound up
10:37
getting pulled into the LLM. So you create a page on your
10:41
site, we just coined it, this branded page.
10:44
And it's around that, a specific concept and how your firm does
10:49
that concept really well. And it's not just writing about
10:53
how you do it really well. It's showing specific examples
10:56
of how you've done it really well.
10:57
And in the case of communication, that's an easy
11:00
one if you're a big brand, right?
11:02
Again, going back to the bigger you are, the more easy it is to
11:05
influence these signals. You're going to go into your
11:07
Google business profiles and you're just going to pull out
11:09
examples of reviews that talk about how amazing your
11:12
communication is. And you're going to drown out
11:14
the noise with the things that are in your control that you're
11:17
going to try and let everybody else know about, both humans and
11:21
AI. You can pull through your Google
11:22
reviews, positive ones. If you have specific sound bites
11:25
or clips from testimonials, you can, you know, take that piece
11:29
out of that video testimonial. Anywhere where you have positive
11:32
reviews, you can accumulate them on one page and try to control
11:35
the narrative as much as possible to kind of push it
11:37
front center. Yeah, and write about it, right?
11:40
Create a video like this is how much we value communication.
11:44
And have one of the attorneys at the firm or the office manager
11:47
have them talk about how communication works at the firm.
11:50
Start putting questions on that page about how your firm handles
11:55
different aspects of communication and then back that
11:58
up with, like you said, testimonials, reviews, specific
12:01
examples. If you don't have a review like,
12:04
try to create the narrative and describe situations without
12:07
giving away confidential information.
12:09
Real quick, before we move on to the next topic, what I want to
12:12
bring up is when we do this analysis, so we say, hey, why
12:14
didn't we show up? This is a unique response for
12:17
every firm or challenge we have to deal with.
12:19
So every tactics we difference based on that response.
12:22
And part of it could be, you know, John's example, bad
12:24
communication. If your firm sucks at
12:26
communication, we actually need to fix that issue because
12:29
putting up a brand page is not going to fix it.
12:32
You actually have to do the thing, right?
12:33
That's been the biggest SEO evolution of of this year has
12:38
been You can't just say you do the thing without actually doing
12:41
the thing and backing it up and presenting it outwardly in the
12:44
right way. Marketing SEO has gone back to
12:47
just doing marketing really well and then figuring out the right
12:51
way to technically showcase that on your website.
12:54
Move on to the next one. So traffic patterns are
12:57
changing, but conversions are going up.
13:00
Let's talk about how we've shifted to focus on what happens
13:03
after someone lands on the site. I know we've stopped defaulting
13:06
to like free consultation buttons to some other
13:08
strategies. Why?
13:11
So the era of direct response is at its tail end.
13:17
I'll take. I'll take.
13:18
Direct response heavily relies on people like taking immediate
13:21
action, like you're giving them urgency and like you need to
13:24
take action right now. Get your free consultation, call
13:26
us. Here's all the proof.
13:27
And you got all that in a 30 second commercial?
13:29
Still works incredibly well for e-commerce.
13:31
It does. However, I mean, Mark, don't
13:33
tell me that you don't do this right.
13:35
If you get an Instagram ad for like a new mattress cover or
13:39
like a cup of coffee or something, you're not just going
13:42
and buying it right away. You're going and you're Googling
13:44
and see what other people actually say about it.
13:45
It's like 5050, there's a price threshold.
13:47
If it's under 100 bucks and I want it and it has buy with
13:50
Apple Pay I almost get it immediately.
13:52
That's where you and I differ. Yes, but then for larger things
13:55
I do stop and do research on everything else.
13:57
See if they have a YouTube page, watch some videos on it, watch
14:00
some reviews about people talking about it.
14:01
I do go down the rabbit hole of doing additional research.
14:04
That is kind of the new modern buying pattern for consumers.
14:07
Direct response is becoming branding.
14:11
It's becoming the first step in the discovery funnel and it's
14:14
not the conversion point anymore like it used to be.
14:18
So the channels like TV, radio, whereas people traditionally
14:22
used to call the vanity number that was on that ad, they're now
14:26
hearing it. They may need you right now,
14:29
they may not. But when they do, they'll get
14:30
that recognition and then they'll just start Googling that
14:33
firm. You may capture that through a
14:35
branded paid search ad. A competitor or lead generator
14:37
might steal that branded search click.
