Technical SEO Audits and AI (Podcast)

This episode explores the core issues and practical steps for law firms to improve SEO performance using AI, keyword analysis, and structured data strategies.

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 today is our founder, John McDougall. Today, we’re talking about technical SEO audits and AI. Welcome, John.

John McDougall: Good morning, John.

What a Technical SEO Audit Means for Law Firms

Maher: So, John, let’s start simple. What is technical SEO, and how do new technical elements and standards differ when we are optimizing for AI crawlability?

McDougall: So, technical SEO is looking at issues with your website, from broken links to page speed and things like that. And, for decades now, we’ve been running technical SEO audits, using tools like Semrush, and that’s still important. It’s just that there are additional things now that you need to do to be fully audit-ready for AI as well. I’ll talk about how they kind of connect a bit, so let’s talk page speed first.

So, AI needs extremely fast load times for efficient processing, and it’s a proven ranking factor in traditional Google SEO. So, to not have a website loading in under three seconds, ideally under two seconds, it’s going to affect you negatively.

Indexing issues — is your website crawlable? That’s a top thing on a list of technical things to think about. So, you can set up Google Search Console to see how Google is impact indexing and crawling your site, and Webmaster tools with Bing. So there are a lot of different tools that we have access to, that a lot of people just don’t even use, that can help you with this. So if the search engines in AI can’t even get to your site, that’s obviously an issue.

AI in particular is almost like the early days of SEO when…every other website we worked on in the 90s or early 2000s, it was like, “oh man, Google can’t even crawl certain pages on your site” or certain pieces that were in Ajax or something. In the middle of the page, there were tabs and Google couldn’t even get to it. Or frames, way back when we would build websites in frames and Google would crawl one little piece of the frame and you’d have an orphaned page where it’s just like the middle chunk of a frame instead of the whole website. So, in the history of SEO, handling those issues has been a huge part of an SEO’s job, but Google’s gotten so good at that stuff that it’s less of an issue, not a non-issue, but we find a little bit less issues.

But JavaScript now throws off ChatGPT and various AI LLMs. So if you, for example, vibe code your website like using Replit or Loveable, and you say, “hey, make my website with a tool, an AI tool”, to just pop out a website, which is totally possible now, but doesn’t make it a good thing if it’s heavy JavaScript website, and then it slows down AI from loving your website.

So, you just might not realize that those are issues if you’re not dealing with some of the technical stuff. You still need clean code, a mobile-friendly website, and there’s a thing called a robots.txt file, where if you go to any website .com/robots.txt, you can see instructions. If a webmaster or SEO person added that type of file to tell the search engines, hey, go or don’t go, we’ll let you go or not go to certain directories or things like tags or whatever on the website. It’s a bit in the weeds, but if you’re thinking technical, that’s something to think about.

And now there’s the llms.txt file to give some instructions to ChatGPT and large language models about what to expect on the site. Does it skyrocket your AI rankings? Probably not, but it can’t hurt and I think it’s a good best practice. We’re not seeing everybody have that file, but not a bad idea to use it. So, think about technical SEO like old school stuff and the different stuff now for AI.

Formatting Legal Pages to Win AI Overview Spots

Maher: So, in order to get featured in an AI overview, what are two or three formatting changes that we need to implement today?

McDougall: One of the keys you’ll see if you go to any big news website, media site, is key takeaways or key points of this article. So at the very top of a long in depth article, because as the web has reacted to trying to get good Google rankings over decades, content has gotten longer. Recipes, for example, how to make oatmeal, and it’s like, my God, like a 2,500-word article on oatmeal, right? It’s annoying. So AI is really appreciating when people give the key takeaway. Or if you write tips on how to file a patent or what to do after a car accident or something, if you can give a key takeaway at the very top of the page, that’s a huge, huge benefit to your likelihood to come up in AI answers.

And then scannable format. So, bullet lists, short paragraphs, clear heading structure. All of that is critical for both traditional SEO and AI seems to respond well to better structure. Structure is adding an element of trust.

I would leave it at those are some key things.

Essential Schema Markup Types for Law Firms

Maher: There’s another thing that we talk about called schema markup. What is that, and which two to three types of schema markup should lawyers focus on to give AI the clearest roadmap to their best content?

