Big Money — Who Owns the Future of Law?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and this is the second business I started. The first one was when I left the University of Michigan Business School. I started a recruiting company called Tears and Sweat, and the idea was to take Midwest technical talent and help them find jobs on the coasts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Learn something new about you today. And I’m Gyi Tsakalakis from Attorney Sync. And I eat chia seeds and flax seeds every single day.

Conrad Saam:

And for those of you keeping track, that is the seventh consecutive time in which Gyi’s little tidbit about himself involves food. Although this time not beats, this is Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, the show where Gyi and I talk about marketing from a digital perspective. Your firm today is June 18th and gh, I understand you are going Clark Griswold vacation style, loading the fam into your battered station wagon and doing Michigan vacation.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s a battered explorer, but otherwise, yes, we are heading to Traverse City, Michigan and Mackinac Island, and we’re even going up to the up to Quaran Falls and the Muning area. And by the way, listeners, if you’ve never been to Northern Michigan, I highly recommend it. It is a beautiful area. You’ve got lakes, you’ve got nature, you’ve got hiking. It’s a great place to be and we’re really looking forward to that. But that’s not all we’re talking about today. What else we got today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

We’ve got some really exciting news to cover. And then we’re going to talk about a topic you all love to hate, the entrance of venture capital, private equity, et cetera, into the legal marketing. And after that, we’re going to go deep into Google’s content directives. Hit it

Announcer:

And welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Alright everybody, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news.

Breaking news, brought to you by Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We are going to share some news that everyone already knew about anyway. Jason Hennessy’s firm, Hennessy Digital was purchased by private equity. They did an announcement last week and I was actually pretty impressed with the announcement. We’re going to go deeper into private equity and the legal industry in our first segment. The other thing that we heard about answering legal, I saw this just yesterday, launched a free AI powered chat bot. You don’t even have to be a customer. So answering legal, using a chat bot to try and build their database of customers. And gh, we finally, thanks to your weekend efforts, got the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing site up and running. Thank you for that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My pleasure. And do go check it out. We are very proud of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing site. Somehow this domain, you bought this domain, but somehow, oh,

Conrad Saam:

You don’t. Somehow you know who did it? Who screwed this up? Call him out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We don’t know if this was our good friend Jared Correia, but somehow,

Conrad Saam:

But it couldn’t have been anyone else is what Gyi really means.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, maybe someone, maybe he registered it from somebody else, I don’t know, but was blacklisted by CloudFlare for something and it took us a lot of work in all of our years doing this. You’d think two guys who built websites for a living could untangle CloudFlare Blacklist, but not as fun as you might think.

Conrad Saam:

So the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing site is up live. That is where you can go to register. Look at this. I’m going to turn this into a pitch register for the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, specifically focused on in-house marketers, COOs CMOs, director of marketing, those types of people because we feel like you guys haven’t gotten amazing content yet. That is September 22 through 24 in Las Vegas. We would love to have you, you can now go and actually get registered through the ard legal marketing.com site

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And don’t wait because early bird pricing is not going to last forever

Conrad Saam:

Unless we can’t sell enough tickets, in which case it will.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And don’t be afraid to register if you’re a lawyer. There was a lot of confusion about like, can you come, if you’re a lawyer, you can certainly, like we said, we’re curating everything. Submit your application to register and if we think that there’s an issue, we’ll let you know.

Conrad Saam:

Can you come if you’re a vendor? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You can try.

Conrad Saam:

Now. What’s the best way? I’m trying to set up our next bullet point. What’s the best way for you to show up if you are a vendor, what’s the likely way that we would welcome you with Open Arms?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Be an existing sponsor of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast, Jesus.

