Most lawyers don’t realize they’re practically invisible on Google and it’s costing them clients. 

In this webinar, I break down the Ai and ABCs of SEO, Artificial Intelligence - or Ai for SEO is often called AEO and the core ABCs of SEO - Architecture, Backlinks, and Content are still they key strategic ways to get listed in Google Organic SEO searches. I’ll show you why Architecture of your website, things like site speed, clean code, and ADA compliance matter, how to build the right backlinks without toxic links dragging you down, and how to create content that answers the questions clients are actually asking. You’ll also see how Google Maps and Answer Engine Optimization are changing the rules, and the simple steps you can take today to stay ahead.

Key Topics

01:38 – Why AI Overviews now appear in 30% of Google searches and what it means for law firms

03:49 – The A of SEO: Architecture—why fast, mobile-friendly sites are non-negotiable

08:27 – Why page speed, mobile tests, and site maps directly affect your Google ranking

12:44 – How clean code, schema, and ADA compliance give Google what it wants

19:38 – The B of SEO: Backlinks—how links built Google’s dominance and why they still matter

22:03 – Spotting toxic backlinks and using disavows to protect your site

24:10 – Creative backlink strategies—PR articles, scholarships, and industry directories

26:15 – The C of SEO: Content—why answering real client questions drives rankings

27:46 – Tools like AnswerThePublic and receptionist “question logs” for content ideas

28:15 – Google Maps SEO—optimizing your profile, reviews, and local consistency (NAP)

34:01 – Why multi-location strategies help firms dominate maps and LSAs

34:47 – Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—how AI search is reshaping results

37:38 – The search cycle—when AI answers show up vs. where SEO still wins

40:15 – Repurposing one video into blogs, maps, social, and AEO content

45:55 – Advanced strategies—schema stacking, proprietary data, and authority content

47:15 – Final takeaways and Q&A on common SEO mistakes, priorities, and AI balance

Resources Mentioned

• Download our Handbook The Ten Hottest Trends for Law Firms - https://www.tengoldenrules.com/hottrends 

Books

• The 10 Golden Rules of Online Marketing by Jay Berkowitz  -https://a.co/d/fjcfBpF
• 10 Free Strategies of Internet Marketing by Jay Berkowitz - https://a.co/d/iISJV56
• Matt The Intern’s Guide to Digital Marketing by Matthew Klimek and Jay Berkowitz - https://a.co/d/bF5MuKL
• Advanced Internet Marketing for Law Firms by Jay Berkowitz- https://a.co/d/d5jvwdu

Technology/Software

• Google PageSpeed Insights – https://pagespeed.web.dev/
• Google Analytics – https://analytics.google.com/
• Google Search Console – https://search.google.com/search-console
• WordPress – https://wordpress.org/
• Yoast SEO Plugin – https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
• All in One SEO – https://aioseo.com/
• Elementor – https://elementor.com/
• SEMrush – https://www.semrush.com/
• Ahrefs – https://ahrefs.com/
• AnswerThePublic – https://answerthepublic.com/
• BirdEye – https://birdeye.com/
• Podium – https://www.podium.com/ 

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a best-selling author and popular keynote speaker. Mr. Berkowitz managed marketing departments at: Coca-Cola, Sprint and McDonald's Restaurants, and he is the Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules,  a digital marketing agency specialized in working with attorneys.

Mr. Berkowitz is the author of Advanced Internet Marketing for Law Firms, The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing and 10 Free Internet Marketing Strategies that went to #1 on Amazon.  He is the host of the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Webinar and Podcast. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, The Business Journals and FOX Business TV.

Mr. Berkowitz was selected for membership as a TITAN for Elite Digital Marketing Agencies, he is the recipient of a SOFIE Award for Most Effective use of Emerging Media, and a Special BERNAY’s Award.

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A is the architecture now, simplifying

14,000 things down to A, B and C, architecture is the structure

of your website. So first of all, it's very important that

your website is fast. You've got to go to the Page Speed Insights

and make sure that your website downloads quickly, because if it

doesn't, Google is not going to rank you highly. We're going to

talk about a lot of technical things, like ADA compliance, the

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening,

whatever time zone you're watching, and if you're watching

this on our recording. Welcome to the 10 golden rules monthly

webinar series. My name is Jay Berkowitz, and today we're going

to talk about the aibcs of SEO. And you're probably wondering,

wait a minute, I signed up for the ABCs of SEO. So whether

you're watching this live on Zoom or on LinkedIn or sometime

later on YouTube or one of our social media channels. Today,

we're going to break down Search Engine Optimization. How do you

get found on Google and the other search engines? But of

course, everything's AI these days, and about 30% of the

search results are coming up as the new Google AI overviews on

So first of all, a is the architecture. Now, simplifying

14,000 things down to A, B and C, architecture is the structure

Google, and of course, so many people are searching on chat,

of your website. So first of all, it's very important that

your website is fast. You've got to go to the Page Speed Insights

and make sure that your website downloads quickly, because if it

doesn't, Google's not going to rank you highly. We're going to

GPT and perplexity, so we're starting to see these AI

talk about a lot of technical things, like ADA compliance, the

Americas with Disabilities Act, and this website is a big fail.

We're going to talk about some advanced things like the code,

the back end, structure of the code, and the architecture of

searches coming up about 30% of the time. So we couldn't talk

the website. The B is backlinks. How many other sites link to you

link to your site to make your site more popular? In the eyes

of Google, these guys have over 9000 backlinks to their website.

