The AIO Audit for Law Firms: Introduction
This book is being built in public, one chapter at a time, same as we do for our own clients who participate in our Authority Chapter Plans to build a book over a year, chapter-by-chapter. To access the entire AIO Audit for Law Firms book, please click here.
It dawns on you, during your most recent monthly marketing meeting that your firm’s largest ongoing expense, aside from your office lease, goes to someone you’ve never actually met and whose credentials are vague.
Sure, you’ve spoken with your “SEO/PPC” guy for half an hour or so every month, and you sometimes communicate via email, but who is this person, really? Have you settled into mere routine, you wonder as he blathers on about “click-through rates,” and “keyword rankings.” When he speaks of “impressions,” he never means the impression your firm makes on its community, referral partners, or prospective clients, but rather how often your law firm’s website is displayed in Google searches.
Has mere inertia brought you here? You wonder. Looking back, has the cadence of these meetings ever really changed? When was the last time you were presented with something that felt like innovation. Something regal rather than rote. A nagging thought seizes your mind and gut: is any of this actually leading to the high-value clients we want?
You begin to suspect that perhaps your “SEO/PPC” guy is really more an account executive than a marketing expert. Someone paid to stroke your ego, explain charts and graphs that look impressive but lack coherence and substance, a salesperson intended to keep your monthly retainers paid each month. You experience the vague feeling of being a large, praying mantis, somehow stuck in the spider’s web. You begin to feel a miasmic shock of shame curse through your body.
You need not.
Auditing Your Legal Marketing Team
The truth is most lawyers are poorly equipped to select marketing partners. Lawyers are too busy to properly vet SEO/PPC firms, often relying on a referral from a colleague. Sludge marketing agencies target law firms because they are considered ideal clients: well-heeled, too busy for proper oversight, and largely tech-adverse. They can charge you double or triple what they might most other businesses and get away with it. Most firms that chose to target law firms as clients did so for these reasons, not because they have any great passion for working with lawyers.
I practiced law for sixteen years before I founded Books for Experts, which I built on two aligned desires: (1) to help and humanize lawyers and (2) to fight sludge marketers, the carrion birds that vulture onto far too many law firms. Here, I combine my hard-fought legal career with my extensive publication credits to create Authority Intelligence Optimization™ (AIO) for law firms. I can tell you why I work only with lawyers; in fact, I just did. Ask your current legal marketing team their “why” and see if any judge or jury would buy it as credible.
Legal Marketing “Credentials”
The truth is most marketing agencies are not stocked with computer engineers, marketers, lawyers, or branding experts, but salespeople. There is no barrier to entry to holding yourself out there as an SEO expert or a PPC guru. It’s not like the law, where there is certain coursework and credentials involved. Sure, some can point to easy to attain Google certs, but don’t kid yourself that those took much more than a couple of hours and a multiple-choice test.
Getting your realtor license is harder.
Most of these agencies are stocked with salespeople and fresh out of college humanities majors. If you’re lucky, perhaps a couple of burnt-out paralegals thrown into the mix. If you’re lucky they will have a backend featuring an overworked tech guru or two to step in when things go array. Most of the actual SEO and PPC work is outsourced, specifically overseas. Such work is rote, and tedious, and boring, and there are high margins to be had by playing middle person separating law firm owners from their coin.
The person you met with each month just needs to print a couple of reports, put a smile on, and talk up recent developments as though slight improvements in “long-tail keywords” is going to make any real difference.
Slime Content
If your agency also provides writing, such as web copy or blog posts, have you ever really examined it? Could it be any more generic? To think that lawyers are trained extensively in persuasion but have accepted that law firm websites should be drained of all persuasion. Boring drivel, written not for human consumption, but search engines. Featuring bland, keyword stuffed slime like “Bethesda Maryland Divorce Lawyers Serving Divorce Clients in Bethesda, Maryland: Our Experienced Bethesda Maryland Law Firm Helps Clients Using Our 136 1/2 combined years of experienced throughout Montgomery County.”
It’s an unprofessional image.