Conrad Saam:

And the bullet right after that says, Hey, let’s talk about the Ignite Pitches. We are still reviewing applications for the Ignite Talks. Those are five minute talks with 20 slides that automatically move forward every 15 seconds. We’re looking for new speakers, we are looking for quirky topics, we’re looking for nerdy insights. So if you want to come and you’re a vendor, your best way to actually join us is to either pay legal Talk network, a whole bunch of money or show up and deliver an Ignite talk. Otherwise, we kind of probably don’t want you there all that much. Right? That’s right. Okay. Alright. Speaking of Ignite Talks, can you showcase one of our favorite ones that we already have accepted recently?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I was super excited to get an email from our friend Joe Patrice from Above the Law who has agreed to deliver a fiery rule of law Ignite Talk, and I can’t wait. And again, I think even though the conferences for in-house marketers on legal marketing, we wanted to make sure that we tried to cover the gamut of law practice. And I think Joe’s talk is going to be one of those that’s going to be very exciting to watch live.

Conrad Saam:

In the show notes, it says a condescending rant, which I’m looking for.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we wrote that. We wrote that,

Conrad Saam:

But we can make that part of the title.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We were like, we want a condescending rant. And then we thought, who better to deliver this than Joe Patrice? And we are super grateful that he has agreed to join us in Vegas.

Conrad Saam:

And finally in the news, a little bit of foreshadowing, I talked to CallRail yesterday, they’re letting out of beta, their voice assist product, which is a competitor to capture now, which both Gyi and I have invested in. But the AI powered voice intake game is getting hotter, it is getting more effective. Call Rail’s product comes out of beta mid-July. When we come back, we’re going to talk more about money and now for a topic that we believe you guys have all grown to hate, resent, and otherwise, stick your heads in the collective sand, the entrance of venture capital, private equity, big money into the legal world. We talked about Jason Hennessy’s acquisition by Herringbone, which is a subsidiary of Trinity Hunt, which is one of the most white shoe of private equity firms. And just as an aside here, we’re really lucky to have Azeem Nagare from Herringbone Digital who was the purchaser of Hennessy Digital.

They’re going to be out at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, and Azi is going to give us a behind the curtain look at how private equity thinks about the legal industry. Now, I’ve known Jason Hennessy for a while. Congratulations on your purchase. And I thought it was interesting as a contrast, Gyi, that Jason and Herringbone really proactively went out and talked about the acquisition, right? It seems like some people are trying to keep things quiet and some people are getting ahead of the news and announcing things at the risk of throwing you a softball right across the plate. Why do you think that is, sir?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m going to answer a different question, which is why would Gyi and Conrad be talking about this on Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing? And

They’re kind of three different things, maybe more that come to mind. And the first is, as Conrad has pointed out, is the juxtaposition of the PR around announcements. And I think that has a lot of applicability for law firms, especially as there’s these mergers going on in legal and there’s consolidation in legal. And we’ve seen some of these firms I think do a nice job of getting the PR out and others that have not. And so I think there’s a lesson there for law firms. The second is for the law firm consumer, and especially our in-house marketing friends who are often tasked with making decisions about vendors and marketing agencies. And these are questions that you should be asking. And I think there’s also, there’s a certain amount of cautionary tale that as Conrad implied, if someone’s not being forthcoming about this, why that you should be asking yourselves. I think it also is even beyond just agencies and stuff like legal tech in general, we’ve talked about this before, but if you are signing up, you’re switching your entire firm over to just for the fun of it. We’ll say an AI automated marketing agency that’s in startup mode,

Conrad Saam:

Not, would you like to name names?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, but Rocket Point being that who knows if they don’t have funding, that’s a thing. Or understanding where they are on their journey. So are they a startup? Are they established? Have they been around a while? All these things I think matter from a technology and agency consumer standpoint in making informed decisions about who you’re choosing.

Conrad Saam:

I also get this feeling of fear. And I mean this goes with alternative business structures. It goes to the fear of big money coming into the legal industry. And that happens in a technology perspective. I mean, my origination into this game was venture capital, big players, bill Gurley, venture capital studs coming in. And that was my original experience with the legal industry. And people hated, I mean, I remember this, they hated the venture capitalists coming into avo and now we’ve got some more people coming in. I sense a definitive fear among the legal industry with big money coming in. And my take is you can either stick your head in the sand and hate it or figure out how to play in the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, and I would say this, I think some of the fears warranted. I think the other thing as we were doing the pre-show on this topic is I think there’s a certain amount of stigma around private equity and venture capital that I don’t know, that is entirely fair. I know you have some thoughts and why don’t you start with some of the advantages that a shop might have or a client of a shop who’s been acquired mean, it’s

