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 Six. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
AIO Technical Authority Signals: Let’s Get Just the Right Amount of Technical
“The minute you read something that you can’t understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.” – Will Rogers
Perhaps good old Will had a point, but I think SEO gurus have us beat. Whenever I used to read the monthly report from my SEO and PPC team, it always felt like the reading comprehension equivalent of a root canal. Yet, what they’re doing was not rocket science. Most SEO is more a matter of basic drudgery. But this fact is obscured by the sludge marketers, because it might be hard to justify the high monthly retainer if they admitted most of what they do is basic data input, website modifications, and middle school level statistics.
Most lawyers do not have the time to dig into the details of SEO, being too busy delving into the details of their cases instead. In this chapter, I am going to demystify SEO and reveal AIO best practices. You will learn how AIO and SEO technical signals are alike, how they are different, and how you can profit from being an early mover in this space.
Since I have spent most of my adult life as a lawyer, and not a marketer, I am going to give it to you straight. I’m not making a case for anything here other than clarity.
What are AIO Technical Authority Signals?
In the last chapter, we discussed authority assets and why they are so important for obtaining AI referrals. In this chapter, I will describe how to ensure those assets are properly catalogued by AI. That way you will have the building (the authority assets) and the appropriate scaffolding (the technical authority signals) to ensure your “R” score is maximized. Please note that although what you learn in this chapter will have no impact on how your human referrals sources view your practice, it will make all the difference in how you’re viewed by AI. To be referred by AI, you and your authority assets must first be found.
For over a decade, and even today, SEO has been focused on being accurately listed by search engines. Despite what most SEO providers may intimate, most of what they do is rote. They even have account executives who handle most law firm owners, a separate job from those who do the SEO work itself, which is often farmed out to independent contractors located outside the United States. The people you meet with each month to discuss your marketing are often account executives or project management types, glorified salespeople.
AI on the other hand, is focused on entity and topic authority. Your website is a key part of this, no doubt, but the central focus is creating a dossier on you, and your firm, so that you can be siloed off into a more refined catalogue and judged against all other local competitors in the referral battle royale.
Think of it this way: search engines are like the Yellow Pages, and AI is like an Encyclopedia. Accordingly, SEO has historically been focused on ensuring proper listings, where AIO seeks to ensure reputation management, public relations, publishing, and technical skills.
Content to Have Content
Because SEO has been focused on technical compliance with search engine listing mechanics, what has long been rewarded are humdrum, long-form blog posts stuffed with keyword variations. This is the exciting work I briefly did at a large legal marketing firm during the pandemic.
(As noted in the last chapter, the type of content that resonates with AI is more of a hub-and-spoke model, featuring cornerstone assets such as books and white papers linked to support content like articles and podcasts. As noted in a future chapter, bimodal and even multimodal authority will become more important as AI starts to not only read everything but to also absorb all audio, video, and images)
Once your authority asset content is complete, it must be distributed and published effectively to ensure AIO best practices. Think of it this way: the authority assets are the gift, but the technical signals are the wrapping paper. If you give to AI this way, you will receive a justly deserved abundance of AI referrals. You should no longer be content to simply have content.
AI certainly will not be.
Technically Speaking
Traditional SEO focuses on meta tags. Most important is the title tag. On a website page, this is the subject. Then there’s a meta description, which is a small summary.
So, for my law firm the meta tags worked like this:
Meta Title: Carl Taylor Law Firm, LLC: Mount Laurel NJ Divorce Lawyer
Meta Description: For over fifteen years attorney Carl Taylor, Esq., has helped his New Jersey Divorce and Family Law Clients move past their serious legal issues.
The meta title and meta description are what someone searching for your firm will find on Google. As you can imagine, most lawyers have very similar meta tags. There may be some effort to appeal to humans, but it is mostly functional attempts to communicate with Google so that you’re accurately listed.
