Main takeaways:
- Adapt to Google’s Algorithm Changes: Google’s site reputation and scaled content updates emphasize the need for quality over quantity in SEO.
- Strategic Use of AI: Law firms can benefit from AI-generated tools to enhance content but must avoid pitfalls like low-quality scaled content abuse.
- Focus on Brand Authority: Building links, gaining local citations, and establishing a strong brand presence online are crucial for SEO success in 2025.
Join Patrick Carver, CEO of Constellation Marketing, as he breaks down the major Google algorithm updates of the year and their implications for law firms. This episode of The Optimized Law Firm Podcast covers the rise of AI-generated content, updates targeting SEO manipulations like site reputation abuse, and how Google’s new features affect organic search traffic. Learn how to adapt your content strategy, build trust with Google, and stay ahead in 2025. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned in SEO, this episode is packed with insights to optimize your law firm’s online presence.
Timestamps:
- Understanding Google’s Algorithm Updates
Timestamp: 00:00:05 – 00:14:30- Adapting Your SEO Strategy for 2025
Timestamp: 00:14:30 – 00:27:45- Future Trends and Predictions for Law Firm SEO
Timestamp: 00:27:45 – 00:37:55
Transcription:
00:00:05:23 – 00:00:28:24
Patrick Carver
Google has been on an absolute tear this year when it comes to algorithms. There’s been way more poor algorithm updates than any year before, lots of intermediate updates, and a lot of it has spilled a bit of chaos for attorneys, especially those who have banked on getting a lot of organic traffic from Google in the past. So things are absolutely changing.
00:00:28:26 – 00:01:00:04
Patrick Carver
And I want to go through those updates, what it means for attorneys and most importantly, how you can stay on top of it and get into a very profitable 2025 with Google. Welcome to the Optimize Law Firm podcast I will be taking you through today. My name’s Patrick Carver and I’m the CEO of Constellation Marketing, where we help law firms grow their business and focus on delivering high ROI strategies for our clients.
00:01:00:04 – 00:01:19:03
Patrick Carver
So we are going to get into a really important topic for law firms today, which is going to be covering a little bit of a recap of all of the algorithm updates that have happened in 2020 for kind of where we are in terms of a State of the Union and what law firms can expect moving into 2025.
00:01:19:03 – 00:01:42:07
Patrick Carver
So a little background here. Google has unrolled a lot of core algorithm updates this year and a lot of intermediate are in between updates. And if you’re not totally familiar with this, the algorithm is what dictates the search results within Google. So, you know, when you ever hear about somebody talking about ranking, ranking their content, where do I rank?
00:01:42:12 – 00:02:12:20
Patrick Carver
That is all determined by the algorithm that Google has. And usually about four times a year, they do what’s called a core algorithm update. And that’s like essentially we’re going to make a lot of changes to the algorithm the way that it scores different content and scores your website, how it will appear in those search results. And so this used to be a more infrequent type of update where it would really shake things up and there would be a lot of changes.
00:02:12:20 – 00:02:42:10
Patrick Carver
It’s when they’re trying to make something more of a dramatic change for the search results, where they see something that can either be dramatically improved or they’re reacting to a trend in terms of how people are ranking content and what’s being found in those search results. So when they see there’s like some sort of disconnect between what they believe is the best value for the consumer, the people out there searching and what they’re actually producing, and maybe people have found a loophole and are pushing content in a certain way.
00:02:42:12 – 00:03:11:09
Patrick Carver
They’re going to make big changes to try and circumvent that and reward a different type of profile when it comes to the content and the websites that are being shown in Google Search. So why more this year, right? This has been a really dramatic year in terms of how legal content has ranked. And I would say the biggest issue or biggest thing that’s out there is Google Air over you.
00:03:11:09 – 00:03:35:01
Patrick Carver
So there’s been a number of issues. I’m going to go through these in depth and then we’re going to talk about how you can kind of, you know, get the best of them and put yourself in a position to win in 2025. But the biggest thing that I would say has happened to law firms, which is not directly talked about in one of these three points, is the Google Air overviews.
00:03:35:03 – 00:03:57:02
Patrick Carver
And so this is it’s not an algorithm change, but what’s been happening and we’ve seen a lot of our sites that we’re working on see big changes and force us to really adapt a number of things with our SEO strategy. But this idea that when you go to Google and you search something, a air overview comes up now.
