Ep. 58 - Why Most Law Firm Content Fails to Rank on Google

Most law firms are approaching SEO content the wrong way.

They’re focused on publishing more instead of publishing better.

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, John Rizvi explains why deep, well-researched legal content consistently outperforms shallow “content for content’s sake” strategies — especially in today’s AI-driven search landscape.

John breaks down how law firms can create content that actually resonates with prospective clients, why emotional connection matters more than most attorneys realize, and how simplifying legal concepts can dramatically improve engagement and trust.

He also shares practical insights on:

• Why long-form content still wins in SEO
• How to write for humans instead of algorithms
• The danger of sounding overly technical or robotic
• Why passion and emotional resonance matter in legal marketing
• The ideal balance between keywords and readability
• How AI overviews are changing content strategy for law firms
• Why understanding your audience matters more than legal jargon
• The biggest mistake attorneys make with content marketing

If you want your law firm’s website to rank higher, attract better clients, and stand out in a crowded digital landscape, this episode is packed with actionable insight.

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

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. And 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. Now, when it comes to content and how much of it you really need on your firm's website, there's two schools of thought. The first school of thought is that you need to constantly, consistently be pushing out content that's relevant to your visitors, which is reasonable to a degree. But there's another school of thought that says instead of focusing so much on pushing content out, make sure it's good content. Make sure it's the right content for your potential clients. And the reason that these two two schools of thought clash is because there are so many ways to do content well. But which one is going to attract more viewers and more visitors to your website? Well, unfortunately, this is not as simple and cut and dried as it seems. You'll think that more is better, and that's true to a point. The trouble is that it has to be good, high-quality content, and that's where a lot of people miss because they think, oh, well, I can't pound out something in an hour and a half and push it off to the internet, and that's my job done for the day. But that's not what search engines are looking for. They're looking for your ability to connect with an audience and give them good, solid, detailed information that goes deeper than what end users can find in an AI overview. That's how you wind up with your content in AI overviews in the first place. So you have to take into account when you're deciding whether to go wide with your content or go deep with it. The key point to figure out is which one is going to give you and your visitors more. For this reason, it's almost always better to go deep with your content rather than worrying about throwing out a bunch of content at once. Well, if you can do that, that's great. There's nothing saying you can't. But deep, in-depth, and well-researched articles and blog posts are always going to do better for you on average and over time than if you're just throwing out random blurbs and tidbits throughout the day. And a lot of people don't understand that. They think, well, if I put it on, if I throw enough whatever at the screen, something's going to stick, right? Well, that's true to a point, but it's also a really lazy way to approach SEO and content marketing. What you really need to be figuring out is how does this content connect with my readers and my visitors? How does it convince them that I'm the right person for their case? And what information can I give them that other people out there have ignored or don't think is worth discussing? This all sounds very complicated, but it's really, truly not. When it comes to your content, it's always better to go in depth, really break it down and avoid jargon as much as possible. If you have to throw in legal jargon, define it once and then walk away. Trust that your audience will remember what you've told them regarding stare decisis or whatever. But if you can really drill down to the nuts and bolts of your content and explain not just what it is, but why it matters and how it's relevant to people dealing in your field of law. If you can do that, you're putting yourself ahead of the game automatically, and that's what you want. The goal, of course, is always to get out in front of the competition and to deliver better content and a better experience for your visitors. Now, some people write uh deep think pieces just seemingly effortlessly, and I assure you it isn't. It's because they've spent a lot of time learning how to do this, learning how to encapsulate and isolate information in an entertaining way for their website visitors. And chances are that effort has paid off for them because they're probably the ones getting mentioned in AI overviews. They're the ones contributing to the higher rankings on Google. So it's worth following their lead, at least until you figure out the best mix that gets you in front and keeps your firm there for yourself. Now, again, I have to stress this: this isn't necessarily going to work for every single field of law. And it's not something you're probably going to be able to pull off all of the time. Especially not without getting into the weeds of questions like, what can I say about this case? What shouldn't I say about this case? What must never come out of my mouth regarding this case? That can be a really tricky line to walk. So, of course, you can take refuge and hypotheticals and evaluate