Does Blogging Still Work for Law Firms in the AI Era?

In this episode, John McDougall of McDougall Interactive explains why blogging still works for law firms in the age of AI when it is built around authoritative, strategically connected content. He covers AI slop, EEAT and YMYL, topic clusters, podcasts and video, Search Everywhere Optimization, and a medical malpractice SEO case study.

Why Generic Law Firm Blogging No Longer Works

John McDougall: Hey, it’s John McDougall, and welcome to AI SEO for Law Firms. Thanks for joining me. So does blogging still work for law firms in the age of AI? Not if you’re just using generic AI slop. Not if you’re just paying seventy-five bucks for a an outsourced blog post, especially, you know, say, overseas content or low-end SEO agencies. That content, especially if it’s very top of the funnel, generic content, is just not going to rank.

In the old days, you know, 10, 15 years ago, certainly even before that, but in the old days you could get 500 word articles, basic articles ranking really well, and it would help your law firm get leads from SEO. Now everybody’s got ChatGPT. They’ve got Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all that stuff.

And people are using it obsessively, aggressively. most of the recent customers that we’ve gotten have come to us specifically because either they’re using AI or their agency was using AI and SEO is not working for them. They’re not getting cited in ChatGPT, so their AI SEO is not working. And this

Podcast today will be a quick explanation of why. So blogging definitely still works, but it has to be done strategically and using topic clusters and building your brand and authority. And I’ll tell a quick story, basically, a case study of a medical malpractice lawyer in Ohio that we work with, where the blogging was a big part of the the wins. The end of that story is that May of this year, they said they were already on pace to have done basically what they did the year before, with you know, because of our our work. So they’re you know, really doubling their total business.

Medical Malpractice SEO Case Study: Blogging and Growth

And the leads were coming in primarily from organic content marketing that we’re doing. That prompted them to then hire us to do Google ads, Facebook ads, things like that. And now we’re we’re doubling down, tripling down. But really what kicked it off was the SEO.

And the client actually had hired us, you know, maybe a half a dozen years ago. And for whatever reason, n not every agency keeps every client forever, so they they let us go at one point.

We felt like they weren’t really approving the content readily and that’s never a good a good thing with SEO campaigns. if the clients don’t approve the content and it doesn’t go live, Google doesn’t see it, the results won’t be there and it’s, you know, usually going to end bad. So they let us go and I noticed a year later and then another year later I said, Hey, you know, you emailed them and I said, “Hey, looks like your SEO is completely tanked”. Like not just tanked, but went to almost zero, like five or ten keywords, something crazy. So they got on a call with us and it turned out their agency changed the domain name didn’t know anything about 301 redirects or basically technical seo and then just started blogging and doing some content but they destroyed the entire technical foundation, the domain name the branding.

And that resulted in that, you know, all the work we did that got them ranked really well. I mean, they were ranking for some, I think it was a couple, I forget, I think a couple thousand keywords when we first were working with them. You know, definitely going from like a hundred or two hundred keywords up to a couple thousand.

And so it was good. And then they went, you know, so like a a roller coaster ride when you look at like SEMrush or any SEO reporting tool, they went up and then they let us go and they went down. Now they’ve gone double up. So they’re the you know, they’re approaching five thousand keywords, four thousand three hundred keywords or so. so we love this case study because they went straight up with us, then they went straight down when they let us go, and then they hired us again and they went straight up again and not only you know good SEO rankings but like I said they’ve doubled the size of their business at least so the results aren’t just on paper they’re actually getting really good cases.

And what did that? Yes, blogging was a major part of that, and that’s why I’m saying yes, blogging still works even in the age of AI. It’s just that Google and Chat GPT don’t need another 500-word, you know, what is negligence article or, you know, what to do after a car crash.

EEAT and YMYL Standards for Legal Content

You know, it it’s not that a little bit of that content won’t be okay in the overall editorial calendar, but a lot of people are making the mistake of hitting too much the top of the funnel, meaning, you know, very, very content where they’re not necessarily looking to hire a law firm or even middle of the funnel where they’re starting to think through their decisions, trying to figure out what statute of limitations are, or, you know, the process of of you know medical malpractice or personal injury or whatever kind of lawsuits.

So that strategy, that is all too common, people just thinly blogging, and AI slop blogging, and not realizing that if you can use originality.ai to check if your blogs or your agency or writer who’s blogging for you is, you know, all AI content, obviously so can Google and the other, you know, large language models and and various engines. in the legal space, it’s even more critical to work on your EEAT. EEAT is a Google acronym for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And so you need to show with your testimonials, case studies, you know, that you actually have experience.

