The AI-Ready Law Firm: 10 Actionable Steps for Lead Generation

Learn all our insight for an AI-Ready Law Firm. AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping how potential clients find legal services—and most law firms aren’t ready. In this guide, Patrick Carver, CEO of Constellation Marketing, shares a 10-step strategy to help law firms adapt their SEO approach for AI discovery and stay ahead of the competition.

Topics Covered:

• How AI search is already impacting client intake

• The 10-step framework to optimize for AI SEO search

• Why foundational SEO strategies still matter

• Tools, platforms, and tactics you need to prioritize now

Three Main Takeaways

1. AI Search Is Already Changing Client Behavior
   
   Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are already influencing client discovery—even if most users don’t realize it yet. Law firms need to be proactive before AI search becomes the default.

2. Traditional SEO Still Matters—But Needs an AI Twist
   
   Many AI ranking factors align with traditional SEO (content, speed, authority), but law firms must adapt by focusing on structure, clarity, and omnichannel presence.

3. Visibility in AI Tools Will Come From Data Coverage, Not Just Keywords
   
   The firms that dominate AI search will be those who show up everywhere—not just on their own sites but in citations, reviews, social platforms, and “seed sites” like Reddit and Quora.

The Ai-Ready Law Firm Transcript:

00:00:05:23 – 00:00:40:06
Patrick Carver
Really appreciate everybody’s time coming in. I’m really excited to touch talk about this topic again. We’ve been discussing this for the past couple of months and doing a lot of formative work behind the scenes, trying to get a handle on how this is all going to shake out and what I’m referring to with it is this transition for how law firms are going to handle AI and specifically AI search tools.

00:00:40:08 – 00:01:12:12
Patrick Carver
So we’re talking about Chowdhry Beatty’s, you know, maybe the most ubiquitous one or best well-known, but you also have some really big changes happening with Google, Google’s AI mode, their AI overviews, and you have some other players entering the scene as well that are starting to make some more noise. Groups like Perplexity and others who are starting to kind of nibble at the AI the levers of of distribution.

00:01:12:12 – 00:01:36:05
Patrick Carver
So they’re trying to get deals with Apple to be on iPhones. We’re starting to see perplexity put in a bid to get access to Google Chrome to potentially buy that all through Google. So there’s some interesting things happening out there. And, you know, our our view on this is that search is still a huge dominant piece of the puzzle right now.

00:01:36:05 – 00:02:04:24
Patrick Carver
But this is going to change over the coming months and years. And so we want to have all of our clients and all the other law firms out there who are looking to grow, who are tech savvy and wanting to stay ahead of the trend. That’s what this is all about, is starting to get into start putting the boots on the ground or the real tangible steps that can actually get you found in these A.I. search tools.

00:02:04:26 – 00:02:24:03
Patrick Carver
So I’m going to cover a lot about, you know, what we know about it currently, what our best guidance is on the topic, and then we’re going to make this really actionable. It’s going to be a lot about what steps you can take right now to actually see improvement on this topic. So I’m really excited to do this.

00:02:24:03 – 00:02:50:28
Patrick Carver
Last month we we talked more or we talked about ads last month to month. Prior to that, we were talking a lot about kind of the theoretical implications of this and kind of the big, big picture trends. This is really all about being tactical, getting in and making real changes now that are going to have a negligible impact on your ability to get new clients.

00:02:50:28 – 00:03:17:28
Patrick Carver
So I think we’ve got, you know, most folks in at this point. And so I’ll go ahead and and we can get rolling and at any point during this, please add questions or follow ups to the the chat. We have folks monitoring that. And also, I am a terrible multitasker, so I’ll probably look at it, too, and answer those questions as well.

00:03:18:00 – 00:03:43:04
Patrick Carver
But definitely want this to be interactive because I’m you know, this is such an emerging topic that, you know, everybody’s point of view on it is different or their level of knowledge about it. And so if I’m talking way to an a beginner level or way to advance, please let me know and and happy to make this as valuable as possible for the people who have shown up here today.

00:03:43:04 – 00:04:18:08
Patrick Carver
And we’re extremely thankful that you have taken your your lunch with us. So hopefully you’re having something good. All right. So I don’t know if you guys have experienced this at all, but we’ve started it over the past three months, starting to get our first conversations that, hey, I found you on GPT or I found you on perplexity or Google’s AI mode as anyone in the room heard this in a client intake call or through the form that you’ve seen.

00:04:18:08 – 00:04:47:01
Patrick Carver
Or maybe, maybe for a client. Yeah. I’m curious, is it, is it all are you hearing other ones? Do people, you know, have, have they expressed any sort of, you know, preference are around it? And I have a feeling that GPT is kind of going to become the ubiquitous catchall for all all AI tools, kind of the same way that Hey, oh, I googled you.

00:04:47:01 – 00:05:27:01
Patrick Carver
Well, that could mean ads, it could mean organic, it can mean a variety of things, right? But it generally means someone was was on CBT or another tool and found you. And so if it hasn’t happened to you already and you haven’t heard that there’s there’s probably a good chance that you are in some way affected by this now, because what we are seeing is a really fast shift across the the United States and in Canada primarily where we, you know, we work with our clients for the most part, that more and more people are shifting to using these tools.