them that way, which gives us some extra options and reduces the likelihood that we're going to talk ourselves into trouble. Now, the next point we have to consider is this. When you go deep on a content topic, it is always, always better to start with the content that you already know on a deep level. Do you know the stuff cold off the top of your head? Do you know the facts and the figures by heart? So you don't have to do a lot of run-up or a bunch of research except to bolster what you're stating in your article. So you need to think about that. And what areas of your practice are you comfortable with speaking off the cuff? These are things you could literally talk about in your sleep if necessary. Now that's a great starting point. And if you've got that, you've got a good running start already. The next matter is your vocabulary. When you're talking to lawyers, uh, for lawyers by lawyers, you have access to a completely different vocabulary and jargon than you do when you're talking to the general public. And they don't care what the Latin terms are. In fact, in many cases, the Latin terms only serve to confuse them. So they may need to understand what this concept is, what it means in the context of the law, and why it's important to their case. Okay, fine, you can explain that. But then, like I said before, move on. Trust your audience to be smart enough to remember important information that you took the time to define. And if they didn't catch it the first time, that's fine. They can read back up and say, oh yeah, they mentioned it up here. What is that? And that's perfectly legal and it makes sense to them. Most important of all, your content has to offer real value to your prospective clients. It should be interesting, it should be engaging. Now, of course, what interests me as a patent attorney may not interest you in another field of law, and vice versa, and that's fine. It says that we have different strengths and weaknesses within our respective fields. There's nothing wrong with that. The important part is that when you go to pass this knowledge on to prospective clients or just the general public, you need to make sure that you're speaking in their language and you're discussing the topic in a way that's going to make sense to them. Otherwise, you end up with this problematic situation where you have viewers saying, Well, I think this stuff is useful, but I can't really tell for sure. You absolutely do not want that. So when you're starting your content, one of the best ways to get more attention is to take a case that's ripped right out of the headlines and comment on it. What is each side doing well? What is each side doing badly? And what would you do differently in a situation like that? Of course, the idea is not to run anybody down, but to illustrate how the law works in a hypothetical situation, and this may be of tremendous value to your clients. Or maybe you want to do a thought piece on a new law that's come through and may impact a lot of clients in your specific geography and in your area of practice. Okay, fair enough. So what are you looking for? Well, in that case again, the idea is to take the technical aspects of law and the jargon and eliminate them as much as possible. So your users, your readers, uh sorry, won't have a hard time keeping up. Because let's face it, the vast majority of them probably do not have law degrees. There's just no getting around that. If they did, they'd be filing their own actions and we wouldn't be having this discussion because none of this would matter. But that's not the case. So most places recomm I recommend writing, uh, in fact, on a fifth grade level, I have always personally found that to be a generally decent guideline that doesn't always land. For example, if I want to attract the attention of inventors, innovators, or entrepreneurs, I'm probably going to have to couch things in a slightly higher tone than I would if I was writing for the general public. So instead of writing at a fifth grade level, maybe I write at a seventh or eighth grade level because that's my target audience. People who can understand seventh and eighth grade words without difficulty. But with divorce, general defense, even estate planning, you're going to get all kinds. You're going to uh get some very educated people, and you're going to get some people who are not that educated. This doesn't make them bad or wrong or anything else. It just means that you need to be uh you need to have more of a boost to your knowledge level uh and and talk about it in a way that they can understand what's happening with their case. So it's worthwhile to consider the education level of your average client and then maybe adjust a little bit, make some tweaks where it's appropriate to do so. There's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing that says you can't do that and make it work just fine. However, the point here is that what you do not want to do is either talk so far over the top of your audience that they can't understand what you're getting at anyway. Or worse yet, talk down to your audience. No one appreciates being talked down to. And I know several people who are intelligent enough that if they feel like they're being talked down to, they'll terminate the conversation because they're just not going to put up with that. Again, I want to stress here that your content is you initiating a conversation with your audience. Just like I'm doing on this podcast, I'm starting a conversation. You may notice even when I do these podcasts or my LinkedIn articles, I don't delve into a ton of legal jargon or anything like that, even though this content is for lawyers. Uh, we know we're intelligent people. We're aware that we've passed our law school exams, past the bar. Uh, we're entitled to uh uh use Esquire after our name. There's no problem. But