Your expertise could be you’re a super lawyer, you know, various certifications. Your authority would be did you write a book? Do you have a a blog, a podcast, a video YouTube channel? What levels of authority can be discernible? Do you say you know on your blog that your articles are posted by your name, not just posted by admin or posted by the firm name?

And then the last of EEAT is T for trust. And Google says that that’s the most important so that really is straight up Google reviews, testimonials, things like that, even you know on lawyer directory reviews, things like that. so that stuff is critical because in the legal vertical Google considers it YMYL another Google acronym Your Money or Your Life.

Using Podcasts to Create Attorney-Led Authority Content

And what Google looks at is, in the world of say finance and health and complicated legal things that could really affect you very negatively; obviously, your money, if someone gives you bad financial advice on a blog, they could they could bankrupt you. Or bad health advice, you could be, I don’t know, drinking turpentine or something. Who knows what the the latest health craze is? And it’s like, make make yogurt with turpentine. I’m giving a weird example, but there are crazy blogs out there. And so Google has to combat that with algorithms and concepts. And so money and health are big, but also law is also in there in your money or your life, where the level of emphasis where Google’s going to look at your EEAT factors is the bar is raised.

So just blogging and not thinking about that stuff, you know, how Google is going to respect not only your brand, but the people, the the attorneys, the you know, whoever’s writing the the content on the site needs to be identified, as I mentioned, as a blog author. At the bottom of a blog post, there should be an author box linking to the author’s social media. And that helps establish EEAT and trust, and credibility, and help Google and ChatGPT understand that you’re really truthful experts on your topic. So blogging without that was totally possible many years ago. Blogging without that now that there’s just so much content floating around is just much less likely to work.

And one of the mechanisms that we use is called “Talk Marketing”. And I coined that term and I own talkmarketing.com and wrote a book called Talk Marketing, although that was my third book, and then my fourth book is coming out this year, AI SEO for Law Firms. But in in these books, I talk about podcasting and YouTube optimization as a mechanism to build your EEAT, your authority, and and your blog.

And your SEO overall and your Google, you know, your ChatGPT ranking. And so the idea is blogging is great, but sometimes you’re outsourcing it, right? Or the attorneys don’t want to take the time to write. So maybe you just kind of live with the agencies doing it. And agencies like ours that specialize in law firm SEO and AI SEO and marketing, that’s one thing.

Repurposing Podcasts for Blogs, YouTube and Social Media

So we have retired lawyers that write for us and that’s very helpful. Certainly there are agencies that just write legal content that could even get you disbarred. But when you get an attorney on a podcast for even say 10 minutes, the content is so high level because it’s right out of the horse’s mouth, so to speak. It’s very authoritative content by nature of its conversation with an expert. And that attorney only has to show up, even 10 minutes a month would be a huge benefit. But if you did, say, four 10-15 minute interviews a month with an attorney, or say you’re a bigger firm, you could do, you know, four attorneys could put ten minutes each in, and you’d have a weekly podcast.

And that content will be way more powerful than just weak blogging with, you know, the wrong kind of agency that doesn’t have great legal writers, so it’s easy to do. That’s huge. That’s a way to get your blog really off the ground easily.

And the mechanism for that is this. I’m using Riverside right now. We used to use Squadcast, but it got bought by Descript and kind of blew up a little bit. But whether it’s Riverside or another tool, you hit “record”. Ideally you, if you have someone interviewing you, you set up, say, five questions and a good keyword rich title, you know, “Does blogging still work for law firms in the age of AI”? I mean that’s chock full of reasonable keywords. I could have said, you know, “AI SEO for law firms”, “top five tips” or something, but you know, you have to be reasonable. You have to try and get your keywords in your blog titles and also make them interesting and reasonably viral. So you do need to do both of those. But the key is talk marketing allows you to record with the experts themselves so it will pass that EEAT filter.

You know, it’s good for YMYL topics where Google’s really scrutinizing you. And you also get the side effect or a byproduct of videos. So right now the webcam is running. And I can take the entire podcast episode that we’re recording right now and put that up as a wide-format video on YouTube and then take the audio portion and put that, you know, you download the files from Riverside. Both the MP4 video files and the MP3s and WAV files. You could probably just use the MP3, the more compressed, lighter weight file, but that’s fine for the internet. So that’s what we usually use. You download those, you edit those, you know. Basically, the YouTube summary of the entire episode gets cropped to be you know, just cleaned up very lightly because it’s the entire video. You put that on YouTube, you can make Shorts out of each of the questions.