00:05:27:01 – 00:06:18:27
Patrick Carver
And the the changes happening very, very quick. A couple of months ago, I was not particularly worried or feeling a high, high sense of urgency to figure out a way to really optimize for these research tools. Because if you look at the big picture, the data up till now and even today is so heavily skewed toward Google as the dominant player of search that these other tools like T and perplexity, we’re getting a lot of buzz and they’ve made a really big splash, getting a ton of press and people talking about them in the in the discussion sphere.

00:06:18:29 – 00:07:06:23
Patrick Carver
But in reality, not that many people were using them in comparison to Google. And so you’re looking at the entire search ecosystem. Google still maintains a really dominant share of that. That market, you know, talking about 85% or more. However, we are seeing real clear signals that client discovery is shifting fast. And a lot of people, especially the younger generation who are coming of age and beginning to need legal services, whether it’s a divorce or a criminal case or estate planning as well.

00:07:06:26 – 00:07:44:00
Patrick Carver
They are increasingly using these tools for research. And if it’s if it’s not the only thing they’re doing, they’re using it as as part of it. So I think everyone, if you’re a law firm, has to be mindful of this, right? So it’s, you know, I think a balance of understanding, being aware of it and but not going too far in one direction, but having a really measured, proportional response to this, because I do think now is the time to really get on the ground level of this trend.

00:07:44:03 – 00:08:09:16
Patrick Carver
But at the same time, I would not be putting all of my eggs in this basket at this moment because even was talking about this today, there’s still a huge percentage of the United States and Canada who have never even tried about it. Right. We’re here and the people on this call are likely fall into that early adopter type of mindset and and usage.

00:08:09:16 – 00:08:45:04
Patrick Carver
And so are the way we’re interacting with this is probably not the same as others out there. That being said, again, most adults now say they are using A.I. to search for information, so they they are using it at some level. Right. And so what we’re anticipating and seeing is having a kind of combination of not just Google but people using GPT three, maybe doing their initial research on GPT and then moving over to Google to find other types of data.

00:08:45:04 – 00:09:18:27
Patrick Carver
But the you know, the fact is that this is happening and it’s going to augment everybody’s client acquisition process. So we want you to be ready. We see this as a big, enormous issue that we’re preparing for over the course of the next year so that our clients are really on the vanguard of this and they are very well prepared as these numbers truly start to materialize.

00:09:18:27 – 00:09:49:03
Patrick Carver
And, you know, your chat chip becomes ubiquitous with people just opening their phone. They may not even know they’re talking to chat activity, but it’s just a different way that they’re searching. So it’s kind of like the full adoption of what what they brought with like Siri or other things that are on your phone where now these tools are just going to become so ingrained in the DNA of how we seek information that it’s not really going to be it’s not going to be required to be an early adopter.

00:09:49:09 – 00:10:25:25
Patrick Carver
They’re just going to be in the DNA of how we ask questions. And so we want to be well ahead of everybody else as this happens and put you in a great position to capture those leads, capture that that new business in this new emerging model and I’ve talked about this a little bit before, that I feel like this is kind of our this generation’s Yellow Pages moment and so what I mean by that is I recall growing up and a discussion of, you know, my dad and his law partner was about, oh, should they advertise in in Yellow Pages?

00:10:25:27 – 00:10:45:19
Patrick Carver
Do they advertise on billboards, things like that? And fast forward two or three years later, there’s no more phone books out there to be found. Right. It all shifted to to the Internet. And so I feel like we’re at that kind of moment where there’s all this momentum building and then very, very soon we are going to have this avalanche.

00:10:45:21 – 00:11:12:00
Patrick Carver
And you really want to be prepared for this moving forward. Okay. All right. One quick note before we get into a lot of the meat of this presentation. Just again, thank you so much for for joining us. If you have questions, please add them in the chat. We’re going to kind of I may address them immediately or we might wait a little bit towards the end, too, to cover them, kind of depending on how they fit in.

00:11:12:00 – 00:11:32:17
Patrick Carver
But if you have questions about any of the specifics, want me to expand on anything, please add them in. This is meant to give you people who showed up as much value as possible for this. And we are extremely grateful for your for your time and for your attention. So let’s just cover at a very high level what we’re going to accomplish today.

00:11:32:17 – 00:11:55:16
Patrick Carver
So the first thing we’re going to look at the latest trends. So we’ve covered that a little bit. We’re going to talk more about how how this whole change is happening, what we’re seeing on the ground. And then we’re going to get into the ten actual steps that you can take right now. We’re also going to cover the pitfalls to avoid, because this is a an extremely noisy topic.

00:11:55:24 – 00:12:33:08
Patrick Carver
It it occupies a lot of press. People are talking about it everywhere. There’s in a lot of ways, not a ton of great information on it or people have a lot of different ideas about it. And so in the legal space, there’s maybe not as much clarity about what law firms need to do to prepare. That’s what we’re going to try and fix today and help steer you in the right direction moving forward so that you have the right mindset as these other people come along, try to sell you things, try to get you to commit to certain ideas or marketing strategies that you are well aware of.

00:12:33:10 – 00:13:02:04
Patrick Carver
How this all works together and you don’t get taken for a ride. Ultimately, having a poor marketing experience and losing money because that’s what it’s all about. Growing your business, helping you get more clients, build the practice that that you want to grow and the way you want to do it as a business owner. So if you haven’t been to one of these before, I just want to say again, welcome brief introduction on our company.