And the C is content. A lot of discussion today is going to be

about search engine optimization today without talking about how

about answering questions, because a search query is

essentially a question, and our client is right at the top of

the results here with an answer to a question. And what is

content? Well, it's not just words, it's videos, it's

to optimize for the answer engines. So a lot of us are

pictures, it's everything that occurs on your website and,

frankly, throughout the internet. So we'll get into all

that today. And have you fallen off the Google cliff? This is an

analysis of how many different keyword terms a website ranks

calling it AEO answer engine optimization, in addition to

for, and they've fallen down from 1200 to 439 so if you're

starting to see this kind of reduction in traffic from the

internet, let us know. You can just give Chris a shout out in

the chat and. Or the Q and A section. Or if you're on

search engine optimization. So bear with me. We'll go through

LinkedIn, just send us a note and we'll book some time with

you. And obviously, if you're watching after the fact, go to

10 Golden rules.com

The other thing that's really, really important in SEO today is

Google Maps SEO, and frankly, the maps appears above the SEO

the ABCs, we'll go through the AIS and the Aeos, and we'll have

in most of the search results. So we're going to talk about how

do you get ranked in this all important area of SEO, search

engine optimization, because the Maps is a free search result

that appears above the SEO in most cases. So we're going to

talk a lot about the ABCs, the basics of SEO. We're going to

a lot of fun today, answer some questions at the end. And thank

talk about AI SEO, artificial intelligence SEO, and we're

going to talk about maps SEO today as we get into it. So do

me a favor, if you're here and you're really an expert and

you're really looking for that advanced kind of stuff, I just

you so much for being here search engine optimization,

want to get a gage for the audience. So put a G in chat if

you're a Google guru and you're just looking for the advanced

stuff, and if you're kind of a newbie or, you know, maybe your

boss just said, Hey, go watch this webinar and learn something

there was a recent leak of the Google back end codes, and all

about the internet. Please put an end in the chat. So if I know

we've got some startups here, or some folks who are new to search

engine optimization. And lastly, if you're shy and you just don't

like putting your hand up in webinars, put an S in the chat

for me, just so I know, and I'll get the gage here my audience.

these Google Documents got leaked. Some people think Google

Okay, great. Thank you so much. It looks like we got a mix. We

got some newbies, couple gurus in the house. Next thing,

congratulations for being here. And if you're watching today,

live with us. Great. If you're sometime in the future, this

actually did it on purpose so that we know how comprehensive

awesome to have you here. But I want you to know that you're a

part of a very small minority of folks who actually take the time

to get better. And the people that I see at the conferences

are generally the people the firms that are succeeding.

and how complex the Google ranking guides are. We found out

They're in the top five to 10% in their marketplaces.

Same thing in my industry, like the folks who go to the

conferences, invest the time to learn, read the books, watch the

webinars and produce their own content. That's one of the best

ways to learn. You folks are the winners, and you're generally

there's over 14,000 ranking factors that decide whether you

going to be leading the pack. So what are we going to do today?

We're going to first understand the key strategies for getting

your law firms ranked in Google. And by the way, if you're not a

law firm, 10 golden rules works now almost exclusively with law

go on page one of Google or page 1000 so today we're going to try

firms, and so we are going to use examples from law firms and

from personal injury law firms, because that's the majority of

our clients. But these same strategies and everything you're

learning here today is relevant for ranking on Google,

regardless of your industry. We're going to tap on Google

and break it down and make it really simple to explain what

local maps, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about the AI

SEO or AEO, answer, engine optimization. I'm going to give

you a free workbook download. So if you want to get something to

follow along with and use, I'll give you that download on the

you need to know, what you need to do and what you need to ask

next slide, and then I'm going to tell you a little bit about

myself, where I come from, and why I'm qualified to talk about

these things. So if you want to download the workbook. You can

just grab a screenshot of this now live, or go to www, 10

Golden rules.com/hot Trends, two T's, H O, T, T, T, R, E, N, D,

your agency or your web developers, because they're

S, and actually, some folks will be listening to this on our

audio podcast. So welcome to our podcast audience. Sometime in

the future, 10 Golden rules.com/hot, trends, to

download the workbook. So without further, ADO a little

probably going to learn some advanced things today that

bit about me. I come from Winnipeg, Canada. This is a

beautiful picture of city park, and trust me, it's gorgeous

right now because we're recording this in July of 2025

but in the winter, the big lake becomes a skating rink. Winnipeg

You're going to want to check with your web guys.

completely freezes over. But we got super lucky, and my wife,

Bonnie, and I moved to beautiful Boca Raton, Florida. There's

Bonnie and Parker hanging out in beautiful Boca Raton.

Now I've been a director of marketing for McDonald's and

Coca Cola early in my career, and then I moved to a.com called

E diets.com I went from selling Big Macs to selling diets. And

when I was at EDS, I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing

Association, and I wrote this book, The 10 golden rules of

online marketing, and gave this presentation at the Direct

Marketing Association, and a bunch of people came up to me

and at the end, and they said they wanted to hire me as a

consultant. So I've been consulting with folks at 10

golden rules is a full fledged digital marketing agency for

over 24 years now. So these two books, the internet 10 free

strategies and Matt the interns guide to digital marketing or

Amazon Best Sellers. This was an early book in 2018 I started

talking about artificial intelligence, Bitcoin and

blockchain. And my new book is coming out this year called

advanced Internet Marketing for law firms. We're proud to say we

just passed a million views on YouTube and our social media.

