Law Firm SEO with Jason Hennesey: The Strategy Behind Billion-Dollar Results
Law firm SEO optimizes the legal practice’s website, content, online listing, and other digital presence to help the website rank in SERP and LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc., when a user is searching for legal terms.
Law firm SEO is not everyone's cup of tea. The legal industry is one of the most highly competitive and regulated areas. The reason is extreme market saturation, stringent ethical promotion rules, and Google’s demand for high-level E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Undoubtedly, standing out demands overcoming several core challenges.
In this podcast, Dawood goes deep into how to rank for legal search, optimize traffic into signed cases, and why many law firm SEO strategies fail. This is a practical, experience-based discussion focused on results, not surface-level SEO tactics. We have Jason Hennessey, who has built Hennessey Digital into one of the leading law firm SEO agencies in the country.
He authored Amazon’s bestseller "Law Firm SEO" book and generated over a billion dollars in leads for attorneys, making him the definitive voice on SEO for lawyers. In this episode, he breaks down everything, from local SEO tactics for attorneys to what actually converts on law firm websites to whether law firms can rank inside AI search results.
Our host, Dawood, directs Jason to the exact questions that attorneys, legal firm marketing managers, and law SEO professionals should be doing. If you've been searching for real answers on law firm SEO without the fluff, Dawood gets them from one of the few people who have actually done it at scale.
Topics covered:
- Does SEO actually work for law firms, or is it just a sales pitch?
- Is SEO better than Google Ads for lawyers in the long term?
- What are the best SEO strategies for attorneys starting from zero?
- How do law firms rank in ChatGPT and AI overviews?
For more SEO Tactics, visit us now at https://www.digitalwebsolutions.com/ and let us create a business-custom strategy for you.
In this episode, we discuss:
00:00 - 01:29: Dawood introduces Jason Hennessey and his law firm SEO credentials
01:29 - 02:39: How Jason accidentally built a law firm SEO empire
02:39 - 04:21: Does SEO actually work for law firms, or is it just a pitch?
04:21 - 05:47: SEO vs Google Ads for lawyers: the honest answer
05:47 - 07:33: Best SEO strategies for attorneys starting from zero
07:33 - 09:38: Google Business Profile and local SEO tactics
09:38 - 11:32: Full local SEO strategy for law firms beyond the map pack
11:32 - 13:35: How to find SEO keywords that bring in legal leads
13:35 - 15:15: Highest CPC legal keywords and how to target them organically
15:15 - 17:02: Do FAQ pages still help law firm SEO?
17:02 - 19:07: Schema markup for attorneys: the competitive advantage nobody uses
19:07 - 21:23: Are backlinks still important for law firm websites?
21:23 - 23:51: AI content and law firm SEO: where Jason draws the line
23:51 - 26:27: Getting traffic but no leads? What is broken on your law firm website
26:27 - 28:59: How to measure SEO ROI for law firms beyond rankings
28:59 - 31:29: Can law firms rank in ChatGPT and AI overviews?
31:29 - 33:37: The one thing most attorneys still get wrong about Google rankings
️ Hosted by Dawood Bukhari — helping law marketing agencies get real, actionable strategies and results across businesses: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawoodbukhari/
Subscribe for more law firm and other SEO strategies: https://bit.ly/44fNtyW
Connect with Jason Hennessey
Jason's book "Law Firm SEO" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Law-Firm-SEO-Exposing-Algorithm/dp/1544519370
Hennessey Digital: https://hennessey.com/
Jason Hennessey’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhennessey/
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Full Episode Transcript - Jason Hennessey Law Firm SEO
Dawood Bukhari (00:00) If you ever typed law firm SEO into Google, there's a good chance you have already come across today's guesswork. Whether you knew it or not, Jason Hennessy has been reverse engineering the Google algorithm since 2001, built Hennessy Digital into one of the leading law firm SEO agencies in the country, and literally wrote the book on it. His Amazon bestseller is called Law Firm SEO.