14:39
They may go to ChatGPT and ask for the best car accident
14:43
lawyers and then recognize that one of the five that showed up,
14:46
they've heard somewhere else on one of these TV commercials,
14:49
there was a stat that you and I were talking about that you
14:51
brought up a couple days ago. I, I think the audience would,
14:54
would love to hear that. I don't remember what it was,
14:57
something about set, hearing something, seeing something, the
14:59
brand 7 times. Oh, so yes, there's a study,
15:03
it's called the zero moment of truth that Google did a couple
15:06
years ago. And it is the amount of
15:08
marketing you need to do. So when that moment of truth
15:11
someone's making a buying decision, who pops to their mind
15:14
of who they want to purchase from.
15:15
Think about these are like instant reactions where you
15:18
don't double think the purchase. So like a Nike or big brand
15:21
where it's a no commodity money that you're like, or an Apple
15:24
product, you're absolutely going to buy this because you know
15:27
it's the decision you want to make.
15:28
They broke it down. It's a lot more complex than
15:30
this. From the simplest perspective,
15:31
it's called the 711 four framework.
15:34
So for you to be a household name in that person's brain live
15:37
rent free, you need, they need to have consumed 7 hours of
15:40
content across 11 different touch points on four different
15:45
mediums or platforms for you to really them to know, feel like
15:48
they know you. For them to be sad if you died
15:51
and they saw it in the news like we do for movie stars and you
15:55
know, celebrities. When I saw that and I read the
15:57
research just drove home to me the amount of messaging and
16:00
touch points you need to do over the lifespan of brand marketing
16:03
for them to without a doubt think of your firm first.
16:06
If they are injured or a loved one is injured, that without a
16:09
doubt in their mind they're calling you.
16:11
That's, that's really important. But what's not taken into
16:14
account there is any of the negative sentiment that someone
16:16
might actually come across that could completely kibosh any of
16:21
the positive brand sentiment that was earned across those
16:24
touch points. And that makes marketing
16:28
exponentially harder because 1 bad thing that's out there, if
16:32
you don't combat it appropriately, can take all of
16:34
the positive brand equity and just squash it instantaneously.
16:38
So now I'm actually going to answer the question that you
16:40
asked me in the 1st place before we went off on this tangent,
16:44
which is about changing and focusing more on the clicks and
16:48
the traffic that you're actually getting and how that changes
16:51
conversion. More on conversion, less on
16:53
total traffic numbers. Traffic has always been this
16:56
like vanity metric that people point to on both sides of the
16:59
equation, right? That the agencies themselves or
17:02
the marketers as well as the firm's, because if you don't
17:05
understand the impact of that metric, it's the easiest metric
17:09
to go to, right? There's so many other factors
17:12
that come into account between the traffic and that turning
17:15
into a lead and then that lead turning into a case that let's
17:17
just look at traffic. So then you get the marketers
17:19
who will focus on like, how can I boost traffic through like
17:22
random pages about celebrities or, you know, stuff that's
17:26
trending in the news that has nothing to do with actually
17:28
generating a case. You got to get that noise out
17:31
and focus on of the convertible traffic.
17:34
What's the best route for you to get that person from visitor to
17:37
bleed and eventually claim it? And because traffic is just at a
17:43
macro level diminishing holistically, right?
17:45
AI, we know is just eating up traffic.
17:48
For those who don't know, the reason AI is is eating up
17:50
traffic is AIS job is to serve the answer immediately to the
17:54
person without having to have them click on anything.
17:57
Yeah, the only click comes through the citation or the
17:59
source of the answer that AI actually showed you.
18:02
This is usually very top of funnel traffic and even mid
18:05
level funnel. Not always bottom of funnel
18:07
traffic yet, but a lot of the top of funnel traffic is going
18:11
to a click list environment in the AI world.
18:14
Right. So when you actually do get a
18:16
click, those clicks are truly more valuable than the clicks
18:19
that you were getting previously because they took the deliberate
18:22
effort to get there. We're not fully at that point
18:25
yet. I think it'll be another 6 to 12
18:28
months before it, like AI, becomes a de facto first stop.
18:31
And whether that's within someone going to Gemini or just
18:34
going to google.com and it pops up AI mode or something similar,
18:38
that is the direction that we're moving and that traffic is more
18:40
and more valuable. Hot take alert, right when that
18:43
happens is when they'll start introducing more and more ads
18:45
into the platform as a way to monetize that, getting people to
18:49
your site at that point. Yes, I, I do not disagree with
18:54
you. It's like Facebook, right?
18:56
You go back 1520 years and like ads were not rampant through
19:00
Facebook. A lot of the ads were on that
19:01
like right hand sidebar. And as soon as like they won the
19:05
social media game, they were like, that's it.
19:08
We've got mass adoption now. We got to monetize it and they
19:11
moved from from growth to value. And, and, and it's all about
19:14
their shareholders, right? How much money can they make off
19:17
of every visitor? And in turn, how do we keep them
19:19
in our ecosystem and continue gathering?