Conrad Saam:

Not even about the agency. I mean, this is the reality. Gyi, I’ve been doing this since 2006. I got into the legal industry and legal tech and legal SEO O in 2006 when no one was doing anything. And I used to get into WordPress sites and change a title tag and all of a sudden the phone starts ringing and it was easy because no one was playing in the game. Everyone’s playing in the game at this point in time. There is value to scale, there is value to technology in order to scale, you need to actually have volume. There is a huge value in this. Now, scorpion, I mean interestingly, scorpion tried to do this, right? And interesting, the guys who purchased Hennessy, they are Scorpion guys. So Trinity Hunt brought on a bunch of Scorpion guys and there’s value in the size engine, and I’ve panned Scorpion almost as a career, but they did an amazing job with pay-per-click because they had a volume of data to work with and a scalable system to extract the best value out of that volume. Now, the fact that they did it to their benefit more than their client’s benefit, that is a sideshow. And that’s why I personally never liked them.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think I wanted to pick up on that because a lot of this stuff does cut both ways. So the data thing, I mean you and I position ourselves as we’ve got data then of multiple law firms that has value.

These large companies scaling companies, they’ve got data. And so the question is, is that in and of itself a good thing for the law firm? And the answer is not. It could be, but not necessarily. And again, you got to get into other questions. How many of your competitors are they working with and all that kind of stuff. The other thing though that I’m going to give a shout to Kurt London on LinkedIn, he was talking about in the context of choosing a law firm, his whole point is when you choose a law firm, you’re picking a business model. And I thought this is a lot of applicability to this conversation. He breaks it down with three, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Maybe there’s more than three. But he basically says there’s a process firm that’s the fast food bottle style firm, the relationship firm that’s the trust and connection firm, the brain surgery firm.

That’s the super complicated catastrophic injury. These are the people that just know this stuff better than everybody else. And I’m not saying that any one of the companies that we’ve discussed necessarily falls into one of those buckets, and maybe you’ve got some other buckets. But I do think that at some point, I’ll say this, there are examples of venture backed and private equity firms that it becomes very clear that they’re trying to build the process firm. And we’ve even heard from law firms that have been at other agencies that have been acquired, and their biggest feedback was there was a noticeable difference that, Hey, I feel like I’ve turned into a number. And truthfully, we’ve heard from firms that have said that even that haven’t been acquired as some of these other, whether it’s agencies or technology company scale, there was an experience they had from that company when they were smaller in startup boutique mode, whatever you want to call it. And that experience changed as the firm scaled.

Conrad Saam:

So I mean, it’s interesting you talk about process, relationship and brain surgery. And I think the reality is whether we like this or not, if you are not one of those things, you are in a world of hurt in the future. And in a perfect world, the process driven agency leverages the value of the volume by providing better results for their clients. That is what we would, that’s the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Promise.

Conrad Saam:

That’s the promise. That’s the pretty picture of what is portrayed. And the flip side, what you did not mention in here, and I think this is why private equity can get a bad rap, is that it’s about cost cutting, right? It is about taking big overhead out. And I don’t know, I was not there when this happened, but I watched when after Ava was purchased, they divested themselves of the large salaries of all of the really, really smart people at avo, mark being kind of the most prominent one. But there was a bunch of really, really smart people and internet brands cast them aside and they are now focused on cost cutting and milking in many cases what I will call unethically milking as much as they possibly can from a financial perspective out of these brands that have gone there to die. Those are the two ends of the promise of what happens when an agency or a technology or a law firm is purchased. And if you are on the cost cutting side, the value that you deliver to your clients does not improve. And at best, you become a number that might be getting good service.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s why I liked Kurt’s framing of this because it’s really trying to figure out what’s the best fit for you. If you’re a firm that is looking for, it doesn’t really matter to you, you don’t need as much of the hands-on relationship, blah, blah, blah, or you’re going to rely on the scale and the process and the data, but it’s just a different feel for you. That’s kind of the point here. And it is true even outside of agency world, I think it’s true of technology. There are different legal tech vendors that have different levels of product support. Some people are doubling down and investing in client success and product support. Others are, we’ll say they’re not for lack of a more kind way of trying to say it. And so I think you got to find what works for you. And let’s also face this, the cost that it’s going to cost you as a customer or client of these various agencies and or technology companies is going to vary largely based on what model you’re buying, right? There’s more cost to, it’s expensive to hire the brain surgeon, it’s expensive to hire the person who’s going to be a quote white glove account director for you versus putting all these others aside. The AI driven private bingo, equity backed, completely automated thing.