00:03:57:02 – 00:04:24:19
Patrick Carver
So it’s essentially that space between the search bar and the actual search results is now producing this air generated summary or, you know, resource that is going to cover largely what is on below that page. And so this is a really big shift since basically the the trade off has always been that people creating content is what’s powering the search engine.
00:04:24:19 – 00:04:48:18
Patrick Carver
So that’s giving it credibility, making those resources available. And law firms have historically taken advantage of this, right? They’ve created guides on the laws in their state, the things that they do. And this has allowed them to connect people who are out there searching for mostly informational queries about how things are happening or why why something is the way it is.
00:04:48:20 – 00:05:14:20
Patrick Carver
And Google has put a giant dent in this by creating these AI overviews. So I’m going to talk a little bit more about that at the end, but we’ll kind of come back to how all of these things are kind of working together and then provide some insight as to how you can, you know, put yourself in the best position for 2025 and beyond.
00:05:14:22 – 00:05:44:09
Patrick Carver
Let’s kick things off with the site Reputation abuse update. And this happened in May 2020 for basically trying to stop what is called parasite SEO in the biz. And this is largely not a big deal for law firms. So the the basis of this is that there people are essentially exploiting a loophole in that Google has long prioritized websites that have a lot of authority.
00:05:44:12 – 00:06:17:18
Patrick Carver
And so think about a website like Forbes, think about Facebook. Any of these they are linked to by millions of people, right? Different websites in different places, everywhere. And so they have an enormous amount of authority. And so the the the process basically is that these websites get indexed more quickly. They have more authority. When they put out a piece of content, it’s going to immediately go much, much higher in the rankings because of this inherent authority.
00:06:17:24 – 00:06:40:25
Patrick Carver
So the idea generally is that Google more or less trusts these domains. And so the information on them is is, you know, more valuable and more reputable than, say, you as as a lawyer who is just starting their website or it’s only been up for a month and you get, you know, a couple hundred people per month, whereas they get millions of people every single month.
00:06:40:27 – 00:07:27:24
Patrick Carver
And so you the probably the application for this for most law firms that is is better is going to be thinking about the legal directories. So you’re find laws your Ibos, those type of websites would be considered the highest authority websites in the illegal space. Right. And so if you’ve ever wondered why, you know, Google is putting these, these sites like Fine Law and others in the search results for your local attorney keyword so criminal lawyer Omaha or Springfield any of those and you know you see some competitors but you also see the fine laws and the ABA’s that’s exactly what what’s happening here and what the exploit is all about or why this is
00:07:27:24 – 00:08:00:02
Patrick Carver
changed is that that’s that’s been going on for a long time. But what is different now is that people are basically finding more Web sites, more authority websites who are willing to sell links and sell guest posts on their website. And so people like Forbes have, you know, for a long time sold links to people like me who could go in and pay, you know, a writer of 3000 or $6,000 to get a link placed on Forbes.
00:08:00:02 – 00:08:39:11
Patrick Carver
Now, you know, some of this is kind of covert and not necessarily probably something that, you know, Forbes Central knows about but is happening. And so people started doing this to push affiliate products. So they were selling barbecue grills or pool cleaner or whatever on Amazon. And suddenly they’re paying these websites. The Times of India is a kind of a notorious one, but you’re paying to get on these websites and then you skyrocket in the rankings and this has led to a lot of situations where people are arguably abusing this site reputation.
00:08:39:13 – 00:09:00:01
Patrick Carver
The authority profile and putting up content that really they have no business ranking for. Because if you go with the idea that Google is main goal is to put out the people who are most authoritative, most knowledgeable, and generally giving you the best information because they have like hands on experience and, you know, they’re an authority or an expert in their field.
00:09:00:03 – 00:09:31:21
Patrick Carver
What you’ve probably seen happening in, you know, in your market is that now Forbes is ranking for terms like best criminal lawyer in Louisville or best personal injury lawyer in Atlanta, stuff like that. And so they’ve decided they figured out that, oh, well, we could, you know, rank for all of these terms. Right? So companies like Forbes and other companies are now creating all of this content that’s essentially trying to sell stuff on Amazon.
