Surviving the Zero-Click Era: What Lawyers Must Know About SEO and AI, with Cyrus Shepard

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett:

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 5 91 of the Lawyers Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie talks with Cyrus Shephard about what we need to know in the ever-changing world of search and artificial intelligence, and I think more importantly, how to know what we need to know or how to know whether people know what to ask your marketing providers just cutting through some of the BS maybe. So we’re coming up on the end of the year, and I think a lot of attorneys are thinking about measuring what they did this year,

Stephanie Everett:

I hope

Zack Glaser:

So, measuring what they did this year, measuring where they are. It should be, if you haven’t heard us talk about it,

Stephanie Everett:

That’s a good idea. You should figure out, Hey, what’s this little business of yours doing? I think sometimes we’re scared to know,

Zack Glaser:

Oh man, I always was scared to know, but I always feel way, way better because I was always doing better than I really thought, or there were some easy wins that I could get.

Stephanie Everett:

I think the easy win for this week is go take the scorecard. We have our small firm scorecard on the website. It’s 20 questions now. We simplified it, so it’s pretty easy, pretty fast. Sometimes people say, oh, I didn’t even think about that question. Sometimes there’s learning in just the act of taking it because we’ll ask you something that you’ll think, that wasn’t even on my radar. That should be something I’m thinking about. So that’s interesting. So it’s not really about the score, it’s about the journey. It’s not about the grade, it’s about the process.

Zack Glaser:

Speaking of which, we actually kind of took a, B, C, F out of it because it’s not really a scorecard in the sense of did you get a hundred percent? It’s an assessment, more or

Stephanie Everett:

Less, right? Yeah, no, it’s designed to tell you, we broke it down into the different parts of your business. We ask you a few questions about each part, and it’s really a measuring tool of seeing where is there room for opportunity, where are you doing well? And then from there you should be able to say, okay, maybe this is what I should be focusing on next.

Zack Glaser:

I would suggest though, we’ve had the small firm scorecard for a long time, and it’s had, this is, I guess it’s kind of new iterations. So if you’ve taken the small firm scorecard in the past, and if you took the one, the previous iteration, take the new one, and frankly, if you’ve taken the new one, it’s good to take this, what would you say, every quarter, every half a year, at least every year.

Stephanie Everett:

At least every year, twice a year, every quarter wouldn’t hurt you. I mean, it’s just information, so it’s like

Zack Glaser:

Doesn’t cost you anything.

Stephanie Everett:

Right? How much information do you want to,

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah. Well, where can they go to find this thing?

Stephanie Everett:

Well, we should put it in the show notes. Show notes, show

Zack Glaser:

Notes,

Stephanie Everett:

I’m pretty sure. Also lawyers.com/scorecard.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, lawyers.com. Since I’m the one that put it on the site, I probably should have been the one answering that question. It is Lawyerist dot com slash scorecard, and obviously we’ll put it in the show notes and you can navigate to it just by going to lawyer.com or send us an email, find us online, any of the places that you follow us. But now here is Stephanie’s conversation with Cyrus.

Cyrus Shepard:

My name is Cyrus Shephard. I work in the SEO industry. I’m a longtime traditional SEO person. Started back in 2009, worked for a company called Moz, or SEO Moz, which for a time was the largest SEO company in the world. Now I’m an independent consultant working with a lot of startups, a lot of technology companies. I have worked with law firms. I have a couple of law firm clients, so I’m very familiar with the space and like everybody else, I’m dealing with all these rapid changes in SEO and Google with ai, it’s evolving landscape and trying to stay on top of things and bring my clients along with me, and that’s what I do.

Stephanie Everett:

Well, welcome to the show, Cyrus. I’m excited to talk to you today to that last point you just made. It does feel like, on the one hand, maybe things are changing. On the other hand, maybe, I mean, you’ll tell us what needs to stay the same, so let’s just get everybody on the same page. I hope that they’re not living under a rock and they know that SEO means search engine optimization, but we should just ground set and make sure that people know how, I mean, we always say the algorithms, but for the most part it’s Google, right? We’re always worried about that Seems to be the big, huge monster in the room.

Cyrus Shepard:

Yeah, Google and increasingly OpenAI Chat, GPT taking, people are spending a lot of time on chat. GPT. It’s not producing a huge amount of traffic for a lot of people, but that’s where increasingly brands are having some visibility and it’s a different model. And also with Google in particular, a couple of years ago, they started introducing the AI overviews at the top of search results, and that’s had a huge change in user behavior and also traffic that we see to individual websites. So there’s a lot of moving parts. A lot is changing, a lot’s going on.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, we’re hearing terms right now about zero click and a EO, and I wonder if you couldn’t just set us up with some definitions.

