Ep. 36 - Building Authority in the Age of AI Overviews

In this episode, I talk about how Google’s AI Overviews have changed the SEO landscape and what law firms can do to stay visible. 

When AI pulls answers from across the web, it’s more important than ever to build authority so your content gets cited.I explain how to track AI citations, understand impressions vs. actions, and why creating helpful, evergreen content is key. 

📲Get The Support Your Law Firm Needs: https://www.thelawfirmgrowthprofessor.com/

The goal isn’t to chase algorithms—it’s to consistently publish valuable insights that answer real client questions and build trust.

I also share how I learned to prioritize marketing channels that actually drive results, and why staying involved in your firm’s strategy is essential—even if you work with an agency.

My challenge to you:

What’s working for your firm right now? Which channels are worth your time? And how are you building authority in your niche?

Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

The Law Firm Growth Professor 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. Called the Pod Professor. That's my name.

John Rizvi 0:13

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over$10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Do you remember about a year ago when Google dropped AI overviews? It had been hinted at for a while by Google, and people who paid attention to this stuff were aware that it was coming sometime. But the actual deployment happened quietly in the dead of night. We went to bed with the same Google we'd always known and woke up with a whole new category up at the top of many search queries. This AI-driven Supra search level, or the level above the usual search results, made waves throughout the search engine biosphere. A lot of information-rich websites, visitor counts, cratered. Many marketers and content creators blame the new AI overviews for the sudden plunge in traffic. That's because users were getting high-level answers scraped and aggregated from multiple sources right at the top of the page, which either gave them the information they needed or reinforced what they already knew or suspected. Why search further when you've already found out what you need to know? Q, panic in the streets, mass freakouts and think pieces, screaming about the end of SEO and online marketing as we know it. But was it really? In actuality, the search engines track everything they scrape. They have to. Just like any other field of research, they have to be able to cite their sources to retain credibility. It works the same way that we as attorneys, when we cite cases or case law in a pleading, if our citations aren't accurate, the case falls apart. This is basic first-year law student stuff, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Google, whose goal since day one was to deliver the best results for its users, functions the same way and for the same reasons. The problem is they don't share that information with website owners and marketers. We have to go looking for it. Do you know how many AI overviews have used content from your website or your social media? Probably not. Odds are good that your marketing agency doesn't know either. That's not good, because it means you're missing out on a whole new marketing avenue. But to really get into it, you need to know what content AI is looking for to present to users. And that means understanding, like I said in the last episode, that you're aiming at a moving target. So how do we find where our brands and our firms are being cited by AI? The first way is manual testing using popular AI programs, input ideas and concepts that concern your firm, like guides and helpful tips for your type of law. See what comes up. If your firm isn't cited, you need to look at what the competition in your area is doing and evaluate what they're doing that your brand isn't. This is known as competitive citation analysis, and it's a huge tool for understanding how your site is being used in AI overviews. You can use this information to estimate how many impressions your firm is getting. As you probably know, impressions are just users seeing your content or ad somewhere. They saw it for long enough to recognize it. That's not the same as actions like navigating to a page or clicking your contact me button. That's a separate metric that we'll get into in a moment. See, for every 1,000 impressions, you're hoping for about 20 or 30 click-throughs. From that 20 or 30, you're hoping for one to three people to interact with your site in a meaningful way, like scheduling a consultation or calling your firm. You're hoping for 2 or 3% click-through and a 5 to 10% conversion rate from that. If you can manage more, wonderful. But understanding impressions, what they are, and how they're showing up in front of your ideal clients, and how potential clients respond to your impressions is critical to understanding how AI is impacting your firm's client funnel. Tracking actions is a lot more complicated. Because AI query funneling is poorly tracked, it can be hard to tell where your action-taking visitors are coming from. A sudden sharp spike in visitors to a specific landing page or your website in general can suggest an AI assistant referral. There are ways to embed AI-generated result queries into your Google Ads console, but these are not always reliable. That means you could be getting a lot of background noise or incorrect information. So what can you do? You probably don't have time to come up with a dedicated AI query that works for your firm, and your marketing agency may not even know that this is possible. The best answer is to chase AI assistant citations without actually chasing them at all. Well hold up, John. You're probably saying, is this like the sound of one hand clapping? No, not at all, and I'll explain why. Your biggest and best weapon is authority. If your firm develops and gains authority, it's more likely to be cited by AI assistants, regardless