Authority & Personal Branding: The Lawyer’s Blueprint for Unshakeable Trust

In this episode of AI SEO for Law Firms, John Maher and John McDougall explain why authority, experience and personal branding matter so much in ‘your money or your life’ legal topics. They cover Google’s E‑E‑A‑T signals, how to upgrade attorney bio pages, why writing a book instantly boosts perceived expertise, and how PR, media mentions and schema markup all work together to prove real-world authorship and trust to search engines and AI.

John Maher: Welcome to AI SEO for Law Firms, the podcast that cuts through the tech noise to give you the exact roadmap for dominating Search Everywhere Optimization and landing high-value cases. From McDougall Interactive, I’m John Maher and with me as our founder, John McDougall. Today we’re talking about authority and personal branding. Hey, John.

John McDougall: Morning, John.

Why AI Trusts Authoritative Law Firm Brands

Maher: So John, we know that for lawyers especially, trust is one of the foundations of a practice. Why does AI give preference to people it can discern have authority and how does strong personal branding strengthen that signal?

McDougall: So AI prioritizes safety, especially in “your money or your life” type of scenarios like law. So your money or your life is a Google thing and it means essentially if your website, if it’s about finance, or law, or certain key things of your life that could affect you, health, if you recommend dangerous supplements or crazy things, you’ll be judged more, algorithmically and by search engines and AI, than in other [areas], like if you’re just selling T-shirts or something.

Maher: Right, something where it doesn’t really matter if mistakes are made or something like that.

McDougall: Right. So do you have to be an authority on rock concert T-shirts to sell T-shirts? Is it that critical, this authority building stuff? Not as much. But for lawyers, it falls into that Google category of greater scrutiny. And then there’s EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, another thing from Google. And what that means is they need to see you’re a trusted website, essentially. And it used to be just E-A-T for experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And after ChatGPT came out, they added, “Well, geez, we got to see their experience, too, because everybody’s now pumping out AI slop content. How can we tell the difference between really good stuff and not so good stuff?” And that extra E for experience, like your case studies and how you actually work with clients, is another level of signal of trust.

Key Law Firm Website Elements That Prove Authority

Maher: So let’s talk about some practical steps. What are some of the key website elements that lawyers need to implement to prove their digital authority?

McDougall: Well, a bio page is number one, and I think most law firms have bio pages. We do see some clients not doing that or, if they do it, they’re pretty weak. A good bio page would have clear credentials, quality headshots, and amazingly even some big clients we work with don’t have the best headshots. I saw on Facebook an ad, I haven’t tried it yet, but an AI headshot tool. I should look it up, but it looked really good. You take a picture with your iPhone and then this tool puts you on awesome backgrounds. In front of a brick wall, in front of a nice building. It’s crazy. It’s pretty cool, but we have a client right now, a very good client, and they just have these terrible photos of the attorneys. It drives me nuts. And the picture of one attorney is so different from the next one and they just don’t match, like brand wise.

So little subtle things like that can be important. But beyond that, you want to put up links. Have your traditional lawyer bio, but then links to if you have speaking engagements, publications, if you’ve written a book, media features. All of those key things that signal trust and authority should be there and linked to. Otherwise, it’s just kind of a boring bio. So those are some key things.

How Attorney-Authored Books Boost Legal Authority

Maher: And you often recommend writing a book. How does an attorney authored book instantly amplify personal branding and authority for Google and AI?

McDougall: Yeah, a book instantly confers authoritativeness and it’s a great value proposition. You wrote the book on your area of law. I mean, for people watching this on YouTube, here’s one we wrote for dog bite law, Your Family’s Guide to Dog Bite Law, and one on mesothelioma, again, for families dealing with these issues. And it’s great for customers and it’s great to send to people, especially for something like mesothelioma. These are very expensive cases and you may be sending a pocket folder, with some key stuff, to good leads that you’ve gotten. But if you can slide in a little gift book in there that is short and easy enough to read, it’s just so powerful. It’s such a branding key thing.

And right now we’re writing a book. So we do podcasts. We’re on podcast five of eight podcasts we’re doing to write this book, AI SEO for Law Firms. My first book, when I spoke at Harvard, I kind of joked, poked fun at myself, for taking three to four years to write a 420 page book that became a college textbook, which was nice, but don’t spend years doing it.
Just start a podcast, turn those into transcripts. Those can become blog posts. You get Google ranking, you get authority. But then either with AI or a human or a combination of both, you can take those transcripts and turn that into a book very easily.