So if there’s someone interviewing you, you take, you know, Riverside will capture them separately. So you put them on the screen, and then you answering the question, all under, say, 60 seconds to get a nice Short. And then those Shorts go up on YouTube.

And then you could take your YouTube Short channel and automatically feed that through repurpose.io to Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn, things like that if you’d like. But most importantly, you would take the audio file, take out the “ums” and the “ahs”, and you know, maybe any minor screw-ups, clean it up a little bit, add music if you didn’t automatically insert that with a mixing board or something when when you started the recording. And then

Search Everywhere Optimization for Law Firms

And then you upload that to LibSyn or SoundCloud, one of the the, you know, podcast hosting services, ’cause you have to have that to host the podcast. That can then be fed into iTunes through an RSS or, you know, Spotify and things like that.

But most importantly, you put that LibSyn, say, you know, whatever podcast hosting service you use, embed that at the top of a blog post, and then take the transcript of what was said in this 10-minute episode, and you can have a thousand, fifteen hundred-word transcript. And that’s a lot of great text that the search engines love. And if it’s the right topic, the right keywords, you’re going to get respected for publishing regular podcast blog posts where you have the transcript listed.

So that’s number one. Keep your blog active with some talk marketing content, meaning podcasts that also have have videos associated with them. You’re building your podcast channel, your blog, your social media with your videos, all at the same time with very little effort.

Again, look even once a month for 10 minutes, the amount of benefit you get, not if you don’t have an active YouTube channel, and we certainly come across plenty of lawyers…I think the the lawyer that I just mentioned that had the wildly successful SEO campaign twice with us and doubled the size of their firm, we had to start a new YouTube channel because they didn’t even have access to their old YouTube channel. And there were like thirty or forty really crappy 20 second talking head, you know, lawyer talking head videos on there. So they couldn’t there was no way to get access. They didn’t get the passwords. The agency didn’t do a good job to hand that off to them. So we had to just start over. but that’s not that uncommon, amazingly.

Because in the age of AI, Chat GPT and the large language models, they’re looking at social media. They’re looking at Reddit, they’re looking at Quora, they’re looking at YouTube. Maybe, “did you write a book and is it on Amazon?” Somewhere here I have one of the books we wrote. Well, here’s an early book we wrote, for those watching it.

Building Topic Clusters for Law Firm SEO

“Your Family’s Guide to Dealing with Mesothelioma”. We have another, you know, dog bite law, “Your Family’s Guide to Dog Bite Law”. Get those up on Amazon, and then AI has that giant brain, right? It’s the Star Trek computer. It can “see”, in quotes, “see or smell” that this lawyer or law firm is everywhere. And we call that “search everywhere optimization”. So if you’re just text blogging, you don’t get all that benefit. And we see plenty of law firms come to us and they are text blogging, but again, they might not even know how to log into their YouTube channel. And they say “podcast, my God”, they never started a podcast. And podcasts are still, I would say, an extra level of of big win because less people are doing them. Everyone’s on YouTube now and it’s obviously fantastic. You can’t not do it, in my opinion. But blogging, a lot of people start and stop podcasts. I’ve done that myself, I’m getting this going again.

But podcasts give you a bit of a leg up, not everyone keeps them up, and then you get all the multimedia content. And that’s what we call “search everywhere optimization”. And it, if you want to come up in AI, you can’t just text blog. So blogging still works, but blogging haphazardly on a bunch of random topics, especially top of the funnel, that AI can already answer easily, no, that doesn’t work. Is SEO?

Is SEO dead, yeah that SEO is dead. Is SEO dead if you do it the right way? Absolutely not. Google’s one of the biggest websites in the world still, you know, absolutely. Will that change? Yeah, it is changing as we speak but, you know, statistically speaking, Google’s still a massive, massive, giant source of leads and website. so you really need to think about search everywhere optimization when you’re blogging and

Also building out what are called topic clusters. So in the world of medical malpractice, there’s birth injury, there are never events. Those are two examples of topic clusters that we’ve done where we want to have at least a dozen pieces of content on birth injury. That’s a very expensive type of lawsuit. Obviously very sad, you know, when when babies have problems or even in some cases die. If there’s, you know, poor hospital care, you know, a problem with the doctor.