of the platform you're using. That means you've got better odds of being cited in the first place. But how do you gain authority? This is where we have to get back to basics. Pretend the AI assistants aren't even there. We're going to go back to good old-fashioned SEO with one critical difference. See, we're worried about creating content that answers questions and solves problems. We're not giving legal advice, but maybe we're talking about related topics our clients may not have considered. For example, in my own firm, I may ask a question like, now that I have my patent approved, what's the next step? This is important in my firm because it shows my end game is not just to help them get a patent awarded. If the client wants me there, I'm sticking through the life cycle of the product or innovation. So I have to consider what the next steps might look like for my client. Now I can write a guide about it. I can give potential clients some action items that they need to attend to that they may not have considered, like trademarking and branding. But when is the right time to consider selling patent rights? What's the best way to prevent patent infringement? How do I defend a trademark if it's challenged? These are all intellectual property topics that my clients don't think of. They see the patent sometimes as an end onto itself instead of a means to an even bigger and more productive end. So I explained why they need to be thinking about this stuff, trading on my years of experience and knowledge to get them to realize that intellectual property law doesn't end with the trademark or patent or copyright being awarded. Because my site has a long history and I'm well known in my field, I have several obvious edges here. But if you're just starting out, you need to consider how you're going to grow your authority and reputation so it'll gain the attention you need from search engines, especially Google. So here's what you do: you take a minute and think about your practice. Ask yourself what questions you wish your clients would ask before they come to you and how you might answer them. For a family law practice, for example, you might discuss how state laws in your jurisdiction determine how custodial agreements work. An estate planning lawyer might talk about how to write a holographic will that stands up to scrutiny in probate. A financial tech attorney may discuss recent court cases in their field and what fintech entrepreneurs need to consider based on how the case law is working. Once you've figured out a specific question, you can draft your guide. The key here is going to be to stay on point and not get sidetracked with bunny trails or irrelevant information. Clear, concise questions and simple direct answers are what you want here. Try to package the information in such a way that your opening paragraph poses the question and the main answer, and then use the rest of the post to reinforce the point. Doing this will make it a lot easier for search engines to find this content and quote it in their AI assistance. Now, you've just got to do the same thing again and again and again. Do it on your website, do it on LinkedIn. If you can, publish it in your state bar's monthly publication. And of course, don't overlook traditional media like Forbes, Fortune, The New York Times, TV, radio, and so on. Consistency is the name of the game here. The law's always changing. But we want to be as evergreen as possible. Obviously, for press-oriented interviews and thought articles, this isn't always possible. The circuit courts might say one thing only for appeals to change it up, and then the Supreme Court might decide something entirely different. State and federal laws shift and they change all the time. So what you want to do is strike a balance between content that addresses what's going on now and the things that stay fairly consistent within our areas of practice. Now, as I've said before, this isn't a quick process. It takes time, effort, and dedication. But every one of these pieces you produce will help build your authority. If you can write about topics you find boring in a way that entertains, you're already ahead of the game. And in fact, that's a great idea. Look at the parts of your practice that bore you. Everybody has them. Some people hate being asked the same questions over and over again. But if you can answer those questions once on your website, you can skip over them later. This frees you up to deal with more immediate and novel questions from your clients. You can also offer information on support and resources. In estate and family law, for example, you might suggest places where grieving relatives or spouses dealing with the end of a relationship can receive emotional support, financial assistance, and so forth. This is tricky because you've got to be careful to keep your suggestions balanced. Otherwise, you risk exposing yourself to accusations of bias and possibly even sanctions from your state bar. But if you do it right, you can give your clients helpful information without breaking any professional ethics rules. Now that you've got the basic information, the next step is to promote it. This is the part that most lawyers hate. The good news is there's a lot of good ways to do it through automation. If you set your website up correctly, every time you publish a new piece or update an existing one, there are tools that will let you publish immediately to every social media channel that you're on. The more promotion you do, the more likely it is that you'll get the kind of traffic that you're looking for. You should also be sure to promote any pieces that you do in the media. Most reputable organizations will provide you with links to your content. This is important because you can add these to your website and blast them on social media, which increases your visibility to potential clients and your authority with search engines. But why do all of this? What's this going to accomplish? We do this because authority is