And if you like this format, if you like these kind of webinars,

please go to our YouTube channel and you can learn about law firm

growth, the hottest technology strategies, local, Search,

Google, paper. Click chat, GPT and AI, the six parts of Google

is very popular. All of that's available on our YouTube

channel. 10 golden rules, as I mentioned, is our internet

marketing agency. And we help law firms with growth

strategies. So we help them attract more visitors, convert

and we work on five star operations. These are some of

the clients we work with all across the country, some super

big brands. And I like to share one quick case study as a matter

of fact. This is also available as one of our webinars, and you

can learn how Brian Garrett, as he says it in the webinar, he

wasn't ranking for hardly anything now, everything to do

with car wrecks. He's ranking on the top of Google, and we see he

went from 65 keywords to ranking for over 1000 keywords, and

that's an SEO measure. And he was signing 10 or 15 cases a

month, and now he's regularly signing 3745 50 cases a month.

So this stuff can really work.

So without further ado, let's get into the ABCs of SEO, and

this is just a screenshot. This is if you did a search for

personal injury lawyer, just to lay out the different parts of

Google for some of those newbies. So right at the very

top of search are Google screened local service ads, also

called LSAS. We call them LSAs, or screen and the best thing

about these is you only pay per lead, and you get phone calls.

So we love the LSAS. There's a couple whole webinars on LSAS on

our YouTube channel, but we're not going to be talking about

that today. We're also not going to be talking about pay per

click, the paid ads on Google. But typically you're going to

see a couple of the paid impressions right at the top of

the screen. And Google's marking those with sponsored they're

recognizing, okay, these are paid ads. This is organic. Next

up is the Google Maps, as I mentioned, often appears up

above the SEO we have people also ask, which is other

questions or other terms. It would be similar to the thing

you search and then the SEO search engine optimization down

at the bottom of the page. Now, if we scroll down, this is just

a screenshot, we'd see 10 SEO results, or organic, free

results. Google has consistently shown 10 per page, and then you

see some more paid ads. Go to the next page, the next page,

we'd like to simplify. How do you get listed in the organic

results from 14,000 different things down to three, three

things you need to know, architecture, backlinks and

content. And then, of course, we'll get into the AI overviews

after we go through ABCs maps, and we'll talk about how you get

ranked in these new AI search results. So first off, the a the

architecture, the build of your website, the hosting, the

structure, the speed, as I mentioned before, your speed

test. So this is a great result for Davis Saperstein, these guys

have 100 out of 100 on Google's page, Speed Insights. Why is

that important? Well, remember the old days, when you click on

a Google result, you'd go to a website and the thing would be

spinning, or the website would be really, really old. That

doesn't happen very often anymore, because Google is on

the first page of Google. They're putting websites that

are updated and fast, because they know that if the thing's

spinning, we're all going to hit the back button and we're going

to go back to the Google search, and Google knows that they're

tracking it, so you've gotta make sure your website's fast,

or they're just not gonna put you on the first page. Your

website also has to be mobile friendly. Here's a rank checker,

and this website only got 52 out of 100 it's got 73 criticals and

over 1000 warnings. So the site's not mobile friendly. You

wanna have a site map, and this is kind of old school. Remember,

in the old days, we used to go to the site map to try and find

our way around websites. And sometimes, if I can't find

something, I still look for the site map. So it's not as

important, because Google knows how to navigate sites better.

These days, the old robots on Google used to look for the site

map and navigate around the site, but now you should have an

HTML site map. And this is maybe the first question to ask your

agency. And in Google's Webmaster Tools, or it's now

called Search Console, there's an HTML tool HTML website code,

and you can feed the code to Google in your Webmaster Tools.

So basically, now you're you can proactively send Google your

site map, and you want to do that on a regular basis as

you're updating your website. Now, next thing, from a

technical architectural standpoint, is you want to have

nice, clean code on your website. So you want to have a

page name.

So this is a homepage, but like, if it was our podcast page, we'd

want to call it 10 Golden rules.com/internet, Marketing

podcast. And then we'd want to name the page, internet

marketing podcast and the h1 title the meta tags are, again,

this is technical stuff for the developers, but the h1 title tag

here, page title tag is lawyer advertising, Internet Marketing

for law firms. 10 golden rules. So we're getting keywords in

there. Basically, this is an opportunity for you to get a

date. Additional keywords and tell Google, because Google

reads the code, hey, this page is all about internet marketing

for law firms. And then on the page you've got to have the

words Internet Marketing for law firms, and your h1 is your

title. The title on the page that the consumer actually sees

should say Internet Marketing for law firms, so that you're

consistent, there's other tags that you can feed into the

search engines, like alt tags and image names, but that's like

when the old days used to hover over a picture and the name of

the picture would come up. But that data is still there, that

code is still there. Google Analytics. Everybody should have

Google Analytics on your website. This is free software

that'll tell you how many people came to your website. Where did

they come from? How long did they spend? What pages did they

go to? What pages did they leave from? So there's great data that

you can get for free from Google with Google Analytics.

And again, I mentioned this briefly. Search Console used to

be called Webmaster Tools. This is a question for your agency

and your web guys. Do you have search console on the website?

Because search console is going to give you a whole bunch of

tips. Bunch of tips on how you can improve your SEO. It's free

from Google, and Google wants the web to work better, so they

want your stuff to work great, and so you should have search

console on your website, then the back end code, there's some

sophisticated things, and a lot of people don't know this. If

you right click on your mouse, a box comes up, and then you can

view page source, and then you can see the source code. So in

this case, we've got schema code on the website. There's over 800

schema codes. But basically what this is, is Google and Yahoo and

all the search engines got together about 10 years ago, and

they said, let's come up with some standardized code that'll

make it super easy for our search engines to understand

some of the basic things on the internet, things like local

business, legal service, attorney, FAQ page, there's now

over 800 schema codes. If you're not using schema codes, you're

not making it easy for the search engines to find out who

you are, where you are, and a lot of the basic things that

make it easy for the search engines to scan your site, and

if it's easy, they're going to put you on that first page of

Google, right? So next question for your web guys, do we have

schema code? Another thing that is very, very common these days,

and particularly on WordPress websites, and over 40% of the

new websites that are built in WordPress, which is just a

simple set of code that's easy. There's 1000s of people who know

how to work in WordPress, and Google likes it. It ranks really

well. So we recommend building websites in WordPress these

days. So there's plugins for WordPress make it super easy to

do SEO, like the all in one or the Yoast or the Elementor

plugin that makes it easy for you to put SEO code on your website.