00:13:02:04 – 00:13:36:18
Patrick Carver
We’ve been around for ten years. We have helped hundreds of law firm owners grow. We’ve added approximately $50 million in revenue for our clients. Some of the things I’m most proud about with our business we have last year we had a 98.7 retention rate month over month. So basically we’re losing less than one client per month. So it really speaks to, I think, the quality of our team, the ability for our team to help our clients see actual revenue growth, actual profitability and a return on their investment.

00:13:36:26 – 00:13:59:26
Patrick Carver
That’s something that is foundational to our belief with how we want to help clients is getting you that return on investment and be different than other marketing agencies out there and have to include also that we were recently named to the INC 5000 list in the United States. So huge accomplishment. One of the fastest 5000 growing companies in the United States.

00:13:59:29 – 00:14:25:14
Patrick Carver
If you haven’t met me, I’m Patrick. I’m the owner of of this business of Constellation and, you know, I’m making it my business to be a leader in this space with I marketing for law firms. We’re going to talk about it a lot. We are building lots of exciting things behind the scenes and starting to roll them out, test them with clients and be making those available to clients in the future.

00:14:25:14 – 00:14:52:24
Patrick Carver
So let’s dig into this. If you’re doing other stuff, I can’t I can’t be mad at you. But if you if you’d like to, this is a great time to put the phone away, close everything out so we can all get better acquainted with this topic. And I promise that you will get something actionable and valuable from this if you focus in on the material.

00:14:52:24 – 00:15:24:25
Patrick Carver
So I’d like to kind of set the tone here before I get into the ten actionable steps is how you should be thinking about air marketing compared to other marketing that you’re doing. There’s no shortage of things that you can do from a marketing perspective to try and grow your business. So you’ve got SEO ads, email marketing, social billboards, TV’s Legion Paper Lead.

00:15:24:26 – 00:16:10:05
Patrick Carver
There’s there’s all sorts of stuff out there that is available. And our historical formula has been heavily focus on the ways that we can get you into high content search real estate. And so what I mean by that is that at that key point when somebody is out there looking for an attorney, you are in that conversation. And that generally happens by using advertising or search engine optimization so that in those search engine results and now a I search results, you are coming up when somebody says who’s the best lawyer in Houston, Texas, or I need a criminal lawyer, a criminal lawyer near me, things like that.

00:16:10:05 – 00:16:47:17
Patrick Carver
Right. We are still very keen on those two core strategies. We also offer email, social, bilingual, SEO, other things like that. But the real movers, from what we’ve seen of ten years of data, are those first two SEO and advertising. Now the new landscape with these air tools and even how Google is changing the way search works by incorporating AI mode, it’s going to require us to adjust a little bit, right?

00:16:47:20 – 00:17:29:13
Patrick Carver
And so we want to be proportional about this. We want to be intentional about going and understand these new trends, starting to deploy them, starting to adopt them for our websites and in our businesses. But we don’t want to over spend on that right, both from a resource and time allocation perspective. We also we don’t want to go overboard with it because if we do that, we will neglect the circumstances that are on the ground right now, the status quo and we saw some stats at the beginning about the adoption levels and how fast this is.

00:17:29:18 – 00:18:09:07
Patrick Carver
This is all happening, but that is not representative of where we are today. Right. And today is still very much dominated by Google, by people searching on traditional search engines and getting their their answers or their the leads, the prospects they’re going to go for and call for service based businesses through traditional search results. So in our view, we want to kind of match the proportion of how this is this is changing.

00:18:09:07 – 00:18:43:03
Patrick Carver
Right? And so that’s why I recommend a 7030 split. The 70 is keep driving on the things that are working right now. So traditional SEO advertising, if you are doing referrals, those things are not going to change really. I mean, they will definitely change to some degree, but we see that as a a slower burn to where we get into a new environment where ads don’t exist or, you know, something like that.

00:18:43:03 – 00:19:28:23
Patrick Carver
But even with all of this change that we’re seeing and adopting tools like cheap to your mode that have fewer ads or no ads at all, at some point they are going to have to monetize. And so we see ads and also the SEO piece always having a role. But we still need to be preparing for the future and we can do that by starting to allocate a certain percentage of our time, our energy and focus into this 30% of beginning to take what we have and start to think about how that translates into an API centric ecosystem.

00:19:28:25 – 00:20:13:09
Patrick Carver
Here’s what we know so far about the air search ranking algorithm, and this is going to be kind of a key, key point for the rest of the discussion because the ten factors are ten actionable steps I’m going to give to you are going to all relate back to this and what it doesn’t say here, but is a very important point about air search, is that the factors that are going in and being used to show the search results on air search tools are extremely similar to traditional SEO ranking factors.

00:20:13:12 – 00:20:45:23
Patrick Carver
So as you go through this, you’re going to see a ton of commonality between how to be found on air tools and how to be found on regular old school search engines. But there are some some changes. There are there is a little bit of nuance that is going to change between your strategy for ranking on Google, a traditional search result and how you rank on tragedy or perplexity.

00:20:45:26 – 00:21:14:11
Patrick Carver
So there are three categories. We have technical content and authority. The first one, we’re going to talk about probability, how these air tools find data on your website, how they understand your website, and ultimately get that to take it and become training data for these airline models so that they can produce answers. We’re going to talk about speed of the websites.

00:21:14:13 – 00:21:40:07
Patrick Carver
We’re going to talk about schema and some other more technical ways that are going to give you a leg up, give you an advantage in being found in the air search tools. We’ll talk about content as well. We now are working towards a better hygiene schedule with content. We’re seeing that freshness is a is a more important factor on the AI side than with Google.