part of playing the long game. You can't just walk in and expect to be considered an authority because you have letters after your name. That just means you successfully finished law school and passed the bar. But building authority takes time. But it's worth it because authority can help your website keep a stable footing on Google even during a major algorithm shift from Google and other search engines. So, what's your next move? This is the part where we start really digging into metrics and KPIs. But before we can do that, we need to know what we're looking for. That means we have to figure out which metrics are really important and which ones we can ignore. The obvious goal is to have more conversations with active clients. We all know this part, but we need to be able to figure out where the bulk of our conversations are coming from. For working all possible angles, such as in-person networking, traditional advertising, and internet marketing, it can be hard to figure out exactly where our qualified client leads are coming from. Sure, you can throw up a survey on your site asking clients to detail how they found your site, but that only works if people actually fill it out accurately. So how do we get around doing this? One of the best ways to track where you're getting clients from is to simply ask them, but not through surveys. Just on your intake interview, between that and the information you can glean from your website and social media analytics, this will give you the most comprehensive picture of what content and outlets are giving you the best results. This information, you can figure out where to focus your efforts and double down on the avenues that are working best for your firm. This doesn't mean you should completely abandon the channels that aren't giving you the same results because something that isn't giving you leads today could go crazy next week. However, it only makes sense to devote most of your marketing time and energy to the outlets that drive clients to your site and ultimately to your firm. A very common mistake people make is trying to hit all the channels all at once with no real plan or strategy. I made this mistake myself early on in my marketing journey. It was exhausting, it was time consuming, and I spent a lot of time chasing my tail instead of gathering valid leads. I was so busy trying to get the word out by any means necessary that I neglected areas where my firm was doing well in favor of trying to get more traction in places where it just wasn't working. It took me a while to figure out where to prioritize my efforts, starting with my website. Then, once I had that rolling the way I needed it to, I started paying more attention to social media and figuring out where my main traffic was coming from. From there, I could put together a plan that didn't totally ignore my slower outlets, but also meant I wasn't wasting more time on them than what they're worth. Obviously, you'll need to make some adjustments as you go. Social media channels come and go. They change direction or ownership. A site that's great for promoting your firm now might not be a good fit a month from now due to political or financial considerations. The same applies with media outlets like TV and radio. So you've got to be aware of how the channels you use are shifting focus and be prepared to move on channels that would be most beneficial at any given time. Now, sure, your marketing agency should be well aware of all of this, but here's the thing you have to remember. At the end of the day, you're the one calling the shots. It's your firm's reputation and future on the line. So while yes, they should be able to give you good advice and suggestions as to what you should do next, you need to make sure that you're on top of these things yourself. You know better than anyone else what's right and wrong for your firm, and you own the results. That means you owe it to yourself, your firm, and your future to make sure you're in the loop and not delegating your marketing out to a point where you have no idea what's going on. Now, before I wrap up this episode, I'd like to open up the floor for comments from you. What have you noticed is working well for you? Have you already been working on developing your authority rankings? Which channels are best for your firm? And which ones are you ignoring? And why? The reason I'm asking these questions is because your comments and experiences, good and bad, can help others develop their strategies in ways which work for their specific firms and fields of law. They can also help identify pain points and help other attorneys and law firms avoid them. So feel free to chime in with your comments, experiences, and opinions, because we all can grow and learn from everyone's experience and knowledge. And that in turn benefits us all. Now, in the next episode, we're going to talk about why what works for you may not work for someone else, and vice versa. We're also going to talk about the evolution of SEO and how that means that multiple people can look at the same data and KPIs and come away with completely different interpretations of what it means. And perhaps most importantly, we're going to talk about how and why these discrepancies can be good or bad for brands that are trying to break into the SEO game and evolve their outreach and branding. Once again, I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Thank you so much for stopping by. Before you leave today, I'd really appreciate it if you like this podcast, subscribe if you haven't already, and be sure to share the link to this episode with attorneys and colleagues that you think might enjoy this episode as well. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you next time.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 18:48

So when a new idea pops into your brain, professor, that's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think that's oh your ideas are new. So when a new idea pops into your brain, that's my name.