Conrad Saam:

I was just looking up the press release for the acquisition. I knew I was going to find it and you just said, ai, I’m going to read this to you. Joining the platform enables Hennessy Digital to better leverage AI advancements and integrated capabilities across blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So we are dealing with a new piece of technology AI that no matter what people say, no one’s really come close to scratching the surface of figuring it out. And for a small agency or a small law firm to do that, it’s just not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, Google and open AI are struggling to figure it out,

Conrad Saam:

Right? Alright, when we come back, we are going to answer a long-winded question from Mike Howard who submitted it over LinkedIn. If you have a question that you’d like us to address, please hit us up on the socials and after that we’re going to get into Google’s content guidelines. Alright, we’d like to hear from you, ask us a question wherever you may find us, and we might just throw it in the episode. This from Mike Howard. I’m going to read this. It’s a little long, but it’s a great question and not an uncommon one. I found the latest episode on branding and rebranding. Really helpful. Quick question on the topic. It’s not a quick question, but what about rebranding when going from solo attorney like the law office of Mike Howard to adding associates? My intuition is that it would feel strange and maybe even a little misleading to a potential client if they find me on the web as the law office of Mike Howard and that leads them to think that they’re only going to be dealing with me, but then an associate attorney might end up working on their case. Obviously this can be handled somewhat by communicating clearly about which attorney or attorneys might work on their case, et cetera. But there’s just something about the law of one person feeling like a strange misleading name when there’s multiple attorneys. I also didn’t know if it might hinder recruiting attorneys if they think they’re always going to be under my shadow. Maybe I’m overthinking this. Gyi, what do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you didn’t read the rest of it, but I’ll

Conrad Saam:

Start with that. I thought I was going on and on. Let me finish then because Gyi’s being critical. Let me finish Mike’s question. I went ahead and registered A DBA as the Mike Howard Law group so I could still get all the benefit of recognition that I built up through my name. Listening to your podcast made me second guess whether a rebrand was a good idea at all. I certainly didn’t want to cause confusion by changing the name if I don’t get much of anything out of it. Now that I’ve read that in real time, I understand why. Gyi insisted that I read the second part of Mike’s long-winded question. Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I think that that was well handled by Mike. I think of other large firms that had the founding lawyer as the named lawyer. But I think if you say whether you say law group or law firm, I think that does enough from the misleading standpoint. I think the really important thing as Mike noted in his question is how are you communicating that to potential clients? How are you putting that out into the world? And certainly the one that comes up all the time is actually the opposite of this one, and this is the ethics issue. One is there are a lot of lawyers that will try to do things like lawyer name. So I’ll just use myself as an example. It’d be like GI Sakis and associates when it’s just GI sakis. And I think that one is pretty clearly misleading because it’s just me and I’m implying that there are other lawyers at the firm.

Honestly, to me, this is the way to handle this. One is if you’re going from solo to multiple attorneys, I think it’s totally permissible to add either law firm or law group or and associates or whatever else you want to come up with from a positioning standpoint. But being sure that you’re setting those expectations and recognizing the trade-off. And this is just the inherent trade-off of this, right? Because we talk about this in the context of Morgan all the time, is that we say bigger isn’t always better because you’re not working with John Morgan. I think as you grow, you need to be mindful of how you’re communicating this and how you’re doing those kind of handoffs and what expectations you’re setting all the way through from your marketing messaging through intake and through representation.