Are the blog posts you’re paying for ever tailored to your ideal client? Written specifically to your law firm? Is there any differentiation here, or just further commodification. Of you, of your law firm, of our profession.
AIO/AI Referrals
You are aware of AI, but are you aware that AI is replacing search as the number one referral source for legal services? Even within search engines, AI is becoming fully integrated. That means SEO and PPC are fast becoming yesterday’s marketing platforms. The future is AIO: Artificial Intelligence Optimization. Or what we call, via our proprietary system: Authority Intelligence Optimization™, because we think it best to not only market to AI machines, but to actual humans as well.
Most law firms with legal marketers distribute their resources like this:
90% Search, 10% humans.
In 2025 what the mix should really look like is this:
50% AI, 35% Humans, 15% Search engines.
by 2030 It should look like this:
60% AI, 35% Humans, 5% Search Engines.
The good news is, what works for AI referrals generally works for human ones, and vice versa. The problem is, what works for search engines generally provides no value, or even actively harms AI and human trust and referrals.
Has your marketing agency even discussed AIO with you yet in any meaningful manner? I don’t mean they have mentioned the term artificial intelligence, or even made statements such as “With Google’s new AI overviews we need to shift our SEO strategy a bit…”
I’m talking about making real changes to your marketing plan.
The Three Pillars of AIO™
I created the Three Pillars of AIO concept, which is the framework of our proprietary Authority Intelligence Optimization System™. It’s fast becoming the black letter law for AI best practices. This is something I devised, so if you see something similar, even with different words, know that you’re drinking a generic cola.
Even Google AI overviews have picked this up, linking back to our website.
Look, there we are, top right corner!
As you can see, the Three Pillars are as follows:
- Creating Authority Assets: In other words, writing books and articles, creating podcasts and videos, all created by humans for AI. Too many agencies create with AI, and too few create for it. To maximize referrals, you are going to need to create unique to you authority assets. I call this the gift to AI.
- Technical Authority Signals: Here, the final productive remnants of SEO merge into AIO within Pillar two. This is how you improve your website’s technical foundation with structured data, namely something called “schema markup” to help AI platforms better understand your firm’s services and credibility. I call this the wrapping paper for the gift to AI.
- Building Real-World Validation: This means expanding your firm’s authority through public relations work, media mentions, speaking engagements, community service, sponsorships, and other forms of distributing your content and name, connecting your physical self with the “digital twin” that AI referrals so value. I call this the bow on the gift and the distribution channel.
Authority Philosophy™
All Three Pillars of AIO™ must be built upon a foundation, and our proprietary foundation is what we call Authority Philosophy™. This is the secret sauce you bring to the equation, though we can help you distill it. What is unique about your firm, your professional philosophy, your services? Your Authority Philosophy™ is what differentiates your firm from all others, so that you can attract the right types of clients and repel the wrong ones.
Auditing Your Legal Marketing Team
So, if you never have before, or if it’s been a while, I suggest you ask your marketing team a few questions and see if you find their answers credible.
(1) What are their credentials?
(2) What are their thoughts on AI referrals changing the game?
(3) Do they agree SEO and PPC will be diminished in the coming years? Keep in mind here what Upton Sinclair famously wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
(4) Do they farm out any of their work overseas?
(5) How do they differentiate your firm from other firms in your niche?
(6) How many files are they working on, yours included?
(7) What does their job entail, aside from meeting with people and reviewing reports.
(8) What was their undergraduate degree in?
(9) What was their job immediately prior to this one: where did they work, for how long, and what was their title there?
(10) What tools do they use to create your reports and to monitor your progress?
(11) What is their actual, current job title?
(12) Have they been promoted within the last three years, and if so, from what?
(13) What is their plan to integrate AIO?
(14) Can they assist with creating authority assets?
(15) Do they use AI to produce your content?
(16) Do they produce the content, or is it someone else at the agency? If so, who are they, what are their credentials, and can you speak with them sometime via a Zoom meeting?
(17) Why does the service cost so much?
(18) What long-term value is there in SEO and PPC?
(19) Is there a plan in place to help you build up real-world validation and mentions?
(20) Why haven’t they brought up the importance of AI referrals and AIO to you yet?