So you’re not going to rank really well for birth injury lawsuits if you just blog once in a blue moon on that topic because you’re a medical malpractice lawyer, there are whole websites with a thousand, two thousand pages just on birth injury. So if Google’s trying to rank you and comparing you to other sites that are massive on that one subject, well, you better get your act together and cover that topic really deeply.

Connecting Blogging, Multimedia and AI Search Visibility

So one of the things that you can do, if you’re not sure how to get started, is pick one topic and just do a dozen pieces of content on that one topic. Maybe for the next three months, write 80%, 70, 80% on that one topic, so that Google will see that you have interconnected pages and topic clustering is just that. Think Wikipedia. If you go to Wikipedia and you look up the history of Scotland or National Law Review, even, or something like that. Or the amendments to the constitution. You know, pick a topic and you’ll see you go to wikipedia and you get sucked in right because there’s all these little links in the paragraphs to other cool related stuff and when you go to one of those subtopics when you click a link to the, you know, from that master main topic you kind of get lost but they’re smart. They also link you back.

So the main pillar page, or the hub page, as they’re called, will link to the subtopic or cluster pages, those then need to link back to the pillar page, the mothership. And if you don’t, it’s not really a topic cluster. A topic cluster by nature has to interlink back and forth from the parent page to all the little baby topic cluster pages. And those could all be blog posts or you could have like we have a dog bite law page where we’ve made a personal injury lawyer in Massachusetts millions and millions of dollars from dogbite lawsuits.

And we started out generically writing about, you know, 15-20 years ago when they hired us. They had like a FindLaw site and a bunch of like generic auto accident content that was all duplicated all over other websites. So we started, “hey, let’s pick one topic and really narrow the focus.” So that was pretty forward thinking, right? Because that was 2008 or 2009 or something like that. And people are talking about narrowing your focus now because of AI, like it’s brand new, but we’ve been doing it a very long time.

But it’s still highly relevant. You know, narrowing your focus, kind of like niching down and narrowing your focus actually gets you more business. It’s like that with blogging. If you have eight or ten blog posts in the next three months, say, you’re blogging weekly and eight out of twelve of those are on birth injury and they’re all interconnected with one nice main master page linking to the subtopics, you’re way more likely to go way up in Google. And so that’s topic clustering, really a critical concept.

And then being multimodal, so adding, you know, videos and podcasts, FAQ blocks, not just wide format video, but YouTube shorts.

And then even, you know, social snippets and things that are spreading this content, that’s going to help build your brand and you’ll be found all over the internet. Maybe even get on some guest blog posts. Of course, with SEO, you want to get other people to link to you, get featured in the media, but that’s a, you know, a podcast for another day, the full scope of SEO. But if you’re blogging regularly and you’re using these multimodal methods, you’re way more likely to come up in ChatGPT.

And I’ve gotten multiple leads recently where they say, I want to hire you because I asked ChatGPT who the best SEO company is and you came up. And you know, that’s pretty good credibility for why I would want to hire you. So that’s great. I’m happy to see that my having written books, having a blog, having a podcast, having a YouTube channel, all those things contribute.

And could I do them even better? Absolutely. But I can tell you that, you know, I didn’t do massive amounts of some black magic to get at the top of AI. It’s everything I just described is a huge part of it. We can go into another podcast another day about getting featured in, you know, the sources that are being cited for searches where you want to come up, you know. So basically doing PR and getting in the sources that ChatGPT cites. Yes, you want to do that as well.

But old school SEO, like having a good, you know, site without broken links that loads fast that has a solid practice area page and blog strategy and then adding the Talk Marketing, Authority Marketing, all the, you know, the multimodal podcasts and YouTube to the blog that’s going to take it to the next level, that’s when you’re really doing search everywhere optimization and that’s when you’re going to get leads like I am from ChatGPT and Gemini, Perplexity, etc. because you’re seen as an authority and you’re all over the place.

So the old school blogging is dead if you’re just using AI slop, “hey ChatGPT, write an article about what to do after you get in a car accident”, you know, that content’s not authoritative. It’s not tied to your brand. It’s not tied to your personal brand, to your authorities, your attorneys that are experts. So think of your blog as a digital library of authority assets, not a keyword dumping ground, and don’t just blog to fill a quota.

So if an AI model could write it without talking to a lawyer, it’s not really worth publishing. So if your traffic is plateauing or you want to, you know, know whether you show up in AI search, reach out and we can give you a free SEO and AI audit. And so the win is not more content, it’s better connected content and authoritative content.

Thanks for joining me on AI SEO for Law Firms. Visit mcdougallinteractive.com for more information, make sure to like and subscribe, and see you next time.