Cyrus Shepard:

There’s a lot of debate in my world, what we call this new thing, and it’s a lot of nerd wars over what it should be called. Some people call it geo generative engine optimization. Some people call it ai, SEO, some people call it just SEO, so you’ll hear a lot of terms floating around, but generally it just means the influence of AI on SEO. And you mentioned another thing. You mentioned zero click, and that’s probably been the biggest change in behavior that we see that if you track your web traffic, 80% of sites on the internet over the last couple of years have seen a decline in traffic. There’s some exceptions to that, but Google now with summarizing information with AI overviews means that informational queries where people just want to learn information, websites are having a harder time attracting those clicks. So a lot of people are staying on Google longer, they’re staying on chat GPT, and that means our strategies have to shift because it’s a zero click world. It’s more about brand now, and we can get into that a little bit if you’d like.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I think so because I think this is what everyone’s trying to figure out and what we thought we knew doesn’t feel to be relevant anymore. And maybe in terms of even how we need to show up the things we need to be paying attention to, where do you even start? What are you telling people these days?

Cyrus Shepard:

So this is a podcast for law firms, so let’s use a law firm specific example. For years and years and years, a great way to show up on Google was informational content. Let’s say you, you’re A DUI firm and you specialize in DUI topics. You could produce content like what to do if you’re pulled over for drunk driving and create a great article, and maybe you specify a region like Atlanta, Georgia, what to do if you’re pulled over in Atlanta and you could rank for that and you could get clicks, and then you could funnel those people into your services, call for a call for a consultation, things like that. That doesn’t work as well anymore because that information is just being summarized by the ai. The question we have is it’s still worth producing that content. What we’re seeing now is we want to be the brand that’s referenced by the ai.

If we’re looking for the best DI firm in Atlanta, we want Google to recommend the brand. So it’s a slight shift. So we’re not producing as much informational content, but we’re trying to promote ourselves as the DUI firm in Atlanta so we can get mentioned by the brand and it changes how we think about our marketing, where we’re putting our marketing budget and how we want to produce that content. Because the ROI is not as great as it used to be for just producing pages and pages of informational content, kind of co-opting that for themselves.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. One strategy I’ve heard, I’m kind of curious now to get your take with what you just said, was that the ai, the LLMs are looking for the answers to questions. And so before we were worried about keywords, now we should be worried about answering questions. So they almost said, you need to still keep creating content, but instead of answering what to do when you get pulled over, maybe you also answer some 15 other variations or similar questions that come up with that. And I’m just kind of curious. That feels like hard sometimes. Like, oh, we got to go make more content.

Cyrus Shepard:

It is, and it’s the dilemma right now because you nailed it, because it’s hard. Creating good content is hard, and we’re seeing diminished ROI on creating that content. So what do you do? Sometimes I have clients that just producing a single page, it’s like arm wrestling, and now we’re supposed to produce all these other pages. So it is a conflict. What I’m recommending people do is not necessarily create all these other pages, but simply making sure that the content you do have answers. More questions,

Maybe do, there’s four words that we use in my industry, collect query, fan out, and people also ask just making sure you’re answering more and more, but in a clear kind of way. And I think this is an important tip for people. There’s this concept you might hear, and it’s kind advanced concept called chunking, and that’s just organizing your content on the page. I see this with a lot of attorneys. They write their content and it’s just blocks and blocks of text. We need to make sure we’re organizing it so that LLMs can read it, and that means chunking into very small sections, questions, answers, and formatting it in a way that you’re promoting your brand. So let’s say your name is McKenzie Law firm. McKenzie Law Firm is a DUI agency that helps people charge with drunk driving. Make sure you’re forming your sentences in clear chunked ways so the LLMs can understand and always put your brand first. We create these articles, but we’re terrible at putting ourselves in the articles themselves. So if you’re writing an article on a specific law subject, make sure you’re talking about how your brand name yourself,

Our law firm does this. This is how we do it. This is our experience. Don’t just write a general informational article. Make sure you’re marketing yourself within that article.

Stephanie Everett:

That’s a great point. I’m just sitting here thinking about the last blogs I’ve written, and I don’t normally talk about at Lawyerist, we do blank. We do these things. That seems like a good little tweak.