Conrad Saam:

My read on this is maybe simplistic. Every time you change something, you’re kind of starting over. And there are plenty of examples of law firms named after people who one person named with 200 attorneys, that happens all the time. It’s not super confusing. I personally think that consistency here is more important than specificity. How’s that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ll buy that. Thank you so much too, Mike, for submitting the question. And please do hit us up on LinkedIn, drop a review, however you can find us. We’re all over the place now. We really appreciate your questions and topic suggestions. Okay, now we’re going to talk about some topics that are going to be featured prominently at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing summit. And this episode we’re going to talk about Google’s guidelines on creating helpful, reliable, and people first content and run through the self-assessment that you can do on your own content. And next episode we’re going to talk about Google’s search guidance about AI generated content. Alright, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Google forever has told us just to create great content. And finally now with their helpful content update, they provide us some more specific guidance. What are some of the things that Google says you can do to self-assess your content?

Conrad Saam:

So it starts with the title there, which is People First creating People first content. The contrapositive of that is are you creating content specifically for search engines, right? And you and I live in a world of creating content to drive traffic to websites. So one of the things that they ask here is are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results? This is kind of the long tail taken to its logical extreme. We’re just going to vomit out content hoping that something eventually gets picked up. And that seems to be a kind of cornerstone strategy for a lot of SEO agencies, partly because you guys like getting that tangible piece of content. And part of it because you guys have the Dunning Kruger effect of understanding a little bit about the long tail concept and you think it might eventually work,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’ve talked about this in many other episodes, and right now we’re in the world of this idea of this great decoupling between visibility and actual traffic in Google. And I think a lot of sites that have tried to cover these big wide array of topics are suffering. And the thing for me that I really wanted to help people understand in this segment is some of the specifics of what does it mean to create this people first content? And one of the first things that they say that you can assess, and we’re not going to do all of these, but I think talking about some of these questions I think is really valuable is the first one is does the content provide original information reporting research analysis? And so how many law firm websites do we see where it’s the same old 10 things to do after a car accident? There’s nothing original about it. There’s no research. It’s not based on any kind of data. There’s no analysis. And so I think if you frame your content from that starting point where you’re like, what can I do that doesn’t exist anywhere else, that’s backed by research, that has original analysis? I think that’s a great way to be thinking about publishing in general. And whether it’s written word video content or whatever, it makes sense that Google would want to surface the stuff that you can’t find anywhere else.

Conrad Saam:

One of the other things they talk about, and you and I have kind of panned this, but it’s at least a good framework to discuss, is the concept of eat the who wrote the content and eat is the experience, expertise, authority, and trust. And so that has less to with the actual content of the content and more with the who wrote it and where it is actually appearing. So I would be thinking through the things that you can do to improve the expertise, experience, authority, and trust signals. And I also believe we talked about this many times that those are also ranking elements that impact LLMs, right? Because they are looking for that type of expertise. Now, is it the same exact? I’ll go, no, but those two things do go hand in hand. There is a solid Venn diagram over that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s a really good point. I think too because we’ve been getting all these questions, how do I rank and LLMs and AI modes and aios and all this stuff? And I won’t even want to go go even deeper for folks who aren’t, they’re just listening to launch our legal market and they aren’t going to spend the time to read these guidelines, but they give you these four expertise questions. What do they saying here? Clear sourcing, right? Lawyers know how to do this stuff. Source your information, the background about the author, right? Your attorney bio page or your firm about us page. Link your pages, put an author byline in and link your pages to it about us, an author bio page. That is how you’re telling the machine, Hey, this thing I wrote over here, here’s what you need to know about me and why you should be surfacing my content because I’m an expert on this.

Conrad Saam:

And that’s why Gyi and I, at least a year ago started talking about that this may be the importance for directories. The directories becomes foundational to understanding this. Another thing I thought it was really interesting in this specifically, they talk about how the content was created and what they really mean on that is guidelines for working with ai. And they kind of equivocate here. They don’t say don’t use ai, but they also call for a disclosure to ensure that if you are using a lot of ai, and there’s another kind of really specific AI content guideline page here, but if you are using AI to have some of disclosure for that’s the use of automation including AI generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways as we live in a world where it’s very easy to generate blather content through ai, they’re really kind of leaning into that because it’s a huge part of the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, when you start getting a sense of how these LLMs actually work, it becomes so evident that it is the juxtaposition of the original well-researched, well sourced, well cited content. The AI is not doing that. The AI is going to give you another version perhaps with a bunch of m dashes of 10 things to do after a car accident. And so they’re not saying not to use AI if you rely on AI to publish something in the way that you’re not doing anything original. I think that’s the issue. The other thing that I think that, and this is kind of one of those MythBuster style things, are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? No, we don’t. How many times lawyers have called us and said, so-and-so told me we have to have more word count. And I’m like, who is so-and-so? Let’s go talk about them on LinkedIn. Jk,