00:09:31:21 – 00:09:58:27
Patrick Carver
So it’s basically affiliate SEO content where they’re trying to sell things or they’re trying to generate leads. You, you know, for a local service type of thing. And so, you know, you might be wondering like, why would Ford be interested in doing this? It’s just a it’s a pure cash grab where, you know, they have this authority and they realize they could put up content under any subject and they would be able to get to the first page really quickly, easily.
00:09:58:27 – 00:10:28:20
Patrick Carver
So that’s exactly what this is what’s happening here. I don’t really think law firms have to worry about this one too much because this is really more about the affiliate side of it. Now, I am curious if this will in some ways, you know, benefit law firms by penalizing folks like fine law above others who are putting these these directory pages inside the local search rankings.
00:10:28:22 – 00:10:59:20
Patrick Carver
It kind of remains to be seen. I haven’t seen any signs of that. And I’m still a little skeptical that of how much this reputation abuse update is actually going to do because what I’ll talk about later is that we’re seeing the bigger trend, the bigger backdrop here with all of this is that Google is, I think, going to put more emphasis on the link building side or the page authority side of the equation rather than how much content and the depth of content on someone’s website.
00:10:59:20 – 00:11:23:12
Patrick Carver
So not a huge concern there, but just definitely something to be aware of. If you’re trying to do a parasite SEO and pay for a, you know, a really expensive guest post on on a page with the hope that you’re going to outrank other people in your market. For some of those key terms, like, you know, auto accident lawyer or something, something like that.
00:11:23:12 – 00:11:53:03
Patrick Carver
So, okay, let’s dive into the expired domain abuse update. And this, again, is not really a high impact issue for law firms. Really, what you know, this is all about is folks buying expired domains that, you know, once were websites that were active driving websites and had links. And so they have this authority. When you lose the registration for that, the links don’t go away.
00:11:53:03 – 00:12:24:23
Patrick Carver
And so you just have this like website entity out there that’s maybe not active website, but that doesn’t change the fact that if it had 1000 links from other websites, those links are going to stay there. And so what people do is grab these at auction and then repurpose them and spin them up for for something unrelated. Again, this is largely for affiliate websites and these are people who are going to going to take the website and then try to turn it into a guide for barbecue grills or something like that.
00:12:24:23 – 00:12:57:29
Patrick Carver
So again, this is really not a huge deal. But what I would think about is just asking your SEO provider, make sure they’re not doing using expired domains in their in their process, such as, you know, link building and stuff like that, because I think there’s more potential for 300 tons to be in be problematic. And I think something that I’m going to talk about now in just a little bit is more about the importance of brand signals.
00:12:57:29 – 00:13:25:24
Patrick Carver
And so I think when you are looking at this tactic, if you’re either thinking about setting it up, repurposing the website or just doing like a 3 to 1 redirect to your main site, they could potentially come with some baggage because you’re going to inherit all of the links and anchors from that website, which I’ve seen personally go against a website’s authority because you’re you’re basically confusing Google about what that website’s all about.
00:13:25:24 – 00:13:50:17
Patrick Carver
So avoid these and avoid, you know, basically if we want to focus on getting natural as much as you can natural backlinks or if you are going to buy them, go from a real varied sources so that you don’t you’re not creating these like really easily catchable type signals that that Google is going to look for. So again, those two not a big deal.
00:13:50:20 – 00:14:27:18
Patrick Carver
Now let’s get to scaled content abuse. This is maybe the most impactful item for lawyers in 2025. So scale content abuse is writing. Okay. And just as a quick background, I’m not going to go through the whole saga of of how this has played out over the past year. But Google went from, Hey, don’t use AI content on your websites to, hey, if you’re going to use content, just make sure it’s really good and fact checked and you know, and all of that stuff or limited use of it is okay too.
00:14:27:18 – 00:15:10:22
Patrick Carver
Now they just don’t really care. And you know, they are creating this. I mean, they are arguably the biggest generator of AI content with all of these AI overviews that have hit all of the search results that were in largely inaccurate, not really well done. I think they’ve gotten better, you know, since they initially rolled it out. But, you know, a bigger point here is that, you know, there was this at one point there was this concern that Google’s not going to write content that’s developed from A.I., but they had some sort of test that you could you could catch it by using these A.I. detectors and stuff like that.