Cyrus Shepard:

So let’s talk about this for a second. This is something that a lot of people even in my industry are missing. A couple years ago, Google came out. Google has this concept called Eat, experience, expertise, authority. A couple years ago when AI was introduced, they realized that the internet was going to be flooded with AI articles. So they introduced a new concept called experience, and they have all these algorithms and these army of human quality raters that look at your content and try to evaluate how much experience you have in writing this content. They’re trying to separate out the AI content. They don’t really want it. So when you’re creating these articles, you need to demonstrate experience, firsthand experience. We do this, we are experts in X, Y, Z, and this is how we do it. Explain your methodology. We sit down with you, we research your case. We go through the documents, and it may seem obvious, but most people aren’t really good at this, and a lot of law firm sites don’t really demonstrate their own expertise except on some of their main landing pages. So putting that in every piece of content, that’s going to help you

A lot.

Stephanie Everett:

And I feel like we also have to get over, we’re sort of taught not to brag. We can’t call ourselves experts officially, and so we’re always worried about putting ourselves out there in this role, but what I’m hearing is we got to get over that and we got to be able to talk about how we help clients because it’s important. I mean, it actually probably makes for a pretty good copy

Cyrus Shepard:

Too. So the AI systems, generally, there’s a rule in SEO, but also ai, what you say about yourself is important. So if you have an about page and you say, we’re a top firm in X, you can often get cited by Google or the LLMs as a source, even though that’s you. But the opposite of that is what other people say about you is more important. So getting cited in the top law firm, directories, review sites, getting a lot of good positive reviews everywhere on the web, just being mentioned in as many places as you can, as an expert, as an authority, that’s going to help you even more than what you say about yourself, but what you say about yourself is extremely important.

Stephanie Everett:

No, I love that. Okay, since I’ve got you, this is exciting, I get to just like, alright, these things Stephanie wants to know, but I was at a conference recently and everybody was talking about Reddit and how important comments on Reddit seemed to be right now. And I mean, I know lots of lawyers aren’t hanging out there. It feels like a waste of time. And so I just thought I’d get your hot take.

Cyrus Shepard:

Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. So around the time that Google started promoting experience, they also started promoting Reddit and user generated content because they want voices from real people. And Google entered into a data agreement with Reddit, and the last couple of years, Reddit traffic has just skyrocketed. So now there are marketing agencies that do nothing but Reddit and Reddit’s not the only site. YouTube is another one. We did some data that showed that LLMs often cite YouTube because they read the transcripts, not necessarily looking at the videos themselves, but they’re reading the transcripts. So that’s another strategy for law firms that can be taken advantage of. Reddit and some other sources are hugely influential right now with Google and LLMs in general. But if it’s not comfortable, I don’t necessarily, for a lot of smaller firms, it may not be worth it to do a lot of investment in Reddit. Commenting, it does take a lot of work, but trying to figure out where LLMs are getting their answer. And you can just do a search for what you’re trying to rank for in Google, in chat, GPT, and see where they’re citing their sources. If it’s Reddit, maybe that’s where you need to be, but if it’s not, look at where, look at the sources they’re citing, and that’s probably where you want to put some of your investment if you can figure out a way to get in those places.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. If somebody’s just getting started now, what advice are you giving them? It still feels like a pretty, I feel like maybe I’m wrong in saying this, but back in the day it was like, write some great content. You’ll play this game and you’re going to get found, and I don’t know why, but somehow it feels harder now. So what do you tell the new folks? Diving in

Cyrus Shepard:

It absolutely is hard, and it’s, getting started has never been easy even 15 years ago. But I think today we’ve shifted from that informational content that I’m talking about to brand. At the end of the day, Google and all these LLMs, they’re meant to be a reflection of the real world. So we can do all the SEO, we can do all the optimization we want, but at the end of the day, if you have a strong brand, that’s your moat, that’s your defense. So I think now starting out, I think the opportunities are where people aren’t necessarily, the old players aren’t necessarily investing their time, and that’s social media, that’s YouTube, that’s even, it’s such a cliche to have billboards for lawyers, but anything you can do to get your name out there and search still is an effective strategy. Late night television commercials, if your budget allows it, things like that.