00:21:40:07 – 00:22:44:09
Patrick Carver
Search results. We’re going to talk about natural language processing structure, the importance of fake news. And then as we get to authority, we are going to dig into this idea of omnipresence and generating authority across the Internet, not just on your own website, domain authority and the importance of reviews. So before we get into the steps, I want to give a warning out there that with any new big change like this, there are lots of snake oil salesman out there and people who are going to come and use the the newness, the kind of idea that, you know, you’re missing out on something as a tactic to try and get you to do things right,

00:22:44:12 – 00:23:06:08
Patrick Carver
especially on the marketing side. And so I’m sure I get it on a daily basis. Outreach that is talking about, hey, you know, how do you how do you appearing in charge or, you know, are you appearing more than your competitors in charge of tea? And, you know, I’ve got the special formula that is is going to get you up there and fix it.

00:23:06:08 – 00:23:37:29
Patrick Carver
And from doing this for a long time, there is a a lot of people who are very light on the details. They’re very loud on the the ideas, the the proposed solution or that they have the confidence in that they have the solution. But in reality they don’t. And they’re not willing to do the work or the investigation that is needed to tackle such a complex issue.

00:23:37:29 – 00:24:07:01
Patrick Carver
Because the thing that I will share with everyone here is that I think we know a lot and we know a lot more than 95% of other marketing agencies out there about this topic. But we are still in the infancy of understanding these air search tools. And if anyone, you know, claims to know the secret sauce or the secret algorithm, it’s just a blatant lie.

00:24:07:02 – 00:24:41:17
Patrick Carver
So be aware. Hopefully this gives you some better context for entering those type of conversations, understanding what you need to do to actually influence this. So let’s dig into some of these specific items that are going to move the needle. And at the end of the day, our goal for our clients is that no matter where someone searches for lawyer and no matter how they search for that lawyer, they are going to find our lawyer, Right?

00:24:41:17 – 00:25:21:22
Patrick Carver
The ones that are our clients, the people that we want to have get that get that visibility and the first part is a technical foundation. So the number one thing that I’ve highlighted here is air crawl ability. So if it depending on everyone’s understanding or knowledge around Google and search engines, the way they basically function in air tools are exactly the same is that they have these software tools out there that that are called crawlers and they’re going out there crawling.

00:25:21:22 – 00:25:51:12
Patrick Carver
All websites are as many as they they can. Then they are more or less storing a copy of that in their own system and then indexing that. And so indexing is the act of putting it into search results. With air tools, it’s a little bit different. It’s not necessarily an index, it’s just the response, right? Because every response is basically being custom engineered at that at that time.

00:25:51:15 – 00:26:20:12
Patrick Carver
But it has this foundational layer of data that is going in. And you may have heard of this. It’s called training data. And so at one point, you know, Chad, if it was only, quote, good up till like 20, 21 or something, because their training data had only gone up to pages that were created in 2021. So the first step in all of this is making sure that your website is is probable.

00:26:20:14 – 00:26:51:21
Patrick Carver
And you can do this by number one, ensuring that you have an LIMS dot text file. So this is similar to like a robots.txt text file, kind of a more technical thing. It’s not a really complicated or hard thing, but basically you’re putting in instruction on your website that is basically saying, Hey, hey, I tools, you can come, you can come crawl the website and here here’s the path I want you to go and find, find my pages.

00:26:51:21 – 00:27:21:00
Patrick Carver
And so you’re basically telling it where your site map is. That is going to make it easier for the crawlers to navigate your site, specifically navigate to the pages that you think are most important. And by doing that, it’s not going to go off and crawl and then indexed these these other pages that can get automatically created like category pages or pages that no longer exist, things like that.

00:27:21:02 – 00:27:49:02
Patrick Carver
By giving it specific parameters with an element text file with robots, hex files, you’re going to have ultimately more opportunities for placement. They’re going to be more intimately familiar with your content with the the makeup of your website, and they don’t have to expend extra computing power to go and find all the pages on your Web site. So we are already starting to roll this out with our clients.

00:27:49:02 – 00:28:37:22
Patrick Carver
We’ve tested it and it’s going to be a mandatory piece of our SEO program moving forward. Another key point here on the technical side is optimization for speed. And what I’m generally referring to there is how fast your your website loads. This has been a ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm for a long time. And why this is important is that it is the most cost efficient way for these companies to crawl your Web site and take that data, indexed it or put it in their AI outputs.

00:28:37:24 – 00:29:17:04
Patrick Carver
So you can help yourself and improve the performance of your website by making it cost efficient for them to crawl your Web site. We know and we’ve seen this, that by optimizing speed on a website will instantly improve your search engine rankings because if other people are out there and they’re buying, getting a website on Wix or they’ve had their cousin build it, it’s going to require more computing power for these companies to go in, access all the pages, move around, kind of map that all out.

00:29:17:06 – 00:29:45:09
Patrick Carver
When you do it quickly and you optimize for things like fast it loading images, you’re putting it in, you’re putting those images in a a format that Google is looking for, right. That they want and specify that they they are needing. It requires less computing power ultimately less cost, because the number one driver of cost for a company like Google or AI is training data.

00:29:45:09 – 00:30:16:06
Patrick Carver
And so they are really at the mercy of of the Internet, Right. So as the Internet expands, they have to get more and more servers. And so you’ve probably seen out there in the news that, you know, people are talking about these data farms. The project I can’t remember the name, but SkyBridge or Skype, maybe something with the different A.I. companies getting together to build these massive data warehouses so that they can go and crawl the data, hold the data, and then spit it back out into the search results.

