Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Welcome to Chapter Twelve. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one. . . A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch. . . oh, there are loads of rules. (pg. 88-9)”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
By now perhaps you feel a tinge of sadness, because SEO and PPC have served you, often well, for many years. Perhaps from the time you opened your practice to the present. Sure, you’ve seen the signs of diminished results, or if you are still obtaining results you know in your heart it’s just inertia at this point because you got there early and went all in.
Now is the time to plant your stake early and go all in on AIO.
But there remains connective tissue between SEO and AIO. As stated before, this will be more a merger than a full displacement, although AIO best practices will only retain about 10-15% SEO DNA. You do not need to let go of SEO, just let it merge and evolve.
SEO: The End of an Era
If you’re like most attorneys engaged in digital marketing, you’ve probably spent tens, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on SEO and PPC. Now, you’re being told the rules have changed. That what you spent the money on has limited future value and may even be actively harmful. This may be a painful pill to swallow. But as Supersonic taught my generation in the classic anthem Closing Time, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
The good news is, the moment of prior SEO work will continue to pay certain dividends even though search engines will be utilized less frequently and you will lose ground to those who implement AIO best practices. As part of an AIO audit with my firm, I will guide you regarding which SEO remnants to maintain, and which to discard.
But since I believe in making knowledge accessible, I am also going to highlight in this chapter how to integrate your current SEO into a future-proofed AIO system. In other words, this chapter presents the bridge from SEO to AIO, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
SEO to Keep and Merge into AIO
- Site Speed – One core tenet of an effective website today is speed; which is an important ranking valuation by humans, search engines, and AI alike. A website built around speed is a must-have carryover from SEO best practices to full AIO integration.
- Mobile-First Design – The primary method of interaction with businesses is through mobile, and this truth applies to both humans and the AI agents they utilize. Mobile is the default method by which humans search for your business and is therefore a non-negotiable priority.
- Security – Clean site architecture and HPPTS are fundamental trust signals valued by humans, AI, and search engines.
- Google Business Profile – Although Google Business and its ubiquitous reviews may wane in importance over time, for now they remain a primary data source for AI. Make sure you continue to maintain a current Google Business Profile and to encourage, within the bounds of ethics in your jurisdiction, Google reviews.
- NAP Consistency – Ensuring that your business name, address, and phone number are displayed accurately on your website and throughout the web is essential. You want to make it as painless as possible for AI to maintain its dossier on you and your business.
SEO to Drop
- Keyword Stuffing – Repeating “Tarzana Divorce Lawyer” on your home page ten times is about to become as distasteful to AI as it’s always been to humans. AI searches for signals of trust, and any content seen as manipulative will soon be ignored or punished. Writing creative, human copy reflects AIO best practices. What SEO has been coasting on for too long is about to become a site-wide red flag. Ask your current SEO provider if they utilize keyword stuffing, then search your own website to verify. If it sounds like it’s written for a robot rather than a human then there’s your honest answer.
- Link-Farming – All those links you bought (whether you realized you did or not) are now considered a clear signal of manipulation, not authority. The digital version of a toxic asset. Ask your current SEO provider if they currently use or ever previously used link farming. Inquire into all the links they have purchased for your website. Finally, use SemRush or Google Search Console to see where your links to your website are generated from to determine if you believe they are organic or not.
- Long-Tail Keywords and Vanity Metrics – SEO sells the idea that all that clicks are all that matters. But do you know if the clicks are coming from your Google Business Profile, from your website itself, or via social media? There are reports that can tell you this information, make sure you read them and that you independently verify. Regardless, the important thing is not clicks, not even calls, but the quality of referrals received. The only metric that really matters in business is your bottom line. Stop focusing on increasing your limited rank for ‘prenup lawyer agreement Tarzana,’ because it’s the only search term you can be competitive in, and go out into the wide open universe of AI referrals. I assure you it’s must easier to catch a fish in the ocean than the creek behind your grandmother’s house.
- Shallow Blog Content – The churning of thin, recycled, even AI created generic content is now considered, as my daughters would say, “cringe.” There was a brief period, yes, when lazily drafted 500 word tips like “Seven Ways to Divorce a Narcissist” would produce some Google juice. Those days are long since past. Today shallow blog posts mark you as a commodity, not an authority, and they need to be replaced with real authority assets.
AI is Not Easily Tricked, and It’s Getting More Sophisticated Every Day
As you can see from the above, the tactics designed to trick simplistic search engine algorithms are quickly becoming liabilities that will now be punished by sophisticated AI.
Creating high-quality, educational content for a human audience was always the SEO “white hat” ideal, but one that could not be achieved due to the limitations of search engine algorithms. Fortunately, AI is now ready to be passed the baton from SEO white hat practices and create a more meritorious marketing landscape for lawyers all across the country.
