SEO vs. AI Search: 3 Myths Bleeding Your Family Law Firm Dry

There’s no SEO vs. AI search. Your law firm needs both channels, and most agencies are only covering 25% of the work. Here's the fix.

We debunk 3 AI myths costing family law firms real clients plus the trust-first framework that fixes your visibility in both channels.

We also cover how your NAP data and off-site authority determine whether AI recommends you or skips you.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - SEO vs AI Search: Why Most Law Firms Are Getting This Wrong 

1:33 - Two Separate Strategies: Ranking on Google AND Ranking on AI 

2:39 - Misconception #1: How AI Actually Ranks Your Law Firm 

5:19 - How ChatGPT Personalizes Attorney Recommendations 

6:40 - The MIT Study: Why 89% of AI Users Still End Up on Google 

9:05 - Misconception #2: Why Your Website Isn't Enough for AI Trust 

11:09 - Misconception #3: How to Actually Influence What AI Shows 

13:33 - What's Coming Next in Law Firm AI Visibility

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Transcript

0:00

AI is moving at the speed of light, and there are so many misconceptions when it comes to ranking in AI. Being visible in AI, especially for law firms. Make sure to check this episode out. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family attorneys build the firm of their dreams. I am your host, Tyler Dolph. And today I have our AI guru, Casey Shea with me today. And we're going to talk about AI misconceptions. You know, there's so much chatter in the space today. All of our clients are asking us, what are we doing about AI? How is it affecting my results? You know, how do I make sure that I'm ranking on AI? And there's a lot of misconceptions out there. Casey, give us a little overview of the land of kind of what you're hearing and seeing on the client level. I mean, there are so many different things that that I hear every single day when it comes with clients. One of the big things is, you know, what are we doing? We're doing all this SEO stuff, but what are we doing with AI? And there's a lot of, chatter out there where they're like, SEO is dead. It's all going to be AI. But what I don't think that people truly understand is like AI. It's like there's a lot of foundational pieces based off of SEO and honestly, like the way that AI is ranking websites has a lot, correlation with like, how SEO used to be, but in a much smarter way. So it's like the foundations of both are there. But the approach is kind of changing. And so, just to be clear, for those listening, and maybe they have, you know, a different agency relationship or whatever, there are there are two different strategies at play here. Right. You want to rank on Google and you want to rank on AI. And just by doing one or the other, you're not going to get both. Oh, absolutely. And it's like, a lot of times we get clients that come from previous agencies. And what I recognize a lot is their SEO department only does like onsite SEO. They don't do any of the offsite stuff. But here at Rocket Clicks, we take care of all of that. So our SEO department, you know, we're not working on just your website, but all of those offsite things as well. So we're touching everything that touches your website. And I think that's the big differentiator from like other agencies and like what people are used to experiencing with their other agencies is they're like, I have this lamb guy when the lamb guy is basically just doing like 25% of what we're already doing. Love it. All right. Let's jump right into the misconceptions. So the first one is AI reads and ranks websites the same way Google does. Not even close. So the big thing is AI is, for the most part, like it's memory. It's knowledge is it's outdated. So it can look at live data now, especially with like Atlas and things like that. But it's almost like it's like giving it a flashlight. So it's like it can see in the dark a little bit better and it can abstract to newer information. But at the end of the day, it's taking old indexed information from probably about a year ago. And then that's where it's like basing its knowledge off of and then training and things like that. Whereas when Google looks at your website, they're looking at, okay, how much information do they have on this topic? How is it structured? How are the keywords set up? You know, it's looking for all those eat signals. So the expertise, they experience authoritative ness and trustworthiness where I their only focus on that trustworthiness. So it's like, how are you showing I the that trust signals. But then there's also like a little bit of sprinkle in there. You know as far as like structured data and things like that that Google also will evaluate with its ranking. But at the end of the day, it just comes down to Google is real time crawling everything and ranking accordingly to like keywords, AI is looking for trust and understanding what your website is so like. Consistency is a huge thing. Like every all the information. Yeah. So it's like if it's not consistent on your website, say you got 500 blogs and that that's super common. Like people are just pumping out blogs. Does everything align with each other or do you have something contradicting? Is there a little bit different of an opinion because that's going to throw AI off? They're just looking for that consistency. And once they hit a couple of like, what is this? They're just going to dip out. They're not even going to look at your site anymore. we see this really play out with multiple practice firms right. It's really hard for them to rank for specific terms in AI because you go to their website and you're like, wait, they're experts in family and personal injury and estate planning. Yeah. Because it's like I want to show the best the best of the best. So how are you confirming that information? And if you're like, oh, we do family law and we do PI and we do construction, we do this like we cover everything just because, you know, we want to catch everything that might work for something like Google's search engine, where it's like, okay, well, let's make sure that we have everything structured and just put a whole bunch of content in there. So, you know, we're creating this like book of expertise on your website where I they're just like, I don't know what this person does. I don't know if they're the best in anything. I'm going to go find the best and then it's going to go to its resources. Is it using personalized? You know, I use ChatGPT every day, right? And I'm putting all kinds of random things in there and asking all kinds of questions. Is it leveraging any of my prior chats when it's serving results like that? Even more so now. So now it's like, you know, just like Google has its own algorithm. If you were to just jump in to GPT and say, what's the best lawyer in green Bay? It's just going to draw from it's knowledge and it's information. It's going to just be like, all right, here's the best lawyer that that we believe to be. But if you're having a conversation or like, I'm going through this divorce, you know what? What can I do in this situation? It's an abusive relationship, you know, it's like it adds a layer and another layer, and then when you ask it, you know, I'm ready to find a lawyer. What is the best lawyer in green Bay? It's going to take everything in that conversation, and it's going to align it with specifically what