00:30:16:06 – 00:30:54:23
Patrick Carver
So you can do yourself a huge favor by creating lean, speedy sites, which are ultimately going to give you preferential treatment in the search results in AI Answers. Another piece in this puzzle is structured data, and structured data is more or less elements of your website that are built in a way to that are more code friendly or are not written speech paragraphs.

00:30:54:26 – 00:31:27:07
Patrick Carver
And these act like little signals to these crawlers, to these tools and search engines that give them an idea of what your what your website is all about or what you’re trying to communicate. And so some different examples of structured data are schema and things like thank you schema, which I’ll talk more about in a later slide. These are like little Cliff notes that you won’t really see on a page if you go to it.

00:31:27:09 – 00:32:07:25
Patrick Carver
But as a crawler goes, they see it and they understand it. And the difference is it’s it takes more computing power for them to go and read a quote, read a website and go kind of understand the most important parts of it. That’s a process that that software has to go through to understand what you’re trying to say for that page with structured data and schema, you can basically give it the Cliff Notes version, and these crawlers and tools prefer that because it requires less computing power.

00:32:07:26 – 00:32:30:03
Patrick Carver
They don’t have to really do any of their own reasoning. It’s it’s really just there for them, right? It’s easier to digest. And as a result of this, they’re going to give you preferential treatment in in their responses because if they’re going out and scanning 100 websites, they are going to include or pick the people who make it drop dead.

00:32:30:03 – 00:32:58:18
Patrick Carver
Simple for them to get added to these responses. And so we are seeing the people who are are benefiting the most early on in these tools and getting found most often are people who have a really solid foundation of website technical SEO. And the good thing about being a client with us is that we are already optimized for all of this.

00:32:58:23 – 00:33:32:12
Patrick Carver
We have been optimized for this for four years and so this all has a really nice dovetail into where the industry is going. So a lot of these elements that have traditionally been SEO elements are now going to be geo or air SEO ranking factors as we move forward. So it’s a lot of the old, but we’re we’re starting to learn how, how it’s actually happening in, in, in this new world.

00:33:32:12 – 00:34:02:09
Patrick Carver
And so I expect and anticipate these these factor a lot of these factors will more or less stay the same, but there will be subtle nuance that will be used and things we can do, like the LMS that text file that are unique to a search tools that you don’t haven’t used in traditional SEO. So let’s talk about the second part of the AI algorithm, and this is going to be content.

00:34:02:12 – 00:34:30:22
Patrick Carver
So these tools are out there crawling. They are more or less scraping straight, extracting the information on your your website that is the the the rocket fuel that is powering all of these answers. So if you go to Chad, GPT and you type in something like what are the what’s the statute of limitations on a personal injury claim in in Idaho.

00:34:30:25 – 00:35:21:09
Patrick Carver
You know it’s not you’re not accessing some all knowing God like you know creature in there you can just spit that out. It is all all of those answers are coming from this enormous database of information that they have have created. So it’s it’s basically like Google search engine, where Google has gone out and crawled all websites on the Internet or as many as they can possibly find is the difference there is that in a Google search result, they’re more or less just pointing to the people where the answer is the real transformative piece of all of this is that with AI mode or with GPT, they’ve taken it one step further and they’ve said,

00:35:21:09 – 00:35:49:07
Patrick Carver
okay, we’re not actually going to really point you to the answer and make you go click through a couple of the results to find it. We’re just going to give you the answer, right? And that is all built on data from websites like our clients and other websites out there where they’ve effectively gone out, taken that content, and now they’re using it as to answer to, you know, to answer their questions.

00:35:49:09 – 00:36:22:07
Patrick Carver
So when you think about it that way, content optimization still has an enormous role in generating this visibility for you because these tools are on kind of a, you know, floating a line, right, where they’re kind of I mean, they are stealing your content, right? And then repurposing it. They’re trying or they’ve shown effort to start to reference that information and give people credit.

00:36:22:09 – 00:37:01:15
Patrick Carver
But we are still going to need to do our best to try and improve the content on our websites so that it gets included. And then we are the people being referenced in those answers. So a couple of ways that we can actually optimize content for. I A.I. tools are generally looking for succinct, direct answers. So in the past, the the traditional search algorithm has put a lot of priority on content depth or comprehensiveness.

00:37:01:17 – 00:37:40:18
Patrick Carver
And so we roughly speaking, if you wrote more on your page, Google would see you as more of an authority. Somebody knew more about that topic. That’s kind of flipped now and the goal for answers in AI search results are succinct, direct to the point. Right? And so a key point of content optimization and how we are going to kind of shift our approach moving forward is that we still want to create the most high quality pieces of content we, but we’re going to optimize a little bit more for search intent, trying to get answers to people quickly.

00:37:40:20 – 00:38:02:00
Patrick Carver
Because if those tools find that you have answered that that question succinctly and to the point, they’re more likely to use you. So we are going to work on reducing fluff, getting to the point, using more of that structured data, like having an ordered list or a numbered list, a table with pros and cons, different things like that.

00:38:02:00 – 00:38:36:16
Patrick Carver
Instead of writing three paragraphs to explain the the same idea. So you will still have a lot of value to add to your content and how you help shape your marketing. Because ultimately what these tools are doing is recycling information that’s already out there. The people that they are going to, you know, elevate and and be the big winners are people who are going to add net new information to their content.