19:21
It's a self fulfilling prophecy, gathering more data about the
19:24
people who are on our search results so we can serve them
19:27
more tailored ads so that we can get people to pay more because
19:30
we're making our customers, Google's customers, money.
19:34
All right. Another big shift for us started
19:37
last year, but especially this year was starting the use of
19:41
video. What's the connection between
19:43
video SEO and how AI evaluates a firm?
19:47
Video is extremely important. We we know this for a number of
19:51
reasons. First up, YouTube is I think the
19:55
second most visited search engine on the Internet behind
19:57
Google. That is correct.
19:59
People love consuming video. It's something that they can
20:02
see, it's something they can listen to, it's something they
20:05
can visually go through and get to the point of what they want
20:08
to People watching this, right? They're watching video.
20:10
It happens for a reason. So video content from a user
20:13
perspective is the best way that users can consume a concept.
20:17
In addition, Google owns YouTube, right?
20:21
That is not something that is hidden in any way.
20:24
They acquired YouTube, and YouTube is another method for
20:28
them to monetize users who are coming into their ecosystem.
20:32
It's also another place for them to get data about users and what
20:35
they're searching and what they're researching.
20:38
Google knows what's in every video, right?
20:41
It's not just the transcripts, but the transcripts are
20:43
important. But Google knows what's in every
20:45
video. It has visual recognition.
20:48
It listens to it, it understands it.
20:50
So it it believes that a video is going to be important in what
20:56
it is summarizing in an AI response.
20:58
It is going that potentially include that video big, bright
21:01
and center directly in the response that it's giving you
21:04
within Gemini or within ChatGPT gem and I more likely will serve
21:09
it because Google owns YouTube and they don't have to go out
21:12
and query some third party API to go grab that data back in.
21:16
They literally own the 1st and the second most visited search
21:19
engines on the Internet. So they have access to all this
21:22
data. Both Google's regular search
21:24
index and the video index. We've also seen video from a
21:28
traditional SEO standpoint help pages rank better.
21:32
So we'll do video shoots, as you know, Mark, where we'll plan
21:35
these shoots out. And it's not just like us
21:37
sitting down with an attorney and tell me about yourself and
21:40
how did you become a lawyer? No, that stuff is good, but
21:43
we're creating specific strategies around pairing a
21:47
video with a certain page and having like the lawyer talk
21:50
through something that is very specific.
21:52
It'll be a 62nd video or a 92nd video.
21:55
That video on the page will help the page rank better.
21:58
That transcript on the page gives you unique copy.
22:02
This is something that is sort of the next step in content
22:07
creation, right? Social media like Twitter was
22:10
huge. Now people are now heavily
22:12
relying on Reels and Tik Toks. Visual content is what people
22:16
want, and sometimes it's just a better way to get concepts and
22:21
explain those concepts. To bring this home to the
22:23
audience. So for example, if I'm in a car
22:25
accident and I'm having issues with my insurance company and I
22:30
have a very specific query, it pulls up a lawyer's page that I
22:33
want to understand, you know, how do I hire a lawyer when I've
22:36
been in the car accident to pay for my medical bills?
22:39
That article will get surfaced and I'll, I probably will read
22:42
it and skim it, but there's a video on there.
22:44
And then I see the lawyer talking about and explaining it
22:47
to me so that I fully understand it.
22:48
I'm like, oh, I trust this person.
22:50
He knows what he's talking about.
22:51
And this is a person I relate to, that I want to work with to
22:54
represent me and my claim. It bridges that gap way better
22:58
than any Britain piece of content ever would versus every
23:01
other lawyer that has that same page out on the Internet.
23:04
Yeah, I mean that that's the the user side of it, right.
23:06
Like absolutely consuming video content is is better.
23:10
It's a better user experience it.
23:12
Goes back to our last point as well.
23:13
It's video is helping us rank better from an SEO perspective.
23:17
So it's completely changed our strategy.
23:18
The video is ranking in YouTube very well for people searching
23:22
on YouTube. It's ranking the individual page
23:25
is ranking well in the search results.
23:26
The video is ranking in the search results.
23:29
And then when we get that click, it is helping us convert it even
23:32
more than before because those clicks are more valuable, per
23:36
our last conversation. Absolutely.
23:38
And and the creation of that video content gives you the
23:41
ability to create more content from that content.
23:43
We've seen like our clients take the the longer form videos and
23:47
cut them up into like social posts, social reels, quote
23:50
cards. Video is extremely important.
23:52
If you're not doing video, you need to be doing video.
23:55
You need to be deliberately thinking about how you're going
23:57
to be roducing video because it absolutely is a factor not only
24:00
in ranking but in conversion. Leading into video, a little of
24:04
a of a of a pivot, but very related.