00:15:10:24 – 00:15:46:06
Patrick Carver
All of that has basically been proven to be just a big load of junk. Google is, you know, creating products like Gemini. They’re allowing Gemini in their suite of office tools like, like docs and allowing you to write content. So there’s there’s no real signal from Google that they’re they’re punishing pages written via via A.I.. Right. Where the distinction happens is this idea of scaled content abuse.
00:15:46:08 – 00:16:17:14
Patrick Carver
And what that really means is creating spammy, super low touch, auto generated content. And really doing it at scale is the biggest issue where people are going to get in trouble because, you know, we’ve tested this and there’s there’s really no way for these AI content detection tools to catch AI content. They will give you a report. But we’ve tested these and they’re not reliable.
00:16:17:14 – 00:16:50:10
Patrick Carver
They we you know, we test them between A.I. generated content versus human content. It will often say the human content is the A.I. generated content. So I don’t put any faith in those. I do think Google would be able to create a much better detection system for that, but it doesn’t appear that that’s what they’re doing. So what it appears is happening is, you know, they’re basically punishing people who are doing it at a very high scale.
00:16:50:12 – 00:17:31:17
Patrick Carver
This all played out earlier this year or around May when there was kind of this large scale attack or punishment of people who were out on social media talking about how they are getting rich, doing scaled content. So they were setting up websites overnight with 10,000 pages, 100,000 pages, really, you know, creating this low quality, high volume type of content and that created some big problems for Google, as you know, into their search results and also them as a business.
00:17:31:19 – 00:18:04:13
Patrick Carver
First they saw that people who were, you know, creating a thousand page websites could quickly establish topical authority. And so they were able to kind of gain the system by creating all of this content. Google falsely identified them as a real expert on the topic, gave them ranking and pushing out people who, you know, maybe had more actual experience with this and but didn’t have the volume of content that had been produced.
00:18:04:15 – 00:18:39:27
Patrick Carver
So the overall issue here was generally the degradation of quality of those search results. Right. And so their number one asset is the fact that people look to them as the undisputed leader of giving them answers. Right. And so when you have a threat to giving your users quality answers, it’s a problem. And the more they saw people ranking using this this auto generated content that doesn’t really have much, you know, much value to it.
00:18:39:27 – 00:19:16:04
Patrick Carver
And it’s it’s essentially, you know, reformatted read re populated content from existing content on the web. There’s no knowledge ad there’s no real value ad in a lot of ways to this content. Now it can be created at a very high quality. But typically what I’ve seen is that the the mass content where you’re just plugging in a keyword and saying, Go write me an article is just as bad as if you, you know, paid someone $5 to go write an article.
00:19:16:04 – 00:19:48:27
Patrick Carver
It’s it’s you know, there used to be spinners where, you know, you could kind of make it create tons of different versions of of a page and stuff like that. And that’s kind of what, what it equates to is just very low value content. The other thing that impacted Google outside of this was that they are responsible for crawling thousands and thousands of pages excuse me, billions of billions of pages on the Internet.
00:19:48:27 – 00:20:22:21
Patrick Carver
And so when this thing kicked off, kind of like a bomb overnight, there was like millions and millions of new pages being created. This is puts an enormous, enormous amount of energy and resources. It requires that from Google to find all this information, classify, organize it. That’s all happening by their hardware, their servers going out. They’re finding all of this and and doing all of that.
00:20:22:21 – 00:20:53:00
Patrick Carver
And so, you know, imagine just the Internet basically doubles overnight and they are now tasked with going out and figuring out how all of that fits in with the current results, what should be rewarded, what’s even out there, all that stuff. And so they publicly are not publicly, but it became public, put down a bunch of these creators and people who were, you know, talking about how they were able to do this and the success they were having and stuff like that.
00:20:53:00 – 00:21:24:13
Patrick Carver
And so long story short, this is mostly about people who are using content or using AI to create scaled content. It’s not going to be a big deal if you use content. Content in your website. But I’m going to talk about, you know, the kind of the key takeaways and how you can actually learn from this and implement it and what that means for your 2025 content strategy and overall just presence on the web.