00:38:36:23 – 00:39:09:00
Patrick Carver
And that means using your experiences, your expertise, weaving that in to the more technical side that we tend to focus on. So keep that in mind as you’re working with your marketing company. So let’s next talk about content hygiene. And what this means is consistently updating your content so that it’s accurate. It’s up to date and it goes again above and beyond.

00:39:09:00 – 00:39:38:11
Patrick Carver
Right? It is adding net new. It’s the highest possible quality. Freshness is a factor in this. In the past it’s been debatable about whether or not the most recent article would be the best article for a search result. And we in the past have seen that if we created a really, really solid piece of content that was five X better than any of the other results we generally hold a keyword position for a long time.

00:39:38:13 – 00:40:08:10
Patrick Carver
We would be the number one keyword for how to get spouse visa or something like that. There’s been a little bit of a fluctuation here now where we’re seeing freshness emerge as a more important ranking factor, especially for for air optimization. So they’re crawling more websites more frequently now. They have really stepped up their ability to crawl their their scale and now in a place where it rivals Google.

00:40:08:10 – 00:40:38:23
Patrick Carver
And so whereas, you know, before in these air tools, it was you were getting information that was not updated. It was from like 2021. Now it’s it’s pretty much out there and it’s it’s out there. Whenever you do a search, use the Internet. You’re out there searching for more with it. So we need to do a better job of updating content with smaller updates, but more frequently making sure that it’s up to date, adding relevant resources that have just come out.

00:40:39:00 – 00:41:06:16
Patrick Carver
And then the other part of this is pruning your website as well. So going back on an annual basis or every six months looking at, Hey, is there any content that really no longer serves its purpose? Right? It was a recap of a race our company did in 2021, not needed any more. And the more you do that, you’re going to put more of spotlight on the content and the pages on your website that you want to have have be found.

00:41:06:16 – 00:41:32:10
Patrick Carver
Right? So think about it as this ongoing, you know artwork that needs to be updated all the time. Right. And it’s no longer good enough just to update a page, let it sit and then come back for, you know, three years later to update it. Another key piece of the content aspect of things with this is Q&A optimization.

00:41:32:10 – 00:42:04:09
Patrick Carver
So I talked about schema and one of the biggest applications of of marketing and SEO and everything we’re doing here is this idea of fake schema. And if you’re not familiar with this, it’s basically, you know, kind of a behind the scenes piece of code that you, I, you put in your page for every question and answer. And it helps search engines understand that you know what basically what you’re trying to say on the page and you are able to encode designate that this is a question and this is the answer.

00:42:04:11 – 00:42:34:02
Patrick Carver
The reason why this is so important is that air tools are heavily focused on finding this is the dominant format that is happening in air. People are asking questions and giving answers. And so when they’re out crawling, they’re looking for schema that is in this style, right? It’s easier for them to see those, catalog them and then use those in the outputs, the answers that they’re giving out.

00:42:34:05 – 00:42:58:19
Patrick Carver
Then going through a really dense big webpage with a thousand words, lots of paragraphs and trying to synthesize, Oh, this is a question. This is the answer to that question. This is like the Cliff notes. It’s like the drop dead simple. Hey, this is a question. This is an answer. So we’re recommending that you add, as you know, as many as you think makes sense to pages on your website.

00:42:58:19 – 00:43:21:16
Patrick Carver
And by doing it with schema, the most important part, you are giving yourself a better opportunity to be found in these answers. The other thing I would encourage you to do that you can do on your side, which is not necessarily a marketing type of activity, is start keeping a log of every client question you get because this will be gold by putting them on your website.

00:43:21:16 – 00:44:03:00
Patrick Carver
So finding places to take those client questions and put them on your practice area page, put them on in blog post where you’ve covered the topic or doing a in a Q database. Everybody has gone through a helpdesk or help center where they give you a whole hub of information with questions and answers about your business. I see this all getting absorbed into LMS, into these tools, and so people look in in five years and maybe they don’t even go to your Web site anymore and it’s all accessible through a tool like chat.

00:44:03:02 – 00:44:32:07
Patrick Carver
You say, Hey, I’m interested in this lawyer. Tell me everything you know about them. Hey, what’s their pricing structure like that data and that information is going to be super important. You would basically want to control that conversation as opposed to allowing in, you know, an AI tool to come up with, you know, as a proven hallucination or bad info and make make conclusions that are not, you know, accurately accurate data data back to information.

00:44:32:07 – 00:44:47:13
Patrick Carver
So a thing that I like to do is at the end of every week on Friday, you look back at all the meetings you had, you look at the client calls, you had, and you just start to make a list. Okay, here are all of the topics I talked about right here, all the questions that I had and in my answers.

00:44:47:15 – 00:45:11:17
Patrick Carver
And you start to document that and then put those into like an answer based or we do it internally with with an answer by our team to get answers. But that’s gold for the website, right? And and it’s easy content to do So start thinking about put somebody on your team in you know in charge of that the final piece of the puzzle here is the authority piece.

00:45:11:17 – 00:45:43:11
Patrick Carver
And so this is perhaps the most important because it gives you it’s going to do a lot of the comparison where you are going to get elevated over other people because authority, your visibility on on the Internet is still an enormous factor here. And so when we’re talking about authority, talking about your not only reputation, your domain authority that you can control, but also your visibility across the Internet.