24:07
We've also lead heavily into storytelling and authority
24:10
pages. What's the goal here?
24:12
Yeah, it's very similar to just the whole holistic video
24:15
strategy that we just spoke about, but it's putting it all
24:18
together, right? It's no longer existing in a
24:21
vacuum. It's taking that video and
24:23
saying, OK, this video that we're creating is a story.
24:27
We are telling a story about a concept and we've got real
24:30
people that relate to specific practice areas that we do at our
24:33
firm. We're going to talk about the
24:35
specific geographies that this happened in.
24:37
We're going to talk about everything that relates to this
24:39
case from start to finish. So you're encompassing the
24:42
entire client experience and what someone could potentially
24:45
experience if they become a client into one encapsulated
24:48
piece of content that they can consume either visually and
24:52
audibly through the video. They can read it.
24:54
We've got pictures. It's like just a huge hub for
24:58
the portrayal of a parallel experience that someone else who
25:02
maybe just like you has went through that you can expect your
25:05
experience to be similar to. I think it does a really good
25:09
job converting people and the fact of the matter is it just
25:13
takes way more work to get all that information from the law
25:15
firms to produce it. I would say a big gap we had to
25:19
bridge over the past year as SEO has changed was firms we work
25:24
with can no longer hire us and throw stuff over the fence and
25:27
expect us to do all the work without having to be involved.
25:30
They're very much working side by side with us day in, day out,
25:33
getting us the information based on all the lawyers in those
25:36
particular areas, specific accident information, as
25:39
detailed information we can get about that particular client,
25:43
the lawyer that did it, the paralegal that did the work.
25:45
They're getting very involved in the content creation process,
25:48
getting us all this information to help tell the story and build
25:52
all the unique authority points around that particular case or
25:56
practice area page we're writing.
25:57
I really like this topic. I think it's extremely important
26:00
that firms that want to take advantage of this changing
26:03
landscape of SEOAI, you know, owned visibility.
26:07
I'm not going to call it a EOGEO or or any of that.
26:10
The closest I'll get is SEO Plus.
26:13
If we're going to use an acronym, you have to understand
26:16
what you're getting yourself into.
26:18
If you are investing in this channel, it is no longer a I'm
26:24
going to hire an agency and expect them to just deliver.
26:28
It doesn't work that way anymore and anyone who is telling you
26:31
that is it is false. They will find holes in the dam
26:35
and they will take advantage of those holes until they get
26:38
plugged by Google or one of these AI systems and then
26:40
they're just going to try and whack A mole and find another
26:42
hole. It's not a sustainable strategy.
26:45
It's not the way that we're moving.
26:47
Those holes are getting plugged faster and faster as Google
26:49
updates happen more and more and models get more and more
26:52
sophisticated. It's not single lane anymore.
26:56
What is happening is SEO has become the evolution of now
27:01
taking all of these things that actually happened and turning
27:05
them into something digital that can be consumed by either AI or
27:10
by search. That's a big, big difference,
27:14
right? You had to have done great stuff
27:18
in order for us to be able to write about that great stuff.
27:21
Unless you're just going to flat out why, right?
27:23
But that's not, I don't think that's anyone strategy.
27:27
The idea is just like the brand pages that we spoke about, if
27:30
you have a challenge, right? Like if it's saying
27:33
communication is an issue, you actually have to have solved
27:36
that problem in order to write about it.
27:38
Your SE OS can't just write about it.
27:40
All the law firms from the SEO in the past are screaming hey
27:43
I'm the best lawyer. Now AI is saying prove it.
27:46
The proof is in the pudding of the actual results you've gotten
27:48
for those people in your city in those practice areas, and show
27:52
the evidence of that to the AI to get surfaced.
27:56
You want to hot take me again? Hot take a lawyer coming in.
27:59
The bad SE OS in the bad agencies in this space are the
28:04
ones who are still just doing that old garbage and telling
28:07
people it's just still going to work.
28:09
Their new manipulative way is they're going to find spammy
28:13
pages that were created all over the Internet that they can buy a
28:16
placement on that says best lawyers in X and they're just
28:19
going to place a link placement. It will not work long term.
28:23
And you're actually setting yourself up to be perceived by
28:26
AI as a law firm that is placing basically false listings in
28:31
places like we're not dealing with with humans anymore.
28:35
We're not really dealing with machine learning in the way that
28:37
we thought Google search worked in the past.
28:39
We're dealing with a sophisticated system that in
28:43
real time understands the context of what's happening out
28:47
there on the Internet and not looking at things in isolation.