Google has its search crawlers scouring the net, and they read meta the way your old English professor read Dickens. They see the above and they catalogue me as a divorce lawyer and then move on. Search engines therefore see your law firms at an outside, street-level view.
Like it or not, AI is coming into your reception area. If SEO is a mail person, AI is a detective.
What AI is looking for, and what AIO technical best practices revolve around are advanced schema markup, the unique dossier we referred to above.
The whole point of SEO was that it’s more profitable to cultivate search engine listings than to hope Google crawlers got it right.
The whole purpose of AIO is to hand-deliver a perfectly labeled dossier to AI, explaining not just your name and location, but your business concepts, delivery, and philosophy. Remember, it’s not enough to make the phone ring with AI referrals, we want to make sure it’s ringing with the right referrals. You’re busy enough, you don’t need a conga line of miscreants, malcontents, and tire kickers. You already get enough of that from your county bar association referral program.
Scheming with “Schema”
Because today’s (and tomorrow’s) AI is far more sophisticated than the search engines of yesteryear, they require far more nuanced and dynamic technical signals. The one-dimensional meta tags of SEO are insufficient. The solution is “schema markup.” Don’t be frightened by the technical name, it’s actually just a fancy term for “digital label maker.”
Essentially, instead of just describing the outside of your building, as SEO meta tags do, we invite AI into the reception area and hand them a dossier labeling and describing everything of importance within the office itself.
That’s a metaphor, of course, but you get the point: we want to not just prove we exist but define ourselves and every important concept and philosophy we hold dear to our business life.
We label your headshot and bio with “attorney” schema, telling the AI your bio and philosophy along with your practice areas and credentials.
We label your services page with “legalservice” schema, defining exactly what you do, who you wish to serve, and your philosophy behind each service.
We label your book’s landing page with “book” schema, ensuring AI knows you are the author.
And so forth, with the intent of removing any ambiguity AI may have when reviewing your website. This transforms your website from a flat, undifferentiated business into a rich, interconnected database of authority, one that machines can understand via the schema, while simultaneously persuading humans because the words actually contained on the website are persuasive and not written for machines, only the invisible to humans schema is.
The best thing is you don’t need to be a coder or tech wiz to implement basic schema. You can either use SEO plugins that contain schema integration such as Rank Math or All-In-One SEO, or if you’re looking for something more technologically sophisticated you can use JSON-LD Snippets. These are tiny “snippets” of code that are simply copied and pasted onto a site in an outwardly invisible manner to help AI read and understand your business.
Schema is the bridge between human and AI and is an important consideration to ensure your authority assets and your business are understood and referred.
It can be a bit intimidating at first, but it’s not rocket science. As AI advances, the need for onsite technological fixes will continue to be minimized. That’s the beauty of it.
And that means the old SEO tricks are soon to be a thing of the past. Especially for those of you with books or other authority assets that will become the focal point of your websites.
Is all this necessary? Yes, and for the same reason you need to be proactive with your professional reputation. If you don’t tell the public about yourself, others will step in and do it for you, and they won’t be nearly as charitable. Think about Google reviews. Very few people leave positive reviews unprompted. A negative review, however, comes all too naturally should someone not feel satisfied.
It’s no different with AI. Proactively provide AI with what it needs to know about you, because otherwise it will do its own research. And you might not be as satisfied with the result. AIO schema markup removes all guesswork. AI systems handed verified, structured files about your business are all too happy to refer, provided they like what they see. AI will still verify from other sources, and in a far more robust manner than SEO does, but that’s for the next chapter which discusses offsite and real-world validation.
The key takeaways here are: the meta tags that work so well for SEO will not be as effective for dynamic AIO. Authority assets are the real gift, but technical signals are the wrapping paper that ties a knot on the whole thing. And none of this technical stuff is rocket science, just tedious. Before we end this chapter, however, I want to share a few important thoughts about the future of technical AIO. The focus at Books for Experts is not about how to beat our competitors, we’re pretty sure they’ll beat themselves. Instead, we keep our eyes on the future to help lawyers like you stay ahead of the curve.