I mentioned this briefly at the start the Americas with

Disabilities Act, and this is an another scanner tool that we use

to see if the website is compliant with the ADA. Now, why

does that matter? Well, first of all, if somebody is visually

impaired, they use a reader to read the website out loud to

them. And essentially it's a robot, and that robot reads

through the website. But if the robot has problems, like in this

case, we see that there's a code that's the same color as the

background and things like that. So it makes it very, very hard

for the robot to read the website. That means it's

obviously going to be a problem for someone who's visually

disabled to read have the website read to them, but also

it's very much a problem for Google, because their robots

read the websites the same way. So you want to make sure your

website is like ADA friendly, so that obviously you're not

offending folks or making it impossible for folks to read

your website out loud, and you want it to work for Google. So

the first section architecture we're going to and there's a lot

of things that a professional search engine company would do

on your behalf, but some of the high level things you need to

know, site's got to be fast. If it doesn't download quickly,

Google's just not going to put you on the first page mobile

test make sure it works on mobile equally as well as it

works on a desktop. And frankly, for law firms, 60 or 70% of your

traffic is going to be searched for mobile phones. You gotta

have clean code, meta tags, titles, headers. You should have

Search Console Analytics code on your website. It's free from

Google, and it allows you to understand how your website's

working, and that the search console will give you advanced

tips and show you errors on your website that you can fix you

want to plugins and then some of the advanced things, schema code

and make sure you're ADA compliant.

Now in the backlink section, I love to tell the story of the

founding of Google and these two guys, Larry Page and Sir guy,

Brin, this is a picture of them in the garage where they started

Google. And you know, what's so cool about the founding of

Google is that there was 14 or 15 other search engines when the

guys founded Google and they were doing their PhDs at Stan.

The parade at the time, we remember some of these iconic

names, like Ask Jeeves and Lycos Excite, Yahoo, AltaVista, infosy

and all these different technology companies were able

to show you everybody on the internet who had a keyword on

the internet. Basically, that's what a search is, right? If you

say personal injury attorney near me, the search results is

going to show you all the websites that have the words

personal, Injury Attorney, near and me. And then hopefully on

the first page, they're going to be the ones that have all of

those keywords. And then they're also going to show you if they

only have near or me or stuff like that. So basically, that's

how search engine works. It shows you websites that have the

words that you search now, obviously it's gotten more and

more sophisticated, but in the early days, what differentiated

Google from all these other guys was backlinks. Because they were

doing their PhDs, and they understood that if you wrote a

paper and other people referenced your paper, you grew

in prominence in academia. Well, if you create a website, and

other websites link to your website and they say, Hey, go to

10 Golden rules.com there's great information there about

SEO and Internet Marketing for law firms and other people link

to 10 golden rules. That's like other people linking to my paper

if I wrote an academic paper, and so it makes it means my

websites more valuable, more important in the eyes of Google.

So basically, backlinks are links from other websites to

your website that make you more prominent in Google's eyes. And

that's the one thing that these guys figured out that none of

the search engines that came before them figured out. So you

want to have lots of other websites linking to your website.

Think of it like this graph that actually is in our search tools

that shows us all the websites that link to in this case, one

of our clients websites, and these in the green are all in

the legal community. So these are things like best lawyers.com

and New York courts.gov, and just the LexisNexis and IP

leaders, right? And they're linking either directly to our

client site or through a link graph to our client site other

important sites, like a.edu or a.gov here's MIT and Harvard

that essentially are linking to this website. And there's a

number of tools. This one is sem rush or Ahrefs, I'm not sure, a,

H, R, E, F, S, these guys have 9000 links to their website. You

also want to look at good links and bad links. And there's

reports that we grab to identify how many are high toxicity. So

there's 88 toxic links to this website, you've got to get rid

of those toxic links, because that's sending Bad Juju to your

website. So essentially, what's toxic? Casino sites, gambling

sites, porn sites, foreign sites, scammer spammer sites,

right? And a lot of those guys want to link to your sites for

different nefarious reasons. So what you can do is ask those

websites to delink you, and then if that fails, you go to Google

and you can do what's called a disavow. Now Google's saying,

Oh, you don't have to do it. It's not that important. But a

lot of times Google, they tell you things like this, but we

still believe in the industry that's the best practice. Now,

what are good examples of links that we build for our clients or

that you can go out and get. Here's a link from the American

judicial system website, and it links to our client, and it's

what's called an anchor text link. So the link isn't just the

name of the website. The link says Florida accident attorney.

And when you can get keywords in the anchor text, that's even

better. Here's one linking to our client in Austin, and the

link is Austin personal injury attorneys. We also do very

creative things to get high value links, like coming up with

a scholarship program. Now, this has been done for many years by

by a lot of us in the industry, but it's still a good tactic.

Here's a link from the Miami law school to one of our clients,

the link from Cornell, a.gov link and public relations links.

And this is a strategy we've come up with where we actually

write an article for the journalist. The journalist

pitches the article to a major publication like USA Today, and

then we're able to get links to our clients. This is like an

Uber and rideshare article on USA Today, and this one on MSN

about self driving car accidents.