will fit you perfectly. So oh abusive relationship. They have children. They're looking for a divorce. This person has a lot of reviews, a lot of people highlighting that the success in these specific areas. So we want to show on this person. That's great. And so it's much more personalized if people are leveraging the tool correctly, right. If they're having a conversation and going deeper rather than just divorce attorney near me. Yeah. Yeah. Well and another cool thing that so I went down a rabbit hole with this and something that I, I had an assumption, but, MIT actually did a study, I think it was last year on this, and they wanted to know what the correlation was with how many people just, like, get their answers from AI or GPT perplexity or whatever it is, and then they're like, oh, okay, cool, I'm going to go with that one. And then they just contact the lawyer or whatever it is that they're looking for. It actually came down to only about 11% of people who use AI will just take that word. The other 89% will go from AI to Google search, and then that's where their decision is made. So it starts 89% will start in ChatGPT or AI ends in the search. Hey, family law firm leaders. My partner, Tony Karl's just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from 0 to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family, law firm will succeed. they're going to do a little research. Then they're going to go validate that research. They probably still want to see a website or read some testimonials or reviews. Exactly. So it's like people are still trusting and vetting it. Especially in like the, law industry. You know, you look at our audience, you know, just say 30 and above, predominantly we're looking at like anywhere from 48 to over 60% of those people in that age demographic are using AI. So it's like and then they go to search. So it's like it's becoming more and more relevant to show up in both areas because if you're showing up in one that's kind of like your billboard, it's like, oh, okay, I recognize that name. And if you're showing up in search as well, it's a game changer. 100%. So you've got to be in both. Yeah. you leverage it is really important. Well and then like ranking as well. So it's like you can show up as the top choice in AI. But you might be the eighth in search. So that's where that balance comes into play. That's why it's like SEO is far from dead, because you got to show up in both. You got to do both just means Oh yeah. All right. Second misconception is my website is the main thing AI evaluates No. So this is this is what I was touched on before. It's like, what are these little LMD guys selling? Because like, I keep hearing that term, it's like this new job title that people are holding on to. Basically what they're doing is like, they're making sure that everything aligns outside of your website. So it's like, yeah, your website, that's that's your home base. You want to make sure that, you know, you got the main things that are super important on your website for, I specifically is all the, the human element. So your attorney bios, you know, any accomplishments that they had, your name, address and phone number and then specifically we'll just sit on name address, phone number. It needs to be consistent across the board. So is it the same on Yelp Google. Yeah. Everything. Because if it's not, as soon as it sees a disruption in the pattern, I lose loses trust and confidence in who you are and that you're a real entity and it's not going to take the time to validate, like, is this for real? I mean, they got this award, but none of their Nap information is consistent across the web. I'm going to choose someone else. And just as a further point there, when it comes to Google, you know, 42, according to our research at not only our own law firm, Sterling Lawyers, but as well as our clients, over 42% of divorce cases come from local search, come from the maps. You know, someone searching for the divorce attorney near me or divorce attorney plus city name. And so you got to do this, optimization. Anyway, Yeah. to be showing in the maps on Google. Yep. And that's like one of the fundamental things we do right away is like, okay, day one clients starting. How is their nap information? And then we'll start digging into everything else because it's like, what's the first thing that people are going to see? They're going to see you in the search results. And then they're going to start looking at the site. So it's like we want everything buttoned up from the get go. Love it. Okay. Final, misconception we're going to review today is that you can't influence what AI shows. Well, whereas with Google, the way that they're evaluating things is you know, what's your structure, what's your keywords. Things like that. So it's like you can and you can't influence it. It's like a gray area when it comes to like I. So the way you can influence it. There's one way which is a newer black hat way that people are doing it where they're poisoning AI. So what they're tending to do with that is they are, feeding in the magic number is 250 documents online where it's like, on a highly, authoritative site, something like that. They're buying these backlinks, and then it pollutes the thinking because there's this, all this documentation on it saying that it's this one thing, but that's something that they're going to be overcoming as far as, like when we're working on websites, people are always like, oh, well, I want to get this page to be ranking on, I specifically. And it's like, well, it's not as easy as just like polishing up like your keywords and your structure and everything like that. It's a combination of both on site and off site. So you have to make sure that the information on your site is easily readable. So it's going to benefit Google and it's going to benefit, I search so easily readable, broken up. We don't want big chunky paragraphs where it's just like, I can't skim this, I'm going to leave. This is too hard to like, digest. Making sure that structured data is in there. Because when I looks at your website, they're just looking at the HTML code. They're not even looking at anything else. They're just reading the text, and then they move on from there. So the way that you can influence it is all of those trusted sources outside of your website. So in influencing it, it's just basically, gaining more confidence and trust that that's all you're predominantly trying to do is gain that trust. And a lot of those is actually out of the marketer's hands. So one of the biggest signals that you can do overall community involvement, if you can get cited in any kind of like community involvement, things that you do, you know, with, any kind of, in Chamber of Commerce yeah, Chamber of Commerce, you know, any, any law groups, things like that, anything that you're associated with and that you are recognized for, those are massive signals. So that's how you can influence it. It's not as easy as just pumping out a whole bunch of content and making sure that it's structured in a way that search engines like it. At. So good. Okay. I appreciate your time, your insights. If you're listening to this and you're intrigued, we are going to continue this, this series, at least monthly. Depending on how fast things change, we may need to do more than that. But, appreciate the insights today and look forward to seeing you again.