The AI SEO Roadmap for Law Firms (Podcast)

In this episode, John and John break down the shift from old-school SEO to AI-powered optimization, covering authority signals, platform strategy, and traffic conversion.

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 MacDougall Interactive. I’m John Maher, and with me today is our founder, John MacDougall. Today we’re talking about the AI SEO roadmap for law firms. Welcome, John.

John McDougall: Morning, John.

Reducing Legal Click Costs with AI SEO

Maher: Yeah, so John, click costs in the legal space, as we know, can be the highest of any industry. How do law firms combat that?

McDougall: Well, AI SEO and SEO in general are risk mitigation in a way, because if you’re totally dependent on paying high cost per click, that’s a little risky. You want to diversify your ways you get traffic. Click costs can be hundreds of dollars a click, in extreme cases, a thousand bucks a click. For a mesothelioma lawyer, we paid $600 for the single word, mesothelioma.

But overall SEO and being an authority is how you counterbalance and SEO algorithms, and now AI algorithms, have evolved so much since the early days when it was very simplistic, and we’ll get into that more in a minute. But yeah, that’s one of the main ways is being seen as an authority with your content.

Understanding the Shift to AI‑Powered SEO

Maher: So let’s define AI SEO. What’s the big split between old school SEO and this new AI search optimization?

McDougall: Well, there are a lot of different names for it now, from GEO, generative engine optimization, large language model optimization, AI engine optimization, search everywhere optimization (where you’re going not just on Google), and the large language models like ChatGPT, but also YouTube and all the other places. Old SEO was more tactical with keywords in the right places. Well, from the very early days in the nineties, it was the meta keyword tag, and then of course, title tags and meta descriptions and things like that are still used, but that was so critical to early SEO, like you just did title and meta tags and some backlinks. And we had examples where we were doing just that and ranking amazingly.

But over time, again, as the algorithms got more evolved, it’s become more of a focus now on EEAT, which is Google’s acronym for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

And what that basically means for a law firm is, you can’t just think of your SEO as either trying to trick Google, or even just a methodical list of stuff to do. You have to think of it like, build your brand and your thought leadership, and be recognized as an authority. Especially in law firms and finance places where Google calls it, your money or your life. A bank, if they gave the wrong information, could bankrupt someone if they invested poorly, or a lawyer could cause serious issues with not doing a good job with lawsuits.

So it’s hyper critical in the legal space to think about EEAT and how your positioned as an authority, and that wasn’t as critical in SEO. And that’s true right now, both for Google and Google AI, but also know ChatGPT and the various large language models are looking at various signals of authority. And then structured data, so the way you put a key takeaway at the top of your page now to help AI grab a little quick summary of, say, a blog post, or how you help someone on a practice area. And then even schema markup and various ways to structure your page with headings and things like that.

Some of that was part of early SEO, but the emphasis now and some of the, kind of requirements to restructure your pages, is a big part of the new AI SEO.

Key Platforms Lawyers Overlook Beyond Google

Maher: So we know that clients are everywhere. They’re searching not just on Google anymore, but lots of other platforms. What are the top two to three platforms outside of search where lawyers are, maybe totally invisible right now?

McDougall: Well, first think about the broader context where people have been obsessing us, included over Google. And almost hanging your whole lawyer marketing hat on it, SEO in Google. But there are about 13 billion searches a day on Google, but 45 billion a day if you look at the broader internet, including Amazon, Reddit, Quora. So if you are not thinking, “Hey, let’s be a thought leader,” as I said, publish a book, put it on Amazon. AI’s brain is massive, right? That’s kind of one of the key features of AI is it can look into the corpus of human knowledge, and that includes Amazon, Reddit, Quora, TikTok, LinkedIn, all these other places.

If I were to give like a big takeaway, I would at least do YouTube and LinkedIn. I mean, if you’re a lawyer, but not doing those to me is shortsighted. I mean, if you want SEO, especially. Because Google owns YouTube and it’s going to rank pages better if you put a video on it and you use schema markup to say that there’s a video on the page as well, it’s like a nice little benefit.

So optimize on these various channels, YouTube, LinkedIn, as though they’re search engines themselves in a way, and you’ll get in front of 45 billion people, not just 13 billion.

Maher: You’re saying that, if a law firm only has their website and they only have say a blog on their website, but they’re not doing video and they’re not in all these other places, they don’t look like much of an authority?

McDougall: Yes. And that’s not only true to Google, but ChatGPT uses social media and video channels like YouTube and Instagram for discovery. They’ll find content and people on those places, and things like best lists, like best lawyers and certain category. So if you find listicles like that, it’s good to get on those.

But yeah, they’re signals of authority, and they’re kind of required now. Like old SEO, you could get away with title tag, meta description, heading, keyword driven heading, body copy, bullet points, maybe some FAQs, which are now really good for AI as well. But if you weren’t on YouTube, but you got some backlinks, even early SEO, you could just get some crappy ones and your lawyer ranks would go up if there was good keyword optimization.