So we come up with the concept. We pitch the journalists,

pitches the major publication, and we get our clients featured

in these links. And these are other links. There's a number of

websites that journalists post looking for experts, and we tap

into those resources, and we get our clients listed as experts in

articles where the journalists are actually looking to give you

a link. So A is architecture, B is backlinks. And the most

important thing I like to differentiate here is these are

links from other websites to. Your website. We're looking for

high quality links relevant industry websites. So in that

legal example, I showed you links from other legal websites

and from the legal industry and from the big, prominent legal

directories are very valuable in Google Sites, because it shows

that you're prominent in the legal industry, local links. So

if you're a local business and law firms are for the most part,

you want to get links from your local community, from your

chambers of commerce, from local associations. We end up finding

about 200 local links we can get for our clients. Then you want

to create content that people will link to. You create guides

and checklists and car accident handbooks and things like that

that folks will link to, and you can reach out to them and say,

Hey, we've got this great free guide available on our website.

And finally, advanced strategies like creating scholarships and

public relations articles.

Next up is the sea of ABCs, and that's content, but teased a

little bit about answering questions, because if you think

about it, nobody goes to a search engine types in something

that they already know the answer to, unless you're

personally doing research and you want to see if your website

comes up or you type in your own name. But for the most part,

when we're searching, we're asking a question, right? Is it

worth suing after a car accident? And I mentioned Brian

Garrett earlier, and he's coming up number one in the world in

the organic section. So this is an ad. This is an ad, and he has

the best answer to the question, is it suing after a car

accident? And then Google's showing that people also ask.

Here's other questions that people might ask that are

relevant to that same topic. So if you can come up in this area,

you're coming up right at the very top of Google. Well, how do

you do that? Well, one of the strategies is we produce a lot

of videos where our clients answer questions like, Is it

worth doing after a car accident? And we've got a video

and then a really detailed article that explains the answer

to the question. Now, where do you find these questions? And of

course, you could just ask Mildred, and everybody's got a

Mildred, right? This is Mildred, and she was the gatekeeper, the

receptionist at one of our clients, fake law firms. And

what we do is we give Mildred a clipboard and a blank sheet of

paper, and we ask her every time someone comes in and asks a

question, or every time somebody calls in and asks a question,

please do us a favor and write those questions down. And then

what we do is we answer those questions in the form of videos

and blog posts and FAQs on the website, and that becomes a

really great resource of the actual questions that your

clients are asking.

Here's a tool called Answer the public, which gives you a whole

bunch of variants of questions, like we type in car accident

lawyer, and it gives you a whole bunch of variants that you might

want to produce on your website. You can get the data from

internal search on your website, if you have a search box on your

website, and you can go out to things like Reddit and Quora and

see the kind of questions that people are asking in your

category. Next up is Google Maps, and I mentioned before

that the A, Bs and Cs, the architecture backlinks and

content, is kind of simplifying SEO, but over the years, it's

gotten more and more complex and more and more connected, and

Google introduced a mapping function to make it easy for us

to find our way to different places. And a lot of times, I go

directly to maps, and I'll search iPhone repair near me, or

shoe repair near me, or best pizza restaurant in a town I'm

in. And the Google Map function is essentially designed to get

you somewhere, okay, but we all use it for SEO purposes. Because

if somebody searches for a personal injury lawyer, the

first thing they see an SEO in free Google, right? Because

these are paid ads, the first thing they often see is Google

Maps. So there's a whole SEO search engine optimization

strategy around getting listed in the Google Maps. Now this is

a tool that represents how well you're doing in that map search.

So if we go back here, this is number one, number two and

number three. And this tool is saying that at this law firm's

location, they are number one in their Philadelphia law firm. And

then if you go in the one mile grid, they're number one, number

two. We go out a little further, there's some twos and threes,

and they're not as good to the south and the far north, but

they're pretty good in that four or five mile grid. Well, this is

a great tool that shows if you're doing really well, or

here's someone who's doing very, very poorly, they're not even in

the top three right at their location, and they're pretty

much out of the top 20 in the entire marketplace.

So how do you get in the top three? How do you improve your

Google Maps SEO? Because this is something that you can affect.

This is something that your agency or web guys can help you

out with, and you can do some things on. Their own. So here's

our client and friends, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, and

they're number one in their area for their Google Maps. So first

thing is, you're going to SEO, optimize your GBP, or what

Google calls a Google business profile. Now as a consumer, we

call this the Google Maps profile, but Google's got these

back end names for things called GBP, so obviously you gotta take

ownership of your GBP. And if you haven't done that, if you're

just one of the newbies, and you search your name a lot of times,

Google's gonna get your business from online business listings,

and it can say, Are you the owner of this business? And then

you claim your GBP, you're gonna have to give them a little bit

of proof, but then you can do things like ask customers for

reviews, get the address right, make sure you've got all that.

They call them products, but in legal it's practice areas. So

you want to add all your practice areas. Question and

Answers is a great way to get keywords into your Google

business profile, motor vehicle accidents and, of course, the

all important Google reviews, you want to get lots and lots of

folks reviewing your services. So David Saperstein is up to 576

oogle reviews. Congratulations, guys. They've been working

really hard at it. And there's some tips. First of all, make it

easy and send the links and the actual link that you can get

here, like if I clicked here to do a review, it would give me

the link. But what you want to do is go into your Google

business profile and they'll give you a nice, clean link that

you can send out to your customers. Or you can use some

different software, like bird eye and podium that make it

super easy for your paralegals to get those links. So you want

to get lots and lots of links to the website. Then another tip is

you can put the Google Maps widget right there on your

website. So this is a software that you can put on your

website, and it's actually from Google.