It’s just getting yourself in as many places as you can and getting your brand out there. And this is the shift. In the old days, you tried to rank for specific keywords, DUI, attorney Atlanta today. I want the name of the brand, the name of the firm to be the focus. So whatever the name of your firm is, I want that to be mentioned as much as possible. And you still have your content on whatever your legal focus is, but it’s your brand. Just get it out there. And whether it’s participating in your local Chamber of commerce or webinars such as this, I’m a big fan of webinars because listen, we’re going to publish this show and you’re going to publish it. There’ll be some show notes. My name will probably come up in different places that helps my brand. That’s one of the reasons I do podcasts like this. So podcasts I think are kind of an underutilized tactic with law firms right now because there’s such a huge interest. So doing things like this, just getting your brand out there, not worrying so much about the keywords, that’s the way to get going and just get that flywheel going. It’s hard, but

Stephanie Everett:

If

Cyrus Shepard:

It was easy, everybody would do it.

Stephanie Everett:

Well, shifting gears, let’s focus on the, there’s a lot of folks out there who either want to get started working with an agency or maybe they’re working with an agency already, and what questions should they be asking to really test if they’re getting sound advice? I saw a friend of mine who has an agency for lawyers post it today, and he was like, listen, there’s a lot of people out there selling you guys some oil right now, and lawyers, sadly, we don’t have the information to know if the magic potion that they’re promising us is even valid. So I’d love your take on how do we vet the agencies better?

Cyrus Shepard:

That is a really good question. I work with a lot of SEO agencies that specialize in law firm, SEO, and I totally agree with you. It’s a landmine field out there because so many agencies are using way outdated tactics. Tactics that were important 10 years ago, but in the shifting landscape, they really aren’t. So I think what you have to do, I actually used to work as a Google quality rater, and we would go and research the reputation of websites. So I think you have to do that too. So don’t trust what an agency says about itself. Never, never trust what an agency says about research. Google that agency and look at every review, look at client testimonials, client stories, and be wary. Be very, very wary, especially because they’re probably collecting those Google reviews themselves or prompting people, but you have to dive deep. I maintain a list of law firm, SEO agencies myself, and I know how hard it is, but also do a lot of the marketing yourself, things like this, the podcast, get out there, write, write for law journals, submit your articles, try to build your reputations, talk at conferences, all those authority signals that Google and LLMs are looking for, get out there and do the work. Don’t trust your SEO agency to do all that work for you because they’re just trying to prop you up. You have to prop yourself up as well.

Stephanie Everett:

And then I guess maybe to wrap up, because you did mention some of the outdated tactics. What are some of the key metrics that you think we should be paying attention to now and have those shifted? In this world of AI and how it’s impacting everything,

Cyrus Shepard:

We really want to focus on conversions, the leads that you’re getting, not so much traffic anymore because that’s gone down. There’s a lot of, we used to just do rank tracking. That’s not as reliable metric anymore. It correlates, but it’s hard because you can rank number one and not get zero clicks. So focus on leads. There’s a lot of tools out there that are now tracking your visibility in AI answers. We’re not quite sure of the value of that. I hate to end on this question because it’s really hard. We don’t really know what the new metrics are, but focus on the leads, focus on your business, focus on your bottom dollar, and that’s probably our North star until we get a little more clarity.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe for some people just to hear, Hey, guys, if you don’t have this all figured out, sadly neither do the experts. There’s some comfort in knowing you’re not alone. The world is shifting and everyone’s trying to catch up and figure out what’s best, but keep doing all those tried and true things you just mentioned speaking and writing and promoting yourself, and that’s going to pay off.

Cyrus Shepard:

The number one advice I can give people is focus on the real world, do real world stuff, because that’s what the systems are trying to reflect, and if you’re out there, you’re putting yourself out there, that’s going to help you in the end.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I love it. Cyrus, if people want to learn more, follow you, read your stuff, where should they go?

Cyrus Shepard:

I would say, look me up on LinkedIn. Also, my website is called zippy zippy.com, so I appreciate that, Stephanie.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, and we’ll make sure it’s all in the show notes for people too, as you mentioned, because we know those LLMs are going to be reading that. We want them to see that, and then they think we have good authority, so they’ll point it back to you and be like, Hey, this guy showed up on the lawyer’s podcast, so he must be

Cyrus Shepard:

Awesome. Absolutely. Yes.

Stephanie Everett:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. We’ll have you back as the world keeps shifting and we figure some more stuff up, maybe you can come back and update us on what you guys figure out.

Cyrus Shepard:

Sounds good. Thank you, Stephanie.

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