28:49
A link is not just a link. The context of that link on the
28:53
website that it's on, the other firms or other listings that are
28:56
on it. Is it known as a place that
28:58
accepts paid listings? Like there's so much that goes
29:01
into it. It's actually going to become
29:03
harder to plug the holes than it is going to be to just work with
29:06
your agency and give them the information about how great work
29:09
you're doing at the firm and allowing them to turn that into
29:13
content in written form, audio form, video form.
29:16
Let them help you. Don't just say, hey, go do it.
29:20
I'm going to pay you X amount of dollars and go figure it out.
29:22
It will not work. Hot take, I agree, all right.
29:26
Another big evolution was how we structure content.
29:29
The way we build pages looks completely different.
29:32
Why are keeping pages shorter but building more of them part
29:36
of our strategy moving forward? Yeah.
29:38
So the way that we currently understand how these AI systems
29:42
work is largely based on how they consume content.
29:47
And I'm sure people have heard in the news about all these big
29:51
energy sources that are being put all over the world to power
29:55
all the AI systems that we use. Pretty sure Microsoft just
29:58
bought a nuclear plant for their AI data center.
30:01
It is immense. Immense, because so much
30:04
processing is getting done in real time.
30:07
Just just a quick caveat hot take if you think turn the
30:09
lights off is going to save the world.
30:11
Just prompt less. The data centers are pulling the
30:15
most amount of power of human history for AI.
30:18
If a crawler from AI could come to your site and get the answer
30:22
immediately and not have to process the rest of the page,
30:26
that is going to be more cost efficient.
30:28
At the end of the day, these AI companies are companies.
30:31
They are businesses and if across billions or trillions of
30:35
crawls that they're doing probably every hour, if they can
30:38
save a fragment a little fraction of money, that all adds
30:43
up for them. This is why I believe they don't
30:46
process JavaScript like that is not a thing that people can just
30:52
ignore. What the the crawlers do is they
30:54
take the raw HTML of your page. It's why the crawlers don't
30:58
process JavaScript, but AI it might be.
31:03
I don't it's not doing it yet and the amount of computing
31:05
power that that would take. I've seen some hot takes coming
31:08
out on LinkedIn, people saying that it is starting to it is
31:12
just an energy resource. That's all it is.
31:15
It's the reason why they don't do it is because it's not
31:17
efficient to do it right. To take this back to your your
31:21
question, the the idea is to give them what they need so they
31:25
can grab it and go away. Yep.
31:26
And what what is the term we use internally to call that piece of
31:29
content when we break it up like that?
31:31
Content chunking. Content chunking, yes.
31:34
The idea is, is to serve the answer to the intent in a as
31:40
easy to consume way as possible. So you're surrounding it with
31:43
structured data or schema, you're presenting it at the top
31:46
of the page, you're putting it in a format like a bulleted list
31:49
or a table or in a couple of sentences.
31:51
And you're allowing AI to come in, grab it and leave.
31:55
And that's it. Because previously we know
31:58
search surfaced entities, right? A business in the local pack, a
32:03
web page in the 10 blue links. That's not what AI is looking
32:06
for. It's not ranking your pages
32:08
anymore. It's taking pieces of your
32:10
content and citing it as a source.
32:13
It's a completely different thing.
32:14
And This is why links have kind of gone away.
32:16
The citations are just pulling people directly to where did
32:19
that information come from in AI?
32:21
It's very different than driving someone actually to like the
32:24
home page of a website. This is going to be an
32:26
interesting one. All right, let's talk about
32:28
tracking, because it's one thing to do all this, it's another to
32:31
measure it all. What are we doing now that we
32:34
couldn't measure before? The easiest thing to implement,
32:40
and one that we did as soon as we realized this was happening,
32:43
was measure the traffic that was actually hitting the website
32:46
coming from all the LLMS. Directly from an LLM.
32:49
Yeah, when you click on a link in an LLM, you'll see it adds
32:51
like a little UTM that references where it came from.
32:54
You just add that into a filter on Google Analytics.
32:58
For as much as I don't like GA 4, it captures what we needed to
33:02
and you can then tell the volume of traffic that's coming in.
33:04
You can tell the pages that that traffic is coming into.
33:07
Can't tell what people prompted, but you at least know the pages
33:11
that are winding up not only getting citations, but getting
33:14
clicks into those citations and driving traffic to your site.
33:16
Which going back to our conversation earlier about
33:19
conversion optimization, these are the pages that you need to
33:22
double down on your conversion optimization and make sure that
33:24
you're getting as much value out of those visitors as you can.
33:27
How does this data help our clients make better decisions on
33:31
what they're doing? It's an interesting question,
33:33
OK. I don't think it helps our
33:35
clients make better decisions right now.