00:21:24:14 – 00:21:49:28
Patrick Carver
So let’s get into some of the key takeaways for today. So with scaled content abuse, you are going to need to create above and beyond content if you want to be on top of the heap. When it comes to law firms in your area. So what this means is focusing on creating high quality original content that is going to be above and beyond what anyone else is producing in your market.
00:21:50:01 – 00:22:17:24
Patrick Carver
So don’t think of AI as a problem that it means other people are going to be able to create a lot of content but use it creatively to improve the quality of your content. So think about ways to improve copywriting. You can do ad resources that maybe wouldn’t be available to you. Normally you would have to go and find like somebody who can code or do things.
00:22:17:27 – 00:22:48:08
Patrick Carver
You can create a calculator extremely easily on these tools and put that on the page, right? So instead of just this kind of basic word document that you’re putting on there, what can you do to add value? Make it more creative, make it more interesting to where you are offering something that other people cannot air is an amazing tool for this because there’s so many different tools coming out every single day that can do different parts of this.
00:22:48:08 – 00:23:15:13
Patrick Carver
They can create images, they can create tables, pro and column lists, audio. They can turn your article into audio, into a podcast. I mean, it’s it’s really wild what what’s out there. And so my prediction with this is that the people who are out there and just clicking the you know, put in a keyword, clicking a button, set it and forget it, are going to get going to get hit and they’re going to be hit in the most negative way.
00:23:15:16 – 00:23:44:13
Patrick Carver
And so think about how you can do this and also think about how frequently you want to update this content. I would recommend a much more frequent update updating schedule or optimization schedule than in previous years, because there’s just going to it’s easier to manipulate content. And I don’t mean manipulate negatively, I just mean adjust it, add things, add value to it because you have these these tools available.
00:23:44:13 – 00:24:06:03
Patrick Carver
And so with that, the best people are going to be out there. The most competitive folks who are using high quality SEO firms are going to be out there utilizing these tools to create higher value content. And so you need to keep up with that by utilizing these tools. And this is, you know, this is going to be a really important thing for for 2025.
00:24:06:03 – 00:24:40:16
Patrick Carver
So start thinking about it. Now, the final thing that I would add here is you want to start adding layers of social proof. What I mean by this is that there was a change update a little while back called the EDT, and it’s all about expertise or experience, authority, trust. This goes hand in hand with this scaled content abuse, because what Google’s trying to do is find actual authorities, find actual experts, and they don’t have a perfect way to do this.
00:24:40:16 – 00:25:01:06
Patrick Carver
They don’t know if, you know, you are truly an expert. If you just put up a web page compared with the person who has no legal expertise and they click a button to to create the page. So they have to figure out how to measure that. And one of the things that you can do with that is whether or not you have these elements on your website.
00:25:01:06 – 00:25:31:06
Patrick Carver
So when it comes to social proof, I’m talking about reviews, I’m talking about accreditations, awards, anything like that, experiential information about how long you’ve done it, any success you’ve had at it, and then, you know, third party or user generated information about that layer that throughout the website don’t have it just on your home page, have it inside of your practice area pages with specific reviews related to that practice area.
00:25:31:06 – 00:25:53:14
Patrick Carver
So go above and beyond what others may be doing and add a review about that specific case type. Maybe you can go and get an interview with a previous client, start thinking about again how to ten or how to go above and beyond anyone else in the market, because we don’t know exactly what a lot of what exactly they’re looking for.
00:25:53:14 – 00:26:31:07
Patrick Carver
But we do know that they review these pages and if there are not signals like this, it can be it can be detrimental or they can rank other people above you. This goes hand-in-hand with the importance of growing your website’s authority in 2025 as a law firm. So going back to this idea of social proof and how do you distinguish yourself against other other law firms or other content out there on the web and links play an enormous part of this, and that is what grows into are what was the main piece of website authority.
00:26:31:09 – 00:27:00:27
Patrick Carver
So with all of this content and the ability to create scaled content, billions of pages, when it becomes that easy to do basic content production, then other things have to raise in importance for Google to effectively sort and categorize and rank content on the web. And so the thing that has always been there, in addition to the quality of the content and the topical authority of the content, is links.
00:27:00:27 – 00:27:18:23
Patrick Carver
And so it’s your your Web site’s authority. And so we’ve seen this. It’s kind of this dance that goes on back and forth throughout the year and over years where it looks like maybe content’s more important and it’s having a bigger impact in the search results and then it swings back to links and then it goes back and forth.