00:45:43:11 – 00:46:07:07
Patrick Carver
And so that doesn’t always mean a link. It means you being found that information basically being cross-referenced with these tools so that, yes, you’re found on your website, but then they’re also finding reviews or other information about your business on these other mediums. And that’s all coming together. That is what is the source that is driving these answers.

00:46:07:07 – 00:46:30:13
Patrick Carver
And is giving you a leg up over someone who maybe only has a website, but they they haven’t put in the work to be found on these other platforms. So we talked about it a couple of months ago with this idea of a content engine of building out content on your website, but then also getting it on LinkedIn, getting it on medium, getting it in these other avenues like Reddit and Quora in different places.

00:46:30:13 – 00:47:16:28
Patrick Carver
So one extremely impactful way that you can influence this is reviews. And in the past we have heavily optimized for Google business profile reviews, but now we are still believe that that’s an incredibly important part. But we’re saying, hey, you want to start getting multiple locations of reviews on the Internet. And so that means not only on Google, but maybe getting that same person to do it on Meta on Yelp, if that’s a, you know, a service that is found often in your area, it could be getting reviews on AVO and some of these other seed sites that these tools and Google are looking for to determine your credibility and authority.

00:47:17:01 – 00:47:41:16
Patrick Carver
So if you don’t already have an organized review, capture or review acquisition program, you absolutely need to do it. You to be getting reviews as frequently as possible. You need to respond to those reviews and get them across different platforms. You don’t need to go crazy with it and get one person absolutely has to do ten platforms every time, but you do want to get a presence.

00:47:41:16 – 00:48:06:27
Patrick Carver
And having one on Reddit or on Yelp is better than nothing at all. Right, so start small. Try to get one on on every platform you’re familiar with and and then start to stack more and more right. Okay. The next item here is what I’m calling seed site seeding. I know it’s a mouthful, but we effectively know where these tools are getting their data from.

00:48:06:27 – 00:48:39:20
Patrick Carver
And so this is one of the biggest studies that has come out about how these tools, where they get their information to formulate those responses. And so as you can see, these user generated content sites, Quora and Reddit are enormously important and LinkedIn and YouTube as well. And so this fits in directly with our strategy of omnipresent SEO, where not only do we want to have your website being found, but we also want to have you found on these other platforms.

00:48:39:22 – 00:49:08:24
Patrick Carver
And so when I talk about seed site seeding, I’m talking about getting you getting your business found on these other platforms that are that data is getting sucked up and used for the answers on these in these air tools. And so you want to start thinking about how to increase your visibility on these platforms. We are going to be offering that as part of our air services, repurposing content from websites onto these other platforms.

00:49:08:27 – 00:49:36:08
Patrick Carver
And a couple of easy ways you can do this are establishing your own company channel. So getting your company on on LinkedIn, doing LinkedIn, Pulse articles, giving your company a presence on Medium, on YouTube, Reddit, on these other places that we know are getting crawled more frequently. And that information in there is getting pumped into the answers on a more consistent basis.

00:49:36:10 – 00:50:00:09
Patrick Carver
You can also start interacting in those communities. I wouldn’t advise jumping in 1,000% and just starting to reply to every every Reddit post out there answering every post on Quora. I don’t think that’s the best utilization of your time, but you do want to have it in your strategy, right? And go once a month or, you know, every other month.

00:50:00:09 – 00:50:33:17
Patrick Carver
Go and start looking at other questions on here that I can answer. Get my name into these conversations because they have a long value tale on them. There are conversations that will happen. Thing you can do is get involved in these, build your own company channel and start to get more active on platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Pulse, Medium and and Reddit.

00:50:33:19 – 00:50:59:03
Patrick Carver
Another key tactic that we’re going to be getting into more heavily are these best of lists. And so we have seen that these are being found very prevalently in the search results. And so when people are going on to the tools, their user behavior is a little bit different than traditional search. They are asking who is the best attorney in this area?

00:50:59:03 – 00:51:31:01
Patrick Carver
Who’s the best criminal attorney? And as a result, they are looking for these best of lists to be cited. And often there’s no real background checking on the best of list. Right. They are just grabbing awards, local roundups, places like three best rated online, these different websites that cultivate the best of type of articles and so a tactic that you can do right away is start to cultivate your own best of list, right?

00:51:31:04 – 00:52:02:12
Patrick Carver
Cultivate the best legal service providers in your area, work on it with some of your complimentary colleagues, right in other practice areas, and you could all develop a best of attorneys list in your city. And right away you’re getting eight or nine different pages with links back to you and developing this seed context for the platforms. And we’re going to be doing that in a much bigger way at scale and figuring that out for our clients.

00:52:02:14 – 00:52:25:17
Patrick Carver
The final part of the actual here and then we’ll we’ll start to wrap this up and go through just a couple of the pitfalls. I’ve talked about them already a little bit, but don’t forget that at the end of the day, a lot of the things we’re talking about here are actually just SEO, right? It’s just search engine optimization, but done in a slightly different way.

00:52:25:19 – 00:52:53:18
Patrick Carver
So old fashioned link building is still the number one driver of authority. And how do I know this? Because I’ve asked all of the research tools about their ranking algorithm in depth. And the number one answer I get around it is your website’s authority is really the best driver to know if you are a important, comprehensive topical expert in your area.

00:52:53:18 – 00:53:24:02
Patrick Carver
And so, yes, we want to do all of the things I’m talking about, but we also want to keep building links. So this is still going to be a key part of our SEO program for our clients. Ultimately, these tools all need data. They all need to train their answers in that all is coming from search engines. So you still need to make your strategy heavily, heavily focused on how search engines work, which has traditionally always been content and links.