33:37
I think what it does is it opens Pandora's box and they start
33:42
seeing like, oh, I'm getting traffic from these LMS.
33:46
What do I do with this? If you don't actually tie that
33:50
to a, a lead into a case, it gets much more complex than just
33:53
tracking it in GA 4. It now opens up to them asking
33:56
like, OK, well we got X amount of traffic from ChatGPT.
34:01
What did that do for me? Right?
34:03
You're, you're now reporting this to me separately from
34:05
organic Google traffic. Did I get a lead from it?
34:08
Did I get a case from it? Was that case more or less
34:11
valuable than a case I would have gotten from SEO?
34:15
So tying very simply those UTM's into your intake platform, into
34:19
your case management system and doing the same type of analysis
34:22
that you would do from any other marketing channel, that's what
34:26
it's doing. It's it's bringing AI into the
34:28
conversation with all the other marketing channels.
34:30
Once it delivers cases, now you got to know what do you do with
34:33
it? Is it efficient for us to try
34:35
and improve that visibility? Is it not?
34:38
How are the ways that we can double down on the things that
34:40
are working? It's the same questions you
34:41
would ask about any other marketing channel.
34:43
It it, this is sort of that inflection point, right?
34:46
The traffic is becoming somewhat meaningful.
34:48
It's eating into Google traffic. The visitors are coming.
34:51
What's going on with that traffic?
34:53
So from an SEO perspective, talk to me about how we should look
34:57
at SEO metrics moving forward in this new world.
35:00
For example, as we see impressions going up and clicks
35:02
going down, how do we interpret this?
35:04
If I'm a law firm owner, what how should I know if what my
35:08
agency is doing is working or not working in this this new
35:11
world we're living in? Yeah, that you always tell me
35:13
trust, but verify. Yes, First off, ask them, make
35:18
sure that their answers make sense.
35:20
Do some prompting by yourself, see what comes up, but realize
35:24
that the metrics that we have historically tracked are
35:29
becoming less and less relevant. I want to caveat the this part
35:33
of the conversation with SEO. Google still drives over 90% of
35:39
searches. We're not seeing that clients
35:41
are now getting, you know, twice as many cases from AI as they
35:45
were from SEO. It's in fact the opposite,
35:48
right? SEO is still the overwhelming
35:50
source of cases, but AI is climbing.
35:53
So just be careful not to make too many knee jerk reactions off
35:56
of the bright and shiny things. You have to ask the questions
36:00
and be very deliberate about the behaviors that you're taking and
36:03
making sure that you're not impacting the cases that you're
36:05
getting today. So putting that aside, right,
36:09
the metrics that people have historically tracked and have
36:12
decided to take action on have been rankings.
36:16
Rankings are, while directionally I would say
36:20
valuable, are no longer the leading indicator that they once
36:24
were. Absolutely not.
36:27
I mean, two weeks ago we had Google remove the ability for
36:30
the rank trackers to even work beyond page one, right?
36:33
Unless they're doing some sort of like weird thing where
36:36
they're like moving from page to page.
36:38
But historically, rank trackers were able to like do a little
36:41
thing in the their search that would show 100 results and they
36:44
would grab all that so that they can tell you where you rank
36:47
within those top 100 results. Google said we're not allowing
36:50
you to do that anymore. You can only do one page at a
36:52
time, which is why all the rank trackers broke a couple weeks
36:56
ago. So this isn't just me talking,
36:58
right? This is the reality of the world
37:00
that we're living in. The challenge we run into as
37:03
well as marketers and in this AI world is, for example, there's
37:06
all these tools coming out that show, hey, we're going to give
37:09
you reports on your AI visibility and how much you're
37:11
showing up in the AI search results, which some of them
37:15
might work pretty well. It'd be directly useful.
37:17
But we, we ran our own tests in house that I want John to talk
37:21
through with a very large firm in Florida and they got crazy
37:24
results. So sometimes tools are great,
37:27
but sometimes actually doing your own manual research gives
37:29
you really great data and information on what to work on
37:32
or where to go. So, John, can you just talk
37:35
about that little piece of research we did?
37:36
Yeah. So one of our clients came to us
37:39
and said, and this is a very, very large client, big TV,
37:43
billboard advertiser, they're everywhere in the state.
37:46
So they were prompting and they were saying why are we not
37:49
seeing ourselves show up? So the first thing I did was ask
37:53
them what they're prompting. Of course, like what they give
37:55
me is probably not exactly what they're typing in, but I take it
37:58
and I prompt it myself and I'm seeing them show up.