Conrad Saam:

Do you want to share so-and-so’s name,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Keith? No, I do not.

Conrad Saam:

You are so kind. Listen, here’s another piece on this. And we’ve talked about this kind of tangentially, but it becomes interesting. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus? We covered this I believe in the last recording where the more specific your site is, the more likely you’ll rank for that very, very specific nuanced thing. Now the flip side to that is the more sites you have, the more you spread out all of your assets and getting them to rank. So there’s a very, very clear balance here, but this does become one of those issues where a firm that does one thing and does that really, really well is going to do a better job from a content perspective. The same content there is going to perform better on a focus site as opposed to, I think of the firms that are in those tertiary markets, right? They’re the all things to all people firms and they do family and they do personal injury and they, someone who does taxes and they have someone who handles immigration and they have someone who handles criminal defense becomes more difficult because your site is definitionally a wide array of content.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other thing that, and I know that we’re going to be talking about this at the summit too, and there’s some nuance here, and I want to let you kind of parse this because when I read this, it could be misinterpreted by many listeners, but the question is, are you adding a lot of new content or removing a lot of older content primarily because you believe it will help your search rankings overall by somehow making it seem fresh? No, it won’t. And you’ve talked a lot about consolidation and removing content, not necessarily because of a freshness thing, but maybe make that distinction from listeners about old content versus off topic content versus talk about your content quality assessment and instances where you might remove content.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I mean, it’s fascinating to see that remove as kind of a negative. And I think that’s because you and I live in this world of legal where you guys have just drank the Kool-Aid on content is king, right? And just we need to publish. And we’ve got agencies who are promising 10 blogs a week, and there’s so much garbage on most of your sites. If you do a site and search and you find that you’re running 800, 900,000, 2000 pages, the likelihood that all of those pages are actually doing anything is low. The helpful content algo update specifically was a site-wide assessment of how much garbage do you have on your site? And that had a negative impact on the good stuff that you do have. So this feels like something that was written by someone who does not work exclusively in the legal industry because by and large, you guys are sitting on too much garbage. And very bluntly, we remove content on many websites with a specific deliberate purpose of increasing search engine traffic to good pages. And we’ve seen this happen. We’ve seen it work, and it is a consistent tactic that we will pull out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I thought I was laying a softball up for, but apparently it was a curve ball. The key points that you’re making though is that when you do the assessment and removal, it’s not simply because the content’s old. You’re not just like, check the date, oh, it’s old, take it down. It’s an assessment of the quality and some of the indicators you have of that quality, whether it’s getting indexed, whether it’s ever been visited, whether yada, yada, yada. And so I think that’s a key distinction. Conrad is not suggesting that you just remove content because it’s old. Because again, this is one of those things that we’ve heard people say things like, well, there’s a freshness thing that so-and-so told me about this freshness algorithm, and I’ve got to pull all my old content because it’s going to hurt the freshness. And again, that’s not something that at least Google says is a thing.