The Sludge Marketing Report: The Illusion of Data
Back to your monthly marketing “report.” You ever get the sense you’re flying a 747 with a dashboard that only shows you the wind?
Let me ask you this: who holds the frame in determining which key words to pursue? I bet it’s your agency. And I would further wager that they’ve said something to the effect of: “most keywords today are too competitive so we can find you ‘long-tail’ keywords to help you rank highly.”
Right?
But what exactly are you ranking for? It’s the equivalent of authors narrowing their niche on Amazon to say they’ve got a “Best Seller,” failing to mention its in the category of Polka Biographies of Arizona, 1910-1920.
Anyone can be number one if they narrow the field.
You don’t go around bragging that you’re the best law firm on your block, do you? You want to be the best in your town, your city, your state.
But then you turn around and accept mealy mouthed marketers who say just compete for “prenup for third marriages Bethesda.”
Then next month your marketer can brag that you’ve moved up 42 places in the “rankings,” on that term, so now your number three. Never mind that people rarely type in the keyword phrase, and that even if they do they will find your commodified website that doesn’t speak to actual humans. Never mind communicating with actual humans who are your ideal clients about what makes you and your firm unique.
Do you want your phone to merely ring, or do you want it to ring with the right people on the other side of the line?
PPC is no better than SEO. The reports will show you that most of the bids and ads are the same, month after month. You could set this up yourself in a weekend but instead the law and the marketers get your head so spun around that you pay a 25% commission, as though you’re a professional athlete and your marketers are your agents when in fact they are just cribbing your competitors’ keywords and running a report like clockwork to keep the checks coming in.
Not every PPC and SEO agency is in the sludge category, only so many are it’s hard to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Ask your PPC provider to fully explain their process, how it changes month to month, their credentials, why they work with lawyers, their undergraduate degree, and how they differentiate you from your competitors.
The traditional PPC/SEO report is not designed to help you make better decisions. It is designed to justify the agency’s monthly retainer. It’s a tool of obfuscation, not clarification. And it is persuasive to the unwary or those who do not know what to look for. If only your legal marketing team were as persuasive and good at sales for your law firm, as they are for their own agency.
The real cost of this bad data isn’t just the monthly fee. It’s the hidden “sludge tax” of firm misalignment from its philosophy, of attracting too many of the wrong types of clients, wading through low-quality leads, and the opportunity cost of not investing in a strategy that actually builds long-term value and authority.
Introducing the AIO Audit for Law Firms
In this book, I will provide you with all the information you need to understand AIO, to perform an AIO audit on your own law firm, and to start taking actionable steps away from the marketing of the past and toward the future of AI referrals.
Think of this as the MRI your business needs to not only survive but thrive in the age of AI. The hallmarks of the AIO audit for law firms includes:
- Measuring topical authority rather than “keyword rankings.”
- Measuring real-world validation rather than “backlinks.”
- Measuring the quality and alignment of your client intake rather than website “hits.”
- Measuring your legacy and authority assets created rather than blogs “posted.”
- Measuring your firm’s increased revenue while reducing your marketing budget and weaning your firm of monthly marketing “agencies” that provide you with no real agency.
The AIO audit is not about justifying past expenses. Its only purpose is to provide a clear, unvarnished, and data-driven picture of your current reality so you can make smarter, more profitable decisions about your firm’s future.
From Data to Dominance
You will not need to be a marketing expert to perform the AIO audit. The only guidebook you’ll need is this book. In these pages I will provide you with the complete framework, step-by-step instructions, and Socratic method questions needed to inform you about how to shift from the SEO of yesterday to the AIO of today.
Part I of the book will explain how we are moving to an AI referral/recommendation economy, and how AIO is the only solution for growing your firm in the age of AI.
Part II of the book will provide the deep-dive, practical and actionable steps taking you through every step of auditing your Three Pillars of AIO.
Part III of the book will show you how to take the data from your audit and transform it into a powerful, actional, growth plan.
The era of flying your law firm without appropriate procedures and data is over. It’s time to take control of your firm ‘s data and build your authority.
Let’s begin the audit.