Think about it if you actually have the Google software on your

website for mapping and local finding local businesses, and

then Google's looking to see who's a local business in that

area. And you've got the Google tool, those two brains are going

to connect directly, right? So we want to put that widget on

the website. We want to make it super easy, obviously, for

people to find your business if they're coming in for an

appointment. And then the fourth thing is something we call nap

in the business name, address and phone and so you want to

have super consistent, precise, exact naming and address and

phone number everywhere on the internet. So your Google is

going to be the guide, your Google business profile, and

then you want everything else to be exact. And we see Davis,

Saperstein, ampersand, Solomon, comma. PC appears everywhere

throughout the internet, on Facebook, Yelp, Super Lawyers,

etc. So we look at over 300 different local associations and

publications and legal publications to make sure we've

got consistency for our clients. You want lots of local links and

citations. So a link is actually like an activated underlying,

clickable link to your website. A citation is when someone lists

your company and maybe your address, but they don't actually

have that activated link. One thing you can do is you can go

out and ask for that link. You can reach out to the webmaster

and say, Hey, you guys listed our website. Thank you so much.

Can you actually put a link so folks could come and get more

information on the website, but a citation. Google's pretty

smart these days, so if somebody lists like Davis, Saperstein and

Solomon and their law firm, personal injury law firm in

Teaneck, New Jersey, Google takes that as like a half a vote

and gives you some credibility in the algorithm. The final

strategy for local maps is actually to have a multi

location strategy now. Why? Why would Morgan and Morgan the

biggest personal injury law firm in the country? They have a huge

head office in Orlando. Why would they have six locations

for Google Maps all throughout Orlando? And it's pretty simple,

right? It's more opportunities to be closer, and part of the

algorithm for mapping is proximity, and that closeness,

so having six locations gives them more opportunity to get

local links and come up local and it also gives you six

locations to have an LSA, or the Google screened Local Service

ads we talked about earlier on, all right? So there's the

basics, like there's the ABCs, but it's a new world, right?

And we're facing AI in every facet of business today. Of

course, Google is not going to leave us alone now, first and

foremost, chat GPT really kicked off the ability to ask questions

and get the AI to comprise an answer for you. So Google was

probably about six to nine months behind chat GPT, and

they're in catch up mode, but I think they're doing a great job.

And essentially what I think they're doing is they're

defending their turf, and they're saying, we. Got great AI

answers for you. You don't have to open a new app and go over to

chat GPT or perplexity, or you can just do your Google

searching. And we're going to give you a choice. We're going

to give you some ads. We're going to give you the AI answer.

We're going to give you the SEO we're going to give you the

maps. And the other thing that I think is really cool, Google's

actually showing links where they did their homework, and

they're showing the sites they use to compile this answer. But

I think what we're going to see this is Jay's prediction. Within

three months, we're going to start seeing paid ads in this

section. But what I think, is Google's training us all now.

Hey, we've got great AI answers. You don't have to go use one of

those other tools or an app on your phone. You can just pop it

into Google. We'll give you the AI answer. And for now, they're

keeping it clean. They're not showing any paid ads. But I

think once they train us, they're going to start

monetizing this because, frankly, there's two $50 billion

of search of revenue that Google makes. They're going to have to

start monetizing these results. And by the way, so is chat GPT,

because it's very, very expensive to do AI as a matter

of fact, it's billions of dollars to run AI queries, and

we're going to have to double the grid in the United States to

make up for all the AI queries that are coming in by 2030 so

it's very, very expensive. So you're going to see, this is my

prediction. We're going to start seeing a lot of paid results

combined with the AI answers over the next little while.

Now, I teased us a little bit earlier, that in the old days,

six months ago, we did SEO, search engine optimization, but

the new game in town is AEO answer engine optimization, and

I've talked about this in the whole ABC section, like

basically 10 golden rules. We've been answering questions for

five or six years because Google has rebuilt the algorithm to

understand semantics, to understand human language. So

basically, we've all been asking questions on Siri, on Google,

voice on Alexa, and we as consumers have learned to ask

and answer questions, but these new engines, like the chat, GPT,

the Grox of perplexities, these are designed to answer

questions. So the industry is starting to call it a, e, o.

There's a few different things bubbling up, but maybe that'll

be the one that'll be the winner going forward. So what are we

talking about here? Essentially, what we're seeing is that when

you first do a search, when you get in a car accident, there's

what we call the cycle of search. And so your first

question is, Do I really need an attorney after a car accident?

Is the insurance company going to pay for my car repairs? And

they start asking these kind of we start asking as consumers

questions early on in the search. Right now, the cool

thing about these results is that Google has a show more, and

this works the same in maps and LSAs, right? So if we click show

more, Google is going to show all the results, and you can

scroll down and see many. And here's our client, Jeff

McDonald, this is our first client. Congratulations, Jeff,

that we saw AEO answer engine optimization result, can you get

laid off while on light duty? And one of the blogs and the

questions we answered shows up now. Chat. GPT is also doing the

same thing. They're now showing their links. I think part of the

reason is they were getting a lot of pushback because their

engine is learning from all the information on the internet, and

they were showing a lot of results that were grabbed from

other people's proprietary data.

So they were running into like trademark issues or copyright

issues, so they started showing their sources as well. So here's

my buddy, Spencer. Are this is the first one that I saw of a

law firm, and then you see like Forbes and Super Lawyers and

apple and some of the big directory sites. The other way

to think about this, I've talked about this for a minute, is what

we call the cycle of search, or the search funnel. So at the top

of the funnel, again, when you just start doing your research,

do I need a lawyer? We're going to see a lot more of these AIO

type of results. And for the most part, this is where you're

seeing these AI results. In the middle of the funnel are things

like, Okay, I do. Maybe I need a lawyer. Well, how much money can

I make? What's the average settlement? And then at the

bottom of the funnel, okay, now we've decided we need a lawyer.