And even if you did that with AI, it wouldn’t necessarily not rank well in Google because it’s all you talking. If you take your YouTube channel and your podcasts and you use AI to make a book out of that, you still want to edit from what AI would do with the transcripts to make it more human. But all of what you said is your unique angle. So I think that’s an easy way to write a book and it really means there’s no excuse not to have one. And with the benefit of being an author, I think that’s a great way to go.

And AI will recognize that a book is an entity connected to an attorney, and an entity being a defined object or person or thing. That’s part of how search engines and AI works is they classify things. And a book is a powerful signal, not just for people, like I just said, but for the algorithms.

Using PR and Press Releases to Build Law Firm Authority

Maher: So beyond traditional media, how can lawyers use public relations to build authority? And are we kind of going backwards, in a way, back to where we were using public relations and PR a lot in the early days of SEO?

McDougall: So yeah, early SEO around I would say late ’90s, early 2000s, we’d do press releases, even free press release submissions, like we’re going to get backlinks for Google. And in the early days that worked, and then everybody did it like lemmings, everyone jumped on that bandwagon and it became ridiculous. Writing a press release if you stubbed your toe. A press release is supposed to be who, what, when, where, why. Some kind of event driven or trend driven thing, not just anything. And so people were making up stupid press releases multiple times a week and that really pissed Google off.

And so it became a negative, but now AI is looking at brand citations and mentions across the internet. And even though it’s not necessarily a followable backlink, or even a backlink, if you submit a press release and you’re all over the place on all kinds of media websites, even if you’re just mentioned, there is a little ping that happens, like a little extra buzz that goes out to AI they pick up on. And they’re less algorithmically critical of that than Google because Google had to put a dampening effect on that because everybody was overdoing it.

But AI doesn’t think that way. AI just sees the mentions of you and gives you some credit for that. So I think press releases are a simple way to get brand citations. And one way to get that going very quickly is using ChatGPT to write a press release. Which is reasonable, especially if you have a specific event or you published a book or you want a certain case.
What you’re feeding ChatGPT for the press release is by nature unique because it’s something about you and your event or trend.

So I think it’s reasonable to write press releases with at least a first draft with AI, and you’d be amazed how fast that is. It’s incredible because AI knows what a press release is. It’s read every press release ever written, essentially. So it’ll give you a pretty good structure, as opposed to if an intern wrote a press release, they’d write some long story. That’s not a press release. It’s like an article. A press release has a certain format, but AI knows what that format is. So I would say just go for it. Just don’t overdo it, but it’s a great way to just signal more trust. And it’s a dual win because you build algorithmic authority. And then again, you can put those media logos on your website and get some added trust for people visiting.

Technical SEO Signals That Prove Legal Authorship

Maher: So what are some of the technical ways that we can connect the dots and prove authorship and authority to AI?

McDougall: You can use attorney and profile schema markup. Schema markup sounds crazy, but it’s just like a little bit of code that goes into a website page to tell Google and AI and general various large language models about what’s on the page. “Hey, this is a attorney, it’s a profile page, it has a video on it, it’s in a certain location”. You can use schema for various things and you can use AI to write schema code, which used to be difficult. And you’d have to pick which format to write it in. And it was a little technical and nerdy, but now, don’t worry about it. Just ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini, etc., “write schema code for this page”, or for my website, “give me good schema code across my website”. And it’ll give you the essentials. You can give that to your web design agency. And if they haven’t gotten on top of that, they should. And this will prompt them and it should be their job to go and implement it. Or if you’re a solo practitioner, you can look up how to implement that through a WordPress plugin type of thing. But yeah, schema is a good one.

Clear authorship — ensure clear and consistent authorship on every piece of content. So never post as “posted by admin” in WordPress. That’s another pet peeve. You can’t do that. You have to identify…every piece of content on your site has to have a clear author. And those authors would have boxes, and connecting the dots essentially of how they go together with the author’s social media profiles and things like that. Yeah, so I would make sure that you use schema, use authorship, and build a strong link profile. That’s another signal of authority, getting backlinks to your content. And then just ranking in Google is an authoritative signal of its own, so taking all of those steps and then getting ranked is authority in itself.

Maher: All right, well, that’s really great information, John, thanks again for speaking with me today.

McDougall: Yep.

Maher: And thanks for joining us on AI SEO for Law Firms. If you’re ready to stop losing high value cases because of outdated SEO, subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And for a deeper look at your firm’s current AI strategy, visit mcDougallinteractive.com for a free audit.