38:01
So I tell them, right? What we've realized is that
38:05
every time someone prompts, you're getting a different
38:08
result. There are so many factors that
38:11
are taking to account as to why. Of course, it depends on the
38:14
platform you're using, the previous sessions that you've
38:17
had, what it knows about you. I encourage everyone go into
38:20
ChatGPT. Just literally ask it, what do
38:23
you know about me and see what it says.
38:26
You'll fall off your chair. It also takes into account your
38:29
location. So there's all of these factors,
38:32
right? The uniqueness of it is
38:34
something that we've been dealing with for a while in
38:36
traditional search, right? Previous search history we knew
38:39
was taken to account, location we knew was taken to account.
38:42
But like it's a whole different ball game now with all the data
38:44
that's available. So we said, all right, you've
38:47
got one thing, I've got something else.
38:49
I'm going to put this theory to the test.
38:51
Reached out to our team and I said take this exact prompt
38:55
within the next hour, anyone who is available to do so.
38:58
And we got about 40 people who responded.
39:00
They said they that they would do it, said put this prompt in
39:03
chat GPTI don't want you to go into any sort of Incognito.
39:07
I just want you to just go in and just put the prompt in.
39:10
And then I want you to take this follow up prompt, which
39:13
effectively turned their prompts to their response into APDF file
39:18
and then send me the PDF files. OK, it grabbed, we got I think
39:22
38 respondents and we took all of those results and I actually
39:27
reanalyzed them. We threw them back into ChatGPT
39:30
and I had I had it identify the similarities or lack of
39:34
similarities between those 38 different responses.
39:38
And the biggest take away was to a very high statistical
39:41
significance. None of the two were even nearly
39:44
identical or similar. Yeah, that was wild.
39:48
Like the firm that we're discussing showed up the most
39:51
across all of the searches in like the top three results.
39:55
But the the spattering of firms that showed up was wild.
39:59
We had major competitors and we had nobodies.
40:02
I said that nicely, but nobodies.
40:05
What was really interesting about this was some of the
40:08
people who work on that client were the ones who didn't see
40:12
that firm show up. Yeah, they're constantly on that
40:14
site. Yes.
40:15
And they're constantly on the site and they're constantly
40:17
asking ChatGPT about that firm and they knew that they worked
40:21
on that client. ChatGPT knew that they worked on
40:24
that client. So when they asked, the prompt
40:26
response given was, well, why would I surface that firm for
40:30
you? You already know of everything
40:31
about them. Think about that.
40:33
It's purposefully not surfacing things for you because it thinks
40:37
that you just already know it because you've done so much
40:39
research about that firm with that LLM already.
40:42
So I need to figure out how to train ChatGPT to recommend only
40:49
the right things to my wife when she's buying me Christmas
40:52
presents by fake searching things that I don't want.
40:56
Mark Bot. Yeah, it was.
40:59
It was very, very eye opening in great exercise for us to do.
41:05
And I, I challenge everyone that's listening to this to do
41:08
themselves with their team, say, hey, this is the prompt we're
41:11
running, this is the LM we're using, we're using ChatGPT,
41:15
everyone do it within the next hour and send the results back.
41:18
The time frame was was important to me because I wanted to
41:20
isolate like people doing it at different times of day as a
41:24
variable. Like you try to control as much
41:25
as you can with any experiment. But we had people all across the
41:29
country, right? Different roles,
41:31
responsibilities. And yeah, man, that was, that
41:36
was wild. Wild.
41:37
If you and I are going to go on Google and we're going to search
41:39
the same thing right now, like, OK, like we'll get maybe minor
41:43
variance as long as it's not like a hyper localized keyword.
41:45
Make it like a position or two different.
41:47
But to get like that level of differentiation, that is
41:51
amazing. All right.
41:52
Let's move on to the last major shift this year has been link
41:56
building. We've moved completely away from
41:58
like huge volumes of links. I wouldn't say completely moved
42:01
away. How are we thinking about link
42:03
building differently now? For those who don't know, link
42:06
building is the unsexiest part about SEO.
42:09
Don't tell that to a link builder.
42:10
Yes, they will agree. This is just like SEO as a
42:14
whole, right? When we're here talking about
42:16
SEO, it means so many different things to us that it means to a
42:20
law firm who hires an SEO agency and even to other SEO agencies.
42:23
So again, I'll caveat, like when we're talking about link
42:26
building, I want to talk to you about how we talk about link
42:28
building and then maybe how others talk about link building.
42:31
When we say link building, we're talking about real organic
42:35
natural outreach that we're doing to other websites in an
42:39
effort to get them to link back to resources that we have
42:42
created for our clients to generate actual links, like a
42:46
clickable link that someone could get to your site.