Unlike SEO, which defines success by ranking position for certain keywords, we define effective AIO as the frequency and quality of “mentions: across high-authority, third-party platforms. In other words, how often is AI referring you, and are the referrals quality. That is more an art than a science and will become a far more sophisticated enterprise over the next five years as AI develops.
The Future of Technical AIO
By 2030, SEO will be reduced to a minor tactical subset of AIO. It’s not that SEO will die entirely, it will just be merged with AIO. The way a smaller, failing company is subsumed by a large enterprise looking to pick off a few of its divisions.
On-site search engine optimization will no longer matter because very few users will still be using search engines. It will no longer be lucrative to have your book catalogued at the library (SEO) when you could have the same book recommended by the head librarian to everyone who walks past.
Said another way, if SEO is currently the process of getting your name listed in a phone book, by 2030 it will be having your name in a phone book that is no longer referenced.
The focus will be on your “verified digital twin,” the version of you that is fed to AI. We will work to ensure that your digital twin’s philosophy, positive reviews, credentials, experience, authority assets, and third-party references are all carefully cultivated and fed to AI, so that when the time comes to make a referral for the type of case you want, it becomes but a fait accompli.
Although SEO has long rewarded quantity, as frequency of posting gives you more opportunities to rank for keywords and trains the crawlers to visit your site with more regularity, the central focus of AIO is quality and trust. That’s why yesterday’s recycled blog posts need to be replaced, ASAP, by white papers, podcasts, displays of thought leadership, and even books.
Start preparing today for bimodal and multimodal AIO, because in the future audio and video will become very important as a trust signifier. Long-form, authoritative books, video, podcasts, all show authenticity, the purest currency in the age of AI. The more you start differentiating yourself, and demonstrating your unique philosophy and humanity, the more you will be rewarded by the new AI referral engine.
In addition, by 2030 there will be more methods (beyond just Google Search Console) to directly provide your “dossier” to AI platforms, further reducing any confusion. Today the use of API (Application Programming Interface) connections allow for limited communications with AI platforms to deliver the dossier. In the future, availability should only increase. Regardless, AI will soon become a near perfect machine, capable of searching the entire web and consuming text, images, audio, and video alike. Creating direct lines with AI will assist with AIO but will by no means be required for AI to find you, just as a secondary layer to ensure that what is found is accurate and cultivated by you, rather than left to chance.
The Humble Website
If your takeaway from all this is that websites will no longer matter, then let me disabuse you of that notion now. Websites will remain important, not just as a way to be found and to demonstrate trust to humans, but as a central hub upon which your “digital twin” will reside. You may be able to rid your firm of SEO marketers, but you should keep your web designer’s business card at hand.
Some of the key elements of SEO are really better served as web designer functions, such as site speed and the quality of your website. Don’t rely on all-in-one vendors, just procure a trustworthy web design company, keep your website well-maintained, and hire an AIO firm that will help you create authority assets, media mentions, and effective technical signals for your website, in collaboration with your website vendor or not.
Clean website architecture is a necessity for search engines and will remain a luxury appreciated by AI. Mobile-first experiences will continue to be non-negotiable. A secure website (HPPTS) and a clean XML sitemap will all be required. The good news is these things can be set up in an hour or less.
Consistent addresses, phone numbers, and contact information off your website will continue to be important but are something you can easily pay a vendor to handle. Again, no rocket science here, just a passing knowledge of the internet and a vast tolerance for tedium.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this chapter, you now know more than 99% of attorneys about technical AIO and SEO. You probably even know more than 75% of SEO vendors. My agency offers all in one AIO services to ensure your reputation is established, your prestige authority assets are created, and that AI has a straight pipeline into all the wonderful things you and your firm represent.
Success for all this also hinges, however, on mentions and other forms of real-world validation.