00:53:24:04 – 00:53:50:26
Patrick Carver
That is, those are still the two primary drivers. So if you want to get into AI tools, you have to get into the search results. So we want to continue to pursue links every opportunity. The idea I just shared is maybe the best thing you can do right now, because not only will you get a link from five, six, seven, eight or ten other people in your area, they’re extremely local, they’re relevant and they’re coming from other law firm websites.

00:53:50:26 – 00:54:16:10
Patrick Carver
So it’s a huge is an easy way to get ten new domains and overall increase your domain authority. So a couple of pitfalls just to keep in mind here when tracking your results, don’t fall for these Air Rank trackers. We believe the best way to track this is going to be through monitoring traffic coming from these these answer tools, these tools.

00:54:16:13 – 00:54:53:02
Patrick Carver
That’s going to be the best way to actually track whether or not what you’re doing on Reddit or these other areas is actually working because there’s no real way to do I rank tracking because they they make none of that data available. There’s no analytics for these these tools. The other best way that I think is going to become increasingly important to make sure you’re getting value out of your marketing efforts, specifically with the AI, is ask your clients how they found you because they are going to have this patchwork journey to find you by doing a little bit of online search.

00:54:53:02 – 00:55:13:13
Patrick Carver
Maybe they’ll do find you on YouTube, or maybe they’ll find you on an AI tool and then investigate you using AI. It’s going to be a little bit of everything, right? And so you need to be in all of those places and ask them on the ground. I don’t think a technology solution will really be able to solve this.

00:55:13:15 – 00:55:43:09
Patrick Carver
So I saw a couple of messages go out. We’ve got the checklist going, Put your name in there if you would like to receive it. We’re going to keep adding to this and grow this over time and and make it give it as much value as possible. But if you are wanting to be on the cutting edge of this emerging marketing strategy, then let’s talk let’s let’s set up a discovery call because we are about to unroll our services, our AI driven services for clients.

00:55:43:15 – 00:56:11:15
Patrick Carver
We’re going to have a baseline that all clients are going to get. We’re also going to have a whole bunch more of other strategies that I didn’t talk about, and we’re talking about all sorts of more advanced strategies that people can get into and are going to move the needle and place you as the dominant lawyer in your market, someone who is going to come up more often and at a higher on a place than your competitors.

00:56:11:15 – 00:56:40:19
Patrick Carver
And now is the absolute best time to get in on this. So I’ll leave it there. Thank you everybody, so much for coming. I love talking about this stuff. I think it’s so exciting. It’s going to mean change. Absolutely. But if you take some of these proactive steps and don’t get into analysis paralysis, you are going to be light years ahead of of your competition and position yourself for the next five, ten years to have a really successful law firm.

00:56:40:19 – 00:57:04:27
Patrick Carver
And that is what it’s all about for us. So again, thank you so much. If there are any question, I don’t think I saw any any come through, but if you have if you have any that you would like me to cover, I can I can stick around here and happy to get into more of it. But that is pretty much it for me on this.

00:57:04:29 – 00:57:28:06
Patrick Carver
And we will send this out. If you if you attended today and you signed up for the webinar, we will make sure you get the the information after this. Just hang out here for a couple more minutes.

00:57:28:08 – 00:57:37:27
Speaker 2
Patrick, there was a question on you. Do you think charging equity could start charging for referring leads to firms?

00:57:38:00 – 00:58:09:00
Patrick Carver
Yeah, I mean, the short answer is yes. I think it’s going to be remain. It remains to be seen how how this all plays out, the specific mechanism that they will use to monetize. But there’s no question that they will have to monetize at some point. Right now, their only monetization mechanism is their subscription fees. So you pay to use it.

00:58:09:00 – 00:58:37:18
Patrick Carver
It’s a consumption, you pay for the API, things like that. That is, you know, they’re losing a ton of money right now because they’re putting all of their all their expenses are in infrastructure, building this experience, getting more people to use it. And so they’re making it inexpensive to get people on board, use it. So the next step is then, okay, how do we monetize this?

00:58:37:20 – 00:59:08:08
Patrick Carver
And that’s what I’m very interested to see how that that all works. They’ve said they’re going to keep the answers neutral, but I think in reality that’s going to be really tough. So I don’t know if you’ll see a, you know, responses from a chat GPT that say, Hey, according to chat group we endorse these people, we think these people are the the best based on on this I think it will be.

00:59:08:11 – 00:59:48:17
Patrick Carver
Here’s how the world views these people. They think the best are these and then I’m guessing guessing that at somewhere in that response they’re going to have a, you know, opportunity to either advertise in there or they’re going to have direct links to book or, you know, kind of similar to how Google set up the booking tool within like their Google business profile transcript will have something like that where, you know, it’s basically one click in and you can you can send that inquiry without actually leaving the platform.

00:59:48:17 – 01:00:23:01
Patrick Carver
So yeah, I mean, I just it’s inevitable that, that they are going to monetize it and it’s just a question of how. Excellent. All right. Unless we have any other questions. So we’ll go last, last call for, for any questions or points of clarification. But again, thank you so much for joining us and we will be back next month with another interesting webinar.

01:00:23:01 – 01:00:30:02
Patrick Carver
So thank you again and I hope everybody here has a wonderful weekend. Thanks. Take care.