McDougall: So schema sounds scary at first, some weird programming thing, and even John and I, it took a little while to get used to schema, especially because in the early days, you’d have to write your own schema, but now you just go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I have this law firm website, here it is. Go give me schema code.” It might not come back a hundred percent perfect, but I mean, if you want to take a shortcut, just ask ChatGPT to give you key schema for your law firm website. Give it to your webmaster, your web designer or your agency to implement if they haven’t. Some SEO agencies won’t even have implemented that, so you can shock the heck out of them by giving them schema markup code from ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

And some key ones, attorney-person schema is essential for EEAT, experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, which Google looks at to judge if your authors are trustworthy. It marks credentials on your bio. Legal service schema defines specific services and practice areas to AI. And FAQ page schema structures Q&A content to win AI answers and snippets. Those are just a few examples for law firms, but a few really good ones, especially that connect to the EEAT stuff for Google.

Why Site Architecture Signals Trust to AI and Google

Maher: And why is the website’s logical and clean structure, what we might call the architecture, considered a foundational trust signal by modern algorithms?

McDougall: Like the structured layout of your pages, a good site architecture is signaling trust. It improves the user experience, and user experience is a ranking factor, like page speed. When Google was talking to the DOJ with their criticism of being a monopoly, they did reveal some things like, hey, we rank websites based on, yes, content, backlinks, but user experience. So, it is a clear signal. And crawlability ensures that AI can efficiently map and categorize your authoritative content. And again, technical auditing to make sure that there’s no issues like broken links, 404 errors and things like that.

Risks of Ignoring Technical Audits and Content Cleanup

Maher: So, John, you are a champion of content stewardship, which is deleting and merging old content on your website. What’s the biggest risk if a law firm avoids doing that kind of technical SEO audit?

McDougall: You’ll end up with a huge pile of crappy content. I mean, I’m belittling it, but it can be true, where we’ve seen thousand-page law firm websites where, I won’t mention names of other agencies but some very big ones, made some, let’s say, weak content many years ago even. When, oh, let’s blog for blogging sake, let’s have a bunch of 500-word articles just to have a weekly blog post. Then 10 years goes by and now your website’s a thousand pages and Google’s looking at it, or ChatGPT, and saying, how do I even weed through this muck? It’s just so messy. So, very unstructured if you’ve just got crap flying all over the place, especially those thin, kind of outdated things. Or maybe you’ve got blog articles like, hey, we went to this event and the event’s long gone and maybe irrelevant now, you should be deleting that stuff, or updating it to be more modern and relevant, maybe republish,

Because there’s a thing called the Google Helpful Content System, or HCS, and a lot of bad content not only will make that content not rank, but it could drag your whole site down. And we have seen, literally sometimes, just deleting like, again, a thousand-page personal injury / mesothelioma lawyer website. We deleted 114 pages and it actually helped the ranks go up.

Now, with that said, we also went through another a hundred and something, 150 pages, where we merged content, made thin content deeper, maybe take three pages that are sort of similar and delete two of them and leave better one remaining, where you kind of bring those pages together. So, you’ll have very diluted content if you don’t do that. And yeah, we think it’s really a requirement now. Not only technical auditing, but your total content library needs to be maintained. You need to be a good steward of that library.

Updating Older Legal Content for Better AI Visibility

Maher: And updating, like you said, older content. Go ahead and make an update to a blog post that’s two or three years old and say, hey, this was updated in 2025 or 2026, whatever, and this has the latest information now, so that even though this blog post might be five years old, no, we’ve updated it and it has good information now. And that can help with both users and, like you said, with search engines and LLMs.

McDougall: That’s exactly right, because you’d be amazed how many people aren’t doing that. So, the good news for law firms, do an SEO, an AI SEO that do that is that… You’ll potentially stand out. Even just going, I mean, you could do five pages a month, even one page a month, just pick something and have it scheduled, because if it’s not scheduled, it probably won’t get done like wishful thinking like, yeah, we should get around to update our old content. No, talk to your lawyer SEO agency or whatever, AI SEO agency, and tell them, we don’t just want lots of new content, on and on and on. It needs to be structured in topic clusters. And if it’s getting dated, long in the tooth, old, update it, refresh it, or delete it. And if you do that, you’re really going to stand out and rank better.

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

McDougall: Sounds good.

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.