The insurance company is not playing ball. I can make some

money from this and obviously pay for all my car repairs and

my medical and then now I'm going to be very specific who's

the best car accident attorney in my city, and this is where

Google's still showing the LSAs, the paid ads. Google's still

going to monetize you mentioned the city. They're going to show

you maps, and the SEO is going to come further down the page.

So think of these series, do I need a car accident attorney?

And so we've been proactively doing Question and Answer SEO

for the last four or five years. Essentially, what we do is we

answer a question like this is Jeff McDonald, what happens if I

get hit by a new. Uber, and we search engine optimize the video

on YouTube, meaning we put the title of the exact question that

we're trying to target in the search engines, and that becomes

the title, and then we use tags and keywords and descriptions.

So YouTube is the number two website in the world. It's way,

way, ahead of chat. GPT, okay, so Google owns YouTube, and

Google and YouTube together still make up like 70 or 80% of

the top of the searches on the internet.

So the second thing we do is we take that video, we create a

blog that's a video blog. We've got the words and the video on a

page which is better than a word only page. We're also going to

use those videos and things like social media, the newsletters

and very, very importantly, you want to update your Google Maps

like it's its own mini website. You can do SEO. We talked about

that earlier. You want to update that on a regular basis. So this

strategy allows us to do a video on YouTube. We're doing video

optimization on the website. We're doing AEO answer engine

optimization. We're doing search engine optimization. We're

knocking off the socials, and we're also covering off Google

Maps. The next tip for AEO answer engine optimization, you

want to cover topics comprehensively with detailed

examples and explanations and real examples, but one of the

things that's really valuable is write a really good paragraph.

This is that example that we saw in the AEO result. Write a

really good paragraph right at the top that just has a precise

question and answer, and then go into more detail. And then

Google can snip, they call it a Rich Snippet. In some of these

results, they could snip that information right from the top

of your page, bulleted list seems to come up all the time in

AEO, frequently asked questions is a natural area of your

website. Most people put like four FAQs frequently asked

questions when they built their website. You should go back and

do 100 FAQs on your website. Also very valuable to become an

expert or authority. So we're doing a lot of work with our

clients on becoming expert brands in their marketplace,

answering questions about things like car accidents or divorce or

bankruptcy, whatever category the lawyers. So in this case,

this attorney got listed on Super Lawyers by writing an

article that quotes and links back to her website. We talked

earlier about the PR as an authority, single public

relations and building your local community brand also seem

to connect to AEO results, local links, super valuable. Now

here's a couple advanced tips for the AEO number one, publish

with regular cadence to become a known entity.

Obviously, our monthly webinars, our weekly podcast work great

for this, getting published in magazines, like we got published

in the pilma magazine and publishing regularly on the

social media gives me the perception out there to the

search engines that I'm a bit of an expert if I'm published in

industry publications, create proprietary data. This is a

great one, like, if you come up with a survey, a lot of times,

the chat, gpts and the Google Aeos are showing the results of

the proprietary data that you produce, send out a press

release, get a bunch of people to link to the study on your

website. And that's a really, really good strategy schema

code. So we mentioned this earlier. This is the code that

Google, Yahoo and the other search engines came together,

and they came up with simplified codes for things like locations.

But here's an FAQ, a Frequently Asked Questions page, or an

answer, or question and answer. And this is a code that tells

Google and the other search engines this page is answering

questions, so you're making it super easy to come up in that

area. Here's an article code, and there's several schemas that

are going to work really, really well in this, A, E, O, and the

final concept is schema stacking. Now this is a tip for

the gurus. Hopefully guys haven't thought of this, you're

going to use multiple schemas on a page, like an FAQ, a video

object, a speakable, an article schema, all on the same page.

And final advanced tip, you're going to do summary, authority

content. So basically, what you're going to do is you're

going to create short answers on four or five different places

throughout the web about the same question. So top 20 steps

to file personal injury claim, and you're going to answer that

in five or six different places. And maybe point back to a guide

that you have on your website, so that you're positioning

yourself as the expert answering one specific question by

stacking five answers in different places. So to sum up,

the AI the artificial intelligence section, so Google

is showing 30% of their results right now, and we think it's at

the start of the search cycle. Now, obviously this is going to

evolve, and this is going to change. So you got to come back.

We'll do another webinar in six months or so, and tell you what

we're learning. Learning.

But the results today say that Google's showing these when

people are just doing those initial searches. So if someone

says, like, do I need a lawyer after a car accident, in the old

days, Google would have shown five blogs that answer that

question. Now Google's answering the question, so not as many

people are going out to your website to read your blog, so

your opportunity is to be shown on the right hand side of that

AI result so that Google's linking to your website to get

that answer. Of course, answering questions, we've

talked a lot about that, becoming an online expert. So

answering questions, writing articles on industry

publications that link back to your website position you as an

expert. And of course, you gotta answer a lot of questions. So

doing those YouTube videos, posting those on social media,

LinkedIn and several industry sites, positions you as an

expert seems to affect the results in the Aeos. And then we

shared some advanced strategies like schema and stacking schemas

and doing summary authority blogging, where you answer the

exact same question in five different places. So that wraps

up the ABCs of SEO. I'll take a few questions now. You can just

type those into the Q and A or the chat, or if you're on

LinkedIn, Elizabeth over there monitoring, she'll send me your

questions from LinkedIn, because I can't stream in two places,

but I'll just sum up quickly while you're getting some

questions in a ABCs is a is architecture, the structure of

your site, the speed, the schema code, the get, make sure you get

those. Ada is taken care of the America's disabilities. Act B is

backlinks, getting links from important, high quality industry

relevant sites throughout the internet that link and make your

site more prominent, more important. C is content, and a

lot of the content we talked about today is answering

questions. That's going to work great for semantic search, where

Google understands the human language, and also for the a, e,

o, answer engine optimization. And lastly, we looked at a AI,

or the answer engine optimization, and some of the

things we can do there, obviously answering questions,

schema code and stacking schemas. So without further ado,

I'm going to throw up the link to the handbook again if you all

want to get a free copy.