00:27:19:00 – 00:27:55:15
Patrick Carver
And the these are two things that have remained stable ever since Google created their search engine. And this idea of PageRank, which is assessing the value of these pages. And so what I believe is going to happen now is that since content production is so easy, links are going to become hugely important. You need to focus on getting legal related links and also local links in your area and then add in to that citations and basically getting your business information visible across the Internet.
00:27:55:22 – 00:28:21:02
Patrick Carver
So that you can create truly a brand that that has visibility everywhere. Now, you might be thinking or think back to the second portion of this where first person we’re talking about site reputation abuse, and I would say like 99.9% of law firms are never going to have to worry about this because the average law firm website, their authority, is never going to be more than like 50.
00:28:21:07 – 00:29:03:11
Patrick Carver
And that’s those are really like, I would say, high end websites. You were never going to get on the level of like a Facebook or a Forbes.com. Are these these massive newspapers and news media outlets that really are the target of this abuse? And so with that in mind, I believe that there will be more of an importance on this on the site authority piece because we’re seeing it play out and that the people with better link profiles, more links, more aggressive link building are the ones that are that are getting results, are getting results in this in this current climate brand building is also going to be a very important piece for law firms
00:29:03:11 – 00:29:38:05
Patrick Carver
in 2025. So brand building to me doesn’t necessarily mean so much focused on the the positioning, the, you know, the wordsmithing. I think some of that I think that’s important. But really what I’m talking about is digital brand building. So for me, this means being everywhere on the Internet in addition to evaluating your website in your presence based on the link profile, your website’s authority, they’re also looking across the Internet for other signals.
00:29:38:05 – 00:30:08:06
Patrick Carver
They want other kind of independent signals that verify, okay, you’re a person of importance or you are an entity that is not just siloed in this one area because that is the biggest way that they have figured out to clamp down on these content. Mills is that when you create a website with 10,000 pages, you have no real experience in the legal field, but you’re creating all this content and it looks good enough, right?
00:30:08:08 – 00:30:42:20
Patrick Carver
How do they know that that’s not as good as a actual law firm? They figured out that these niche content websites where it’s somebody at the computer building these out, they don’t really have a real brand. They are not on Facebook, they’re not on YouTube, they don’t have a Google business profile. All of these things are going into kind of another authority metric or matrix that is affirming the link building that’s going on in the website.
00:30:42:20 – 00:31:11:09
Patrick Carver
So it’s really hard to fake this. You can, but it’s beyond what a lot of people are willing to do. And so I predict that there will be an increase in the importance of signal producing platforms like YouTube. So Google owns YouTube. It makes a ton of sense that they would be looking at this platform to see whether or not you also have a presence there, whether or not you’re actually creating content.
00:31:11:16 – 00:31:37:00
Patrick Carver
And so one of the big shifts we’re going to make as a business in 2025 is certainly continuing to push SEO hard. But we’re going to think about where else can we build digital real estate for ourselves and for our clients. The final prediction I have for 2025 is that pay per click prices are going to absolutely skyrocket for law firms.
00:31:37:03 – 00:32:05:20
Patrick Carver
So we need to be thinking about what are some of the strategies that we can use to replace this historically low cost, high quality traffic coming to the website. So why is this happening and why do I think it’s going to happen? The biggest thing out of this whole podcast that I want you to pay attention to is is Google’s AI overviews and the introduction of AI in these search results.
00:32:05:22 – 00:32:39:22
Patrick Carver
The reason why this is so important is that lawyers have historically developed topical authority on their website by creating a ton of content that is focused on their practice areas. It’s going to be beyond just their practice pages. They’re creating content about guides to, you know, misdemeanors or accidents and all sorts of of this stuff. That has been a kind of secret weapon for a lot of law firms because these pages don’t produce a high proportion of leads, of high quality leads.
00:32:39:27 – 00:33:10:17
Patrick Carver
But they do produce leads somewhere like ten, 15% from what we’ve seen compared to what we would call like money pages or target pages, which are more transactional in nature. It’s going to be somebody searching auto accident lawyer near me, best bankruptcy lawyer in Tupelo. Those are your transactional searches where Google is not doing their eye overviews. But then you get to something like what are the penalties for a misdemeanor in Alabama?