42:48
Now, are those links necessarily going to drive large amounts of
42:51
traffic? No, they're being done because
42:53
Google understands that the more sites that link to you, the
42:57
higher they should be ranking you.
42:59
There's a lot of nuance to that statement, he just said.
43:01
But from a high level simple concept that is correct.
43:04
Yeah, and you want it to be as close of a Nexus to your website
43:08
as possible, right? So you don't want like a cooking
43:11
blog to link out to you and you know, say that you're a website
43:15
about cookies when you're a law firm.
43:18
It's it has the more contextually relevant that it
43:20
is, the more valuable that link is.
43:21
So that's that's how we look at it.
43:23
And the way that we do it has always been create really,
43:25
really great content. Make it a statistic driven,
43:29
data-driven, unique as possible to that firm, and then just
43:33
reach out. We'll find other websites and
43:35
we'll just craft very specific emails to those websites in an
43:39
effort to get them to share the resource.
43:41
Which is why we don't ever tell our clients you're going to get
43:44
10 links a month because we don't do know what others do,
43:48
which is link insertions, where they're buying placements on
43:51
websites, guest posts, where they're paying for the right to
43:55
write an article on someone else's website and insert links.
43:58
We're not doing PBNS. We're not doing all of the
44:01
nefarious stuff out there that people do to earn links.
44:04
They're not earning them, they're buying them.
44:06
So there's a very clear distinction here.
44:08
So when we're talking about link building, we're talking about
44:11
the first thing that I spoke about, which is earning your
44:13
links, earning your references, earning your citations.
44:16
So what has changed about this is that two big things.
44:20
One is links. Now there's more opportunities
44:26
to earn backlinks than there were before because links can
44:32
come in many, many different formats.
44:35
So we have found an opportunity to increase brand visibility for
44:42
our clients by getting them featured in the press, getting
44:46
them featured on podcasts, getting them and their expertise
44:51
to be showcased in some way somewhere else, which then earns
44:54
a link. Being, you know, podcast guest,
44:56
expert commentary on a a news article that's featured on
45:00
something topically relevant to happen in the city or whatever
45:02
is going on, stuff like that. Yeah, so there's just been more
45:06
ways to earn links. But with the advent of AI, what
45:09
we're starting to realize is that before where we only wanted
45:12
what was called a do follow link, like a special way that
45:14
link had to be placed. Now even a mention is important.
45:19
You don't have to have to even have a link.
45:22
Someone tagging you on social media, someone writing a post on
45:27
Reddit that just references your firm without a link.
45:29
Like AI understands that that is your firm.
45:33
So any opportunity that we could find for someone to just
45:36
increase the brand perception and mention your firm coexisting
45:41
to things that are related to your geography, your practice
45:45
areas, your expertise that is helping, it's helping SEO, it's
45:49
more so it's helping AI visibility.
45:51
If you're listening to this OK, how do I game Reddit and
45:53
Instagram to get more mentions and links?
45:55
Don't, that's not the right mindset.
45:57
It's how do I actually drive value to my community to have
46:01
them mention me on Instagram in a positive way.
46:04
And whatever the motions that I need to do as a firm to get to
46:08
earn that trust and visibilities where someone wants to take a
46:10
picture with us, take a video with us and tag us in a post.
46:14
It goes back to like, it's the same thing.
46:17
We were getting very technical here, but at its core, it's like
46:20
just do great things and the goodwill come.
46:25
Now marketers will help amplify that.
46:26
But like you have to think about it the sort of inverse of how
46:30
people thought of it before where it was like, hey,
46:32
marketers, what do I need to do in order to to get more
46:35
business? Now it's here, marketers here,
46:38
all the things that I'm doing that are great, figure out what
46:40
to do with that to help improve my visibility.
46:43
If you're listening and wondering how AI actually
46:46
describes a firm describes your firm, that's a good place to
46:49
start. Because the truth is, SEO isn't
46:51
about gaming a system anymore. It's about earning your future
46:55
clients trust and your communities trust.
46:57
Let's land this plane, John. Final closing comments for you.
47:01
God that I don't know when people are watching this, but
47:04
take everything I say with a grain of salt if it's not like
47:07
within a week of when this thing actually goes out because AI and
47:10
SEO are moving so, so fast. So yeah, trust and validate.
47:14
This is a super fun one. We could have gone on easily for
47:17
another hour. Can't wait to get this out.
47:18
Thank you everyone for listening.
47:20
If you like this content, don't forget to like, comment and
47:23
subscribe. Share with anyone who you might
47:25
think might find this valuable and then let us know if there's
47:28
a future topics that you want us to cover.
47:30
We love doing these sessions, just John and I, and we continue
47:34
and playing to do more of these in the future.