We covered the AI overviews in there, the ABCs of SEO, Google

Maps, Google screen. So there's some really good tips in there,

and some things that you can hand off to your agency to make

sure they get that done. So you can just take a picture of this,

or go to tangos.com/hot, trends, two T's, H, O, T, T, R, E, N, E,

S, all right, thank you guys. I see a bunch of questions coming

in, so let me go over here to the chat. Okay, what is the

biggest mistake companies are making when integrating AI into

their SEO workflows? What is the biggest mistake companies are

making when integrating AI into their SEO workflow. I think the

biggest mistake is just not knowing about it at this point,

even some of my friends in my mastermind, some of the top

agencies in the world, we're just having our first

masterminds and getting together on it, trying to figure this

stuff out. So I think the mistake is I'm not recognizing

that this is new, it's important, and getting some of

these basic things we talked about in place, start answering

questions, start getting published on other places

throughout the internet that link back to your website, get

schema code on your website. So not doing some of those basic

things would be the first mistake that I see. Next

question. Peter from LinkedIn asked if a law firm had limited

time or budget, which of the three SEO pillars should they

prioritize first? And why? So you've got to get the basic

architecture right. I mean, obviously sometimes we get the

opportunity to deal with a startup, an attorney who leaves

a firm and goes out on his or her own, and we get to build

their first website, which is, I love that. It's a lot of fun and

it's a challenge, like, how quickly can we get them listed

for the website for the Google Maps. Normally, Google will give

you some LSAS when you're just starting out. So if you're just

starting out, give me a call. I love those. I love working with

folks who are just starting their business. And of course,

I've been on the journey, so I like to share what I've learned

about entrepreneurialism too.

So the first thing is, you got to get the website. You got to

get the architecture right. Make sure the site's fast, make sure

it's good for mobile, get your analytics and your Google Search

Console, set up some of the basic things we talked about in

a architecture. And then the next thing is, you need some

content. So before I go out and build backlinks, you've got to

have something for people to link to. And frankly, a lot of

backlinks come from having content. If you create a great

article about a new law in your state, and then you reach out to

a couple of legal bloggers say, Hey, I broke down this new law

that just came out from whatever the. State Supreme Court or

whatever, and this ruling, and we broke it down in a long

article, two, 3000 word article on our website, and then some of

those legal bloggers or government bloggers will link to

your website because you've got a really good explanation of

that new law. So first things first, get the architecture

right, get the site fast, get it mobile friendly, and get a site

and then see his content, and then you can start getting some

backlinks to the website. After that, another question from

Carmen, thank you. How should law firms balance traditional

SEO tactics with the newer AI focused strategies like

optimizing for AI overviews or chatgpt? I talked about it a lot

today, and today, that the simplest thing is answering

questions seems to work in both categories, and frankly, it's

great for consumers. We've been like I said, we've been

answering questions on video, or our clients have been answering

questions on video for many, many years now. And I'll tell

you a great story my friend and client, long term client, John

pankowski tells me all this story. He's told me a couple

times. He says, Jay, you know I love Sundays. I'm like, Why do

you love Sundays? He says, Well, I play softball. And then,

invariably, every Sunday after softball, I checked my phone and

I've got a message, and I call someone back and they say, John,

I was watching some of the videos on your website, and I

know you're the right lawyer for me, and I I've tried to figure

it out, like, what's the secret? What's it with Sundays? I said,

John, why do you always get these great leads on Sundays?

And he said, well, because I'm the only one who takes the leads

on Sundays. My intake team takes the leads Monday through

Saturday, and then I get the leads on Sundays. But the point

here is that answering questions on video, you can get found by

the search engines. Then the person's going to watch a couple

of videos, but the videos are doing a lot of things right.

They're good for AEO ads or engine optimization. You create

a blog with the answer to the question. These are getting

ranked in the AEO search engines, they're getting ranked.

And people also ask on regular Google search they're getting

your website ranked. Oh, and by the way, when people watch the

videos, it's like they're sitting across from you and

they're in your office. And they're saying, What do you John

is a probate trust estate attorney, and they're saying,

Hey, John, my dad's third wife is suing us in court, and we

were in the will, and he's going to go to court, and he's going

to represent these folks in a probate matter. So he's

answering detailed questions about probate and different laws

and different changes in laws. He's done hundreds of these

videos. And a, he's coming up in SEO. B people are watching his

videos and giving him a call on Sundays, Mondays through

Saturday as well. All right, so I think we're almost at time.

We've got two minutes left, so I'll just wrap up. And thank you

all so much for being here, hopefully for those folks

watching sometime in the future, you'll give me a shout out. We'd

love it if you give us a subscription on the YouTube

channel or give us a like on this video, give us the thumbs

up, and same thing if you're listening to the podcast. We

really appreciate if you subscribe and give us a five

star review. And with that, I'll thank everyone so much for being

here. And I look forward to next month's webinar. I think we're

doing the seven hottest trends for law firm marketing, so we'll

see you next month.