00:33:10:19 – 00:33:53:04
Patrick Carver
Those have historically been served by law firms writing about that content, and they get that traffic and ultimately can get leads from that. Now, with Google doing the areas, they’re basically replacing you, they are basically putting themselves above you, summarizing your content and allowing the person not to even have to go to the website. And so previously you at least had the opportunity to try and convert that person by game on your website, finding the information they know and thinking, yeah, maybe I should, I should reach out for consultation or at least ask for some more information.
00:33:53:06 – 00:34:26:16
Patrick Carver
They have effectively removed your ability to do that. Now we are seeing that since the beginning of this, the rollout of the reviews, they’re now shifting to where they’re they’re actually citing people in those air overviews. And so maybe it’s it’s helping. It’s getting a little bit of of information or a little bit of your placement back. But still, if people get their question answered, which I think Google’s trying to do, probably not going to go on your website.
00:34:26:16 – 00:34:49:25
Patrick Carver
And so we think that’s going to have a solid impact on your ability to get traffic through things like retargeting. And ultimately with the lead volume, it’s going to take a hit. And so you should start thinking about some strategy to produce reproduced that low cost, no cost traffic. And we have some strategies we’re already cooking up to deal with this.
00:34:49:25 – 00:35:17:06
Patrick Carver
And if you want to hear more about those, please give me a shout. Patrick go constellation dot com. You can go to our website, go Constellation dot com. We’ll be happy to talk about these which we’re not releasing publicly because we want to give our clients every advantage possible. But we are thinking about this gigantic shift. And one of the things we’re going to cover over the next few weeks is the new search engines from open.
00:35:17:11 – 00:35:39:16
Patrick Carver
I perplexity how there is for the first time a real shift in potential user behavior for how they go out and search for information. Where They’re searching for it, and we are going to be on top of that. We are going to lead where other law firm market agencies are going to kind of stand pat on what they’ve been doing for the last five, ten years, because this is a seismic shift.
00:35:39:16 – 00:36:04:09
Patrick Carver
And if you don’t take advantage of it or don’t stay on the front foot with this, you’re going to get left behind. The other thing to keep in mind here is that you want to start testing alternative platforms for pay per click. You’re going to have to change from just a single, single shot, you know, bottom of the funnel type advertising campaign to including that where I think it’s still going to be important and super valuable.
00:36:04:09 – 00:36:35:07
Patrick Carver
But I think you’re going to have to start playing around with other platforms where people are going to get these get these questions answered that you were previously getting traffic from. And so think about other ways that you can recreate this, this traffic, but you’re probably going to have to pay for it by utilizing platforms like Reddit or Tik Tok or other other areas like YouTube, where people are going to get this this deep information about the topics that you’re the expert on.
00:36:35:07 – 00:37:03:03
Patrick Carver
So a lot is, you know, a lot has changed. But I think the, you know, core thing to remember here is that if you continue to do so the right way, which is building links in a measured process or a measured and measured frequency from good sources, and you create content on your website that is of high quality that really tries to help the end user.
00:37:03:06 – 00:37:34:22
Patrick Carver
You are going to continue to see benefit. Of course, there’s always a lot that goes into this and a ton of details that we’re going to kind of integrate and test as we move into the new year. But if you are just someone who is wanting to do it yourself and and create good content for your website and get some traffic through there, just keep doing, you know, keep doing the basics right, keep creating good content, update it frequently as much as possible when there are updates or you can think of better ways to improve it.
00:37:34:28 – 00:37:55:18
Patrick Carver
Just think about it as this ongoing project that you want to dedicate some time to every single month and you’re going to be you’re going to be in a lot better shape than, you know, 90% of other other law firms out there. That’s it for today. Thanks so much for tuning into the Optimize Law Firm podcast. And if you need any help guidance idea is for your own law firm.
00:37:55:18 – 00:38:15:09
Patrick Carver
Please hit me up. Go constellation dot com. I’d be more than happy to help you out because at the end of the day, this podcast and our business at Constellation Marketing is all about helping you build a more profitable and enjoyable law firm that you can take advantage of and not worry about where your next case from coming from.
00:38:15:09 – 00:38:17:11
Patrick Carver
All right, thanks and have a great day.