Those things alone just aren’t enough now. The old SEO is not, it’s not like you wouldn’t want to still do those things. It’s just that alone, they don’t equal the full power of what’s required to impress the new Google and the new engines like a large language model.

Avoiding Penalties and AI Slop in Legal SEO

Maher: Is turning out tons of generic content a penalty risk now, and what do you consider AI slop in the legal space?

McDougall: So we had a client come to us that said, “Our rank’s going straight down. What the heck’s going on? We’ve been publishing content.” Said, “Well, what exactly have you been doing?”

“Well, our agency’s publishing like 40 articles a month, and for some thousands of dollars a month.” I’m like, “That’s a lot of content.” So we looked, and it was at least through Originality.ai, which is an important tool to at least factor in. I don’t think these tools are perfect, but it’s a cool tool to see if it looks like it’s AI written content. And we looked at the content and everything was like a hundred percent score of likely AI generated, that’s when you can trust those tools a little more.

We’ve fooled the tools by writing content and seeing if it thinks it’s AI, and sometimes it does, so take them with a grain of salt. But if you see some very consistent pattern and you’re suspicious that your agency or writer is overdoing it with AI, check it out. Because not only have we seen that tank people, that were going up when they were doing things like podcasting and adding original articles, but it can take your whole site down and be hard to dig out of that hole, because Google has a thing called the Helpful Content System. I think it was launched around 2022 maybe incorporated into the core algorithm 2024.

And they’ve always been kind of about that, is they recommend adding good, healthy, helpful content. And early SEO people like, yeah, screw that. We just get some, buy some backlinks and we’ll get there. For a time. There were loopholes and you could trick the system, but I just don’t think any of that stuff’s worth it, including just hitting the Staples easy button, like, oh, made into the blog post, Hey, AI, write an article, boom. And it’s not insightful, it’s not unique to you. It’s regurgitated from AI’s, grabbing it from all these other sites.

I mean, expecting that slop to do well is foolish, in my opinion. Doesn’t mean you can’t use AI methodically to help you in your writing process, even write some of your content. And if you’re really skilled at AI, like you know, SEO deep level, we see some articles ranking that are almost entirely AI, but that’s risky if you don’t really know what you’re doing, because you’re more likely to just make a crappy article. And Google’s not only going to bury that page, but it could be a site-wide penalty where your whole site is dragged down, like we’ve seen many times with various clients.

Maher: So if a firm is considering shifting their budget around, what should they put their money into in order to move from just getting broad traffic to landing actual high value cases.

McDougall: A little more bottom of the funnel stuff than is typical with SEO. So a lot of SEO over the years built up to where, “Oh, we don’t just need keywords and the pages we need to blog.” And it was like 500 word blog post and it was like, Oh, they need to be like 750, then a thousand, then 1500 word blog posts. And things escalated to the point where I was wondering a few years ago, when is this going to stop? We’re writing such long, deep content, is there any end to this?

And then, AI kind of did shift that a bit because now people can, even if they’re not just generating the content with AI but getting assisted, there’s a lot more content out there. But I think that makes practice area pages, and case studies, and your Google business profile, way more important. Because what’s not going away is when people search for a lawyer in this town, you are unique because there’s only so many say, medical malpractice attorneys in Cleveland, Ohio. So that’s easier winning in SEO than, what are the side effects of Pitocin, or some birth injury situation.

It’s not that I don’t recommend writing blog posts about the top of the funnel, it’s just that SEO agencies that are just selling you on doing way too much of that, and thinking that that alone is a magic bullet. Like it used to be fairly well, if you blogged every week and other people weren’t, it was accelerating SEO for many years. But now I think where there’s so much content out there, you got to be really cautious of just overdoing that, just fluffy blog content.

And it’s kind of a deeper conversation, but it does tie to something, I should just mention, that you now need to audit your entire content archive, your practice area pages, your case studies. Do you work in certain industries, all of your blog content, keep it updated, keep it fresh, it’s got to load in two seconds, certainly under three seconds or AI is not likely to rank it. Google won’t rank it as well. I’ve been telling people under three seconds, there are some experts out there saying, really shoot for under two seconds.

But when we look at average law firm sites, they’re not always near that. I mean, the good ones are. The ones that aren’t, are going to have more of an issue ranking.

So shifting the budget to prioritize that bottom of the funnel stuff and making a good user experience, not just the traditional SEO stuff. And again, you got to do all of it now. So actually, I think it’s already good for agencies like ours because there’s just so much to do and to track, not just ranking in Google, but across all these different engines from Grok to Perplexity, and Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, all this. So that’s a big takeaway. Put major emphasis into those bottom of the funnel pages. Still do the other stuff, but not only.

Maher: All right, that’s great advice. Thanks for speaking with me today, John.

McDougall: Yeah, absolutely.

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.