His agency has generated over a billion dollars in leads and verdicts for attorneys, and he has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. as one of the foremost authorities on SEO for lawyers. Today, we are going deep on everything from local SEO tactics for attorneys to what is actually converting on law firm websites, to whether law firms can rank inside AI search results.
Jason Hennessy, welcome to the show.
Jason Hennessey (00:59) Thank you so much, man. What a great introduction. I appreciate it. It's funny how my name is synonymous with law firm SEO. So it's great to be here.
Dawood Bukhari (01:08) Jason, you have been studying and practicing SEO for law firms since two thousand one and literally wrote the book called Law Firm SEO. What was the moment you realized the legal industry needed a dedicated law firm SEO strategy and nobody was doing it properly?
Jason Hennessey (01:29) Yeah, so my experience comes from working in very competitive niches. I worked in online gambling for a while, which is very competitive. And so I accidentally stumbled into this field. I got asked to speak to a group of lawyers. At the time, they were a bunch of DUI lawyers. And so I just saw that the space didn't really have anybody that specialized in that vertical. And so I took a lot of the best practices that I used to compete in other industries and I got my first lawyer client and I was able to make it a great case study.
And then they introduced me to other lawyer friends and I made those great case studies. And next thing you know, I was building an agency that focused on working with, you know, SEO for lawyers. And so, and then since then, you know, now two decades later, you know, we've built a pretty amazing agency that services some of the biggest law firms in the country now.
Dawood Bukhari (02:33) Congratulations, Jason, you are doing an amazing job when it comes to law firm SEO.
Jason Hennessey (02:38) Thank you, thank you.
Dawood Bukhari (02:39) Jason, does SEO actually work for law firms or is it something that sounds good in a pitch deck but doesn't move the needle for attorneys trying to get more cases?
Jason Hennessey (02:51) Yeah, a lot of times, lawyers might be jaded because maybe they're working with another agency that promised the world and then just for whatever reason couldn't deliver.
Sometimes it might be that the agencies were not incompetent. Maybe they just didn't have the right budget. Sometimes maybe they just didn't have the right strategy. Maybe they just weren't good at scaling their agency and putting systems and processes in place. This stuff is really hard. I always like to say SEO is the easy part. I think scaling SEO is the hard part. So does it work? Absolutely, it works. And we've proven time and time again, I think you mentioned that we've generated over a billion dollars in case results for our clients over the past two decades. So yes, we definitely helped some of our law firms that we work with deposit some pretty big checks into their firms. But the real benefit is not so much like we're making lawyers wealthy, it's really we're connecting the dots where there's people that were affected, their lives were impacted as a result of negligence. Maybe it was a truck driver that fell asleep at the wheel that crashed into a family and killed a loved one. You know what I mean? Like that's really where the meaningful impact comes in is like we serve as the connection or the bridge to helping those families that are in need with competent lawyers that could help them.
Dawood Bukhari (04:21) When lawyers come to you weighing up SEO versus Google Ads for lawyers, what is the honest answer? Is SEO better than Google Ads for law firms long term or does it depend on the practice area?
Jason Hennessey (04:26) Yeah.
You know what? I don't think it's really an either or question. And that's what I would go back to our client. In some cases, we might tell the client that it makes more sense to experiment with pay-per-click initially, just because they need to bring in revenue to their firm right away. Right. And they might not have the luxury of waiting eight, nine months to start making the phone ring with a good SEO strategy if they're just kind of getting started. Other times it might be, you know, a law firm that's been established, that's been doing SEO for years and maybe they tried PPC and it just didn't work. You know, we'll come in and say, Hey, let's try a different strategy. PPC is one of those vehicles that if the economics makes sense after you do a strategy for, you know, 60, 90, 120 days, and you could actually make the phone ring and bring in leads at a good average cost per lead that's comfortable and then bring in signed cases at a good average cost per case that makes sense economically for your firm, then why not continue to feed that channel, right? Get as much inventory that you can from that channel given the budget that you have.