A Little BIG Thing Called Evolution
The seeds of the new methods can be traced to their ancestors, of course. That’s the way it always works in evolution. Let’s consider for a moment how strategy shifts from SEO to AIO for a small firm focusing on prenuptial agreements.
The SEO methods are easily defined: take the term prenuptial agreement, and any other term that relates such as premarital agreements, prenups, and pre-marriage agreements, plus the target area, and then create as much content as possible repeating those terms while outwardly “attempting” to be useful.
The web copy might read like this:
-Prenuptial Agreements in Tarzana. John Doe Law Firm Assists Tarzana Residents with Premarital Agreements throughout Tarzana.
The blog titles might read like this:
-Seven Things Every Tarzana Resident Should Know About Premarital Agreements Before Getting Married in Tarzana, California.
-Getting Married in Tarzana? Five Ways to Ensure an Ironclad Tarzana, California Prenup
-Prenuptial Agreements in Tarzana: Dos and Don’ts about Tarzana, California prenup law
In other words, persuasion, clarity, sometimes even professional dignity were all sacrificed at the altar of expediency.
Today, we retain some of the kernels from SEO, namely the desire to rank, albeit for AI rather than search engines, and we instead focus on quality rather than quantity. We build up a comprehensive cluster of human-written, educational articles, videos, podcast episodes, and other authority assets covering every facet of prenups, with in-depth analysis of practice-specific topics such as business valuations, negotiation strategies, asset protections, and will & trust implications. Eventually, we take all that content and turn it into a comprehensive book, one that demonstrates not only your expertise but also highlights your biography and professional philosophy.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, rather than begging for links (or buying them) from shallow sources, we earn mentions by being quoted in national, statewide, and even local publications, by having our books cited in scholarly papers, by serving as a guest on a high-profile podcast. Again, the focus here is on quality, not quantity. For instance, in the past month my articles have been published in or accepted by Law360, the New Jersey Law Journal, and the ABA’s Judge’s Journal. I have also appeared on the Engaging Experts Podcast. This is the type of authority building you too should be doing, either directly or via outsourcing your authority to an agency such as mine.
SEO was focused on your website above all else. AIO sees your website as a home base, and another tool, but is far more concerned with what you’re doing in real life and how your “digital twin” is perceived as your authority assets are created and distributed far and wide. AI knows the difference between hyperlinks and public influence, same as any humans who are paying attention.
And unlike humans, AI has a near limitless attention span.
Opportunities Abound in AIO
If you opened your law firm within the past five to ten years, you might have felt a bit like Tony Soprano when he said: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’ve been getting a feeling that I came at the end. The best is over.”
For months or years, you’ve been struggling to make inroads against entrenched category leaders, and search engines have not offered much support to those who arrived after the last technological gold rush had ended.
The practical result being you need to spend way more on PPC and other advertising to attempt to make inroads. Even then, part of what you pay may be determined by how you are perceived by search engine algorithms. PPC, for its part, rewards the larger players with less expensive advertising. Another structural disadvantage for anyone attempting to break through the hegemony.
If this is you, then hopefully you will see AIO as the once in a career opportunity that it is. You don’t have to stay there, beholden to yesterday’s big idea; tomorrow’s big play is standing right before you and our profession in particular has been very slow to catch on.
If you’re one of the entrenched, then know there is still some SEO gold to be milked, but I would recommend you start diversifying now. You don’t want to be caught unaware when the shift accelerates. There is a lot at stake, and a shrinking search engine market means shrinking profits unless you start to draw up a new playbook. Even if you stick with search, know that being increasingly powered by AI, it will soon become indistinguishable from AI.
Merely relying on the age and rank of your firm’s domain will not suffice in the future, and is already losing its effectiveness today, as demonstrated by Google’s 2024 E-E-A-T algorithmic changes. In a world where even Google search is seeking “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness,” it’s only a matter of time before the SEO groundwork cracks beneath your firm’s digital foundation.
No Need for Revolution, Just Orderly Evolution
The transition from SEO to AIO is not about burning everything to the ground. Think of it as your investment portfolio. The important thing is to be diversified. But know that although momentum can carry profits forward, as it has for Apple the past few years without significant technological breakthroughs, the big, market-shifting plays have been newer companies like NVDA.
A maturing marketing profile means taking the best of SEO and moving forward into AIO, all while leaving the broken and commodifying parts of SEO and PPC behind. The strategic building of prestige authority assets, technical authority signals, and real-world validation creates an effective blend of the new and the timeless. Certain foundational elements of SEO will remain important, but a move toward schema rather than meta tags, quality rather than quantity, and authority rather than mere visibility is the soundest path forward given such global changes.
And if you need any help implementing strategy or building authority assets or public mentions, we’re here to help guide you and your law firm toward a more sophisticated, intelligent future. The firms that master this evolution won’t just survive; they will own the most valuable asset of the next decade: the trust of both their clients and AI.