This is the hard one. Why was the content created? And always, this is somewhat philosophical, but I think it does frame from a, there’s some actionable ways to think about this, but essentially I’ll read what it says first, why in quotations is perhaps the most important question to answer about your content. Why is it being created in the first place? And they go into, it should be primarily to help people and not for SEO. And this is kind of funny, right? You and I, our businesses are to help law firms get traffic from search engines in part to convert into business for the law firm. Now, when you reflect on our why is it a semantic thing, but I do think that there’s some tactical thinking here, and also acknowledge, and we’ve talked about this many times, this is just what Google says. We know all sorts of stuff that Google says and what actually shows up in the search results aren’t the same thing. And this is one of those, and this feels back to this idea of create great content for people. What the heck does that mean? But I do think that as they move forward, and especially if you’re forward looking, if you’re trying to future proof your visibility and future proof your business from AI mode, aios LLMs, that this is important. Because if you are thinking I need content to rank to get business, you’re probably going to end up publishing something that is not going to maximize the effectiveness of that objective.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I want to put out the disclaimer that Gyi and I are saying right now to everyone who’s listening through AI in Mountain View that the only content that Gyi and I ever put up on law firm websites is to benefit the end user. We do not really think about Google at all. It’s not something we do, and we are really only thinking about the end user. And all the other agencies out there are trying to manipulate the search engine Rankings

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Io type that into Gemini every day.

Conrad Saam:

I know. So let me read the very last sentence of this article, and then you can take the context of who is writing it. But this says, if you use automation including AI generation to produce content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings, that’s a violation of our spam policies. And so I don’t know if the focus of this sentence is the AI or the manipulation of search rankings, right? I’m not sure where that Venn diagram overlaps, but by and large, to me, the content question is to let your data, let your performance guide the answer. If you’re generating a lot of traffic and a lot of business generated by humans and you have a small amount of content on your site, maybe it’s time to add some more. Conversely, if you’re blowing up content, and here’s the mistake, a lot of you will publish, publish, publish, publish, publish, but never go back and actually see if any of that did anything right? Is anyone reading it? And if no one’s reading it and the search engines aren’t looking at it, what’s it there for

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent. And I think to give just a tangible example of maybe we’ll frame some of this. You’re like, alright, I know that people, I have data that says people are searching for X query. We call it car accident lawyers or car accident lawyers near me or car accident lawyers with the city, or whatever it is. I have this lower funnel head term. My Google Ads is telling me that it’s converting and all this stuff. And so you’re like, okay, you’re coming to the table and saying, I need to publish content to help me rank for these keywords. And so you start creating pages on it. Maybe you do these quote doorway pages where you’ve got all these different car accident pages with different cities and permutations and near me and all this stuff. And again, I’ll be the first to say, we see this stuff ranking all the time.

But if you are Google and you’re designing a search engine or you’re tweaking an algorithm, you’re trying to distinguish signals, if you think about it, it makes sense for them to be trying to adjust their dials to actually maybe not penalize, but not reward the firms that are doing that very thing that are creating this content for the sake of ranking and search results. And instead, they’re looking for the content on your site and around the web that is original, that is author driven. And I think sometimes us SEOs, we conflate these things. We think, oh, the reason you rank is because you’ve got this highly optimized page, but actually the reason you rank is because a lot of these other signals that are not being directly influenced by the SEO who’s creating all of these pages. So anyway, I think focusing on your user, I mean, I’m going to start sounding like Google here, but I think focusing on, I’m publishing this because this is a question that potential clients ask me about all the time.

I’m publishing this because there seems to be some confusion about this thing in the law that I think would actually be helpful to people. I think if you focus on that, that’s how they’re trying to tweet. Even if they’re not perfect today, right? It’s still a blind 5-year-old. Maybe it’s a blind 6-year-old now. Hat tip, AJ Cohn. I think if you’re trying to focus on where they’re going, double down on the original, double down on the user intents, double down on the helpful, reliable, double down on attaching your expertise, your bio highlighting where you’ve served in leadership positions. Add the structured data so that you’re telling the machines more about yourself. I do think that that’s the place to invest more into.

Conrad Saam:

So this has been a review of content and AI generated content, sometimes showing up in what we’ll call organic search. Next episode, just a little foreshadowing here. We’re going to go over Google’s guidelines of how to generate content and feed that engine to show up in the AI generated results directly in Google search. And by and large Google ai, those precepts, the LLMs, the way that works is fairly consistent. So we will get into what you can do from a content perspective to start showing up in those a IO results.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you love this stuff, go register for the summit while early bird pricing is still available. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi, for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Announcer:

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Conrad Saam:

Sorry, I’m very important. Brain surgeon. Brain surgery.

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