I don't have to talk up to you because you already know what's going on. And I don't have to talk down to you because we all know we're smart people and can capture and understand uh the topic. So trying to be smarter than your audience uh or come across as smarter than your audience just doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm pointing this out because I want you to be clear on your approach when you start writing deep content. What you don't want to do is worry about the machines. And I've said this before, I'll say it again. The machines uh or the the search engines, they're important, but they don't and cannot do the same work of a human mind. It's just not going to happen. So, what you want to do when you're planning out your content approach is to be thinking with people in mind first. Don't worry about the search engines and uh the getting the right keywords in. If you run through and find at the end that you're light on keywords, okay, you can go through and fix it. Make some edits, make some tweaks and adjustments. This is often easier to do when you're writing long form content, which almost always does better for SEO than short form. So the more time you spend working on your content and the longer it is, generally speaking, the better. Now you don't want to go bonkers and write 10,000 words on a topic you could have wrapped up in 3,000 words. 3,000 words is about what most people can read on a lunch break and still recall the information later. And that's fine. On the other hand, if you want to write an informative white paper that runs to 20,000 words, uh, then by all means do so. However, understand that after the 3,000 to 5,000 word mark, you're going to find that your audience engagement drops off simply because people's attention spans are not as long as they used to be. That's just a fact of our modern world. So if you want to go deep enough that you leave your reader feeling like they've left with something of value and use something that they can put into action in their own world, that's the key. You haven't given them so much information that they've completely forgotten what the initial question was that brought them to your website. The more of that you do, the more of that good quality, long-form content that you're bringing to your prospective clients, the better off you're going to be. And then, of course, you can use your social media platforms to help market and broadcast the fact that this new item exists for people to check out. But then once you've done that, leave it alone. Let it do what it's going to do. Let the content percolate, let it cook. Sometimes the difference between first place in Google SERPs and third or fifth place in Google SERPs is just a matter of patience and playing the long game. But there's one key point that a lot of people ignore and they do it to their detriment, and that's passion. If you're not passionate about the field of law that you practice, or you're not passionate about the cases or laws that you're speaking about in a public forum, it's going to show. And people are going to say, okay, well, so why am I taking advice from this person? It doesn't sound like they care about this stuff one way or the other. And if that's the case, you've already got a problem because you're going to have a lot of people going, yes, it was technically sound and useful, but it sounded like they were lecturing about plant, you know, planting a tree or and they were putting me to sleep. That's not good either. Instead, you need to engage your passion for your subject, engage your passion for why you think this case went well or why you think it went off the rails. The law is a really good uh idea on in your situation, or if you think it's a poor idea, just be passionate about it. Don't be afraid to show some emotion if something made you angry or sad or excited. Don't be afraid to show that emotion. Emotional resonance is what keeps us as human beings and helps us connect, even when the medium of connection is purely digital. We don't connect in a face-to-face sense, but there's that emotional resonance from which we're sharing. And that's going to take you just as far as writing a well-researched 5,000-word paper on why this new law is the best thing ever, or absolutely ridiculous, or somewhere in the middle, uh, which most things are. So bring your passion. Don't overcrowd the page. If you can write about the topic in 3,000 words, write about it in 3,000 words. If you need 6,000 words, great, write 6,000 words. But make sure that they're the right words for your audience. You know, you don't always need to demonstrate how deep your brain pan is with every single blog post or think piece that you produce. Sometimes just the fact that it's there is enough. And a lot of your viewers will appreciate the fact that you put some heart into it, you put some passion into it, and you took the time to think about how these people process information in their own minds. Now, if you can do that, you're already well on your way to creating the type of deep content that will ultimately get you into the top of Google SERPs and AI overviews. And those are the holy grail of this particular chapter in SEO. So be aware of that. Be thinking about that, and consider how you can adjust your tone and your presence and your performance to resonate with more people. If you can do that, you've got the building blocks for great content and for promoting yourself and your law firm the right way. Again, I'm John Risvie, a law firm growth professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel, and don't forget to share with your friends and colleagues who may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today, and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas for making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you.