Dawood Bukhari (05:47) If a personal injury firm came to you with zero law firm SEO in place, what are the best SEO strategies for attorneys you would prioritize first and are those strategies different depending on the practice area?
Jason Hennessey (06:03) Yeah, I think the strategies for the most part are fundamentally the same regardless of practice area. If you're a bankruptcy lawyer, a personal injury lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer.
Some industries are just a little bit more competitive, right? And so, you know, everything is kind of predicated upon who you're competing against, how long they've been doing SEO, the strategies and techniques that they've been using, you know, good SEO strategists, you know, a, we have a good fundamental strategy that we roll out Hennessy digital, but that certainly might change. If we go in and reverse engineer, the top three websites that are ranking in their market. But it all comes down to making sure that we manage expectations properly. I'm big on my personal brand and my personal reputation. so I never want to mismanage expectations if somebody gets introduced to me from somebody else that might be a trusted colleague, and they say, hey, this is my buddy in LA. He's looking for help with SEO.
I just per month, you know what I mean? Like, sure, I could easily say yes, but I would be mismanaging these expectations and putting my reputation on the line. So as long as we manage the expectations upfront with every single client and we say yes or no, depending on their circumstances, generally speaking, we can help the firms that reach out to us.
Dawood Bukhari (07:33) How important is Google Business Profile for lawyers and what are the best local SEO tactics for attorneys that most firms are leaving on the table?
Jason Hennessey (07:44) Yeah, I think it's so crucial. Like local SEO has been crucial since Google first rolled out. I remember, I think it was like the six pack or seven pack way back in the day. You know, it's like a three-pack. But it all comes down to, you know, just doing things that real businesses should be doing, right? You know, servicing your clients, answering the phone.
You know, getting people to leave positive reviews. If somebody leaves a negative review, like try to go solve the problem and see if you can get that review removed, you know, by solving the problem, give them their money back. I mean like whatever you can do there. If you seem like it's somebody else that wasn't a client that is leaving a negative review, go in and comment on that and say, we don't really see you in our records here. But I think it comes down to consistency on the web. So if you do have a Google My Business listing or profile, making sure that your name, address, and phone number is consistent on your website, on your Google Business page you know, throughout the entire web on your better business bureau profile on your avo profile on your just your profile, right. and then just kind of continuing, to, to just perfect that, you know, and make sure that you're just doing things that businesses are doing and providing good services. And at the end of the day, that's the stuff that will shine. I mean, there's probably like restaurants throughout the country that don't really have a Google local strategy, right. But just the experience that people get at the restaurant and the food that they get, you know, and the taste. Like just people are going in and just leaving constant reviews and people are traveling, clicking driving directions. And you know what I mean? And that's what makes that restaurant shine, right? So it's no different in law.
Dawood Bukhari (09:38) Beyond the map pack, how do lawyers get more local clients from Google? What does the full local SEO strategy for a law firm look like when it's working properly?
Jason Hennessey (09:49) Yeah, so for us, I mean, we have a strategy that we've been executing for many decades. And so we look at our clients and we look at what are all their service areas, their practice areas, if you will. Right. And then from there, then we also look at, we zoom out and we say, great, you're in Los Angeles. Perfect. And you do slip and fall, you do car accident, you do dog bite, you do construction accident. Right. Maybe there's 20 practice areas that they're focused on and they're in Los Angeles where most SEO agencies start and stop is they will basically write a Los Angeles car accident lawyer page, a Los Angeles slip and fall lawyer page, a Los Angeles construction accident lawyer page. And that's it. The problem is, is the way in which the Google algorithm works is that if somebody does that search and they don't put in what is referred to as a geo modifier, like Los Angeles car accident lawyer, if somebody does a search for car accident lawyer, and let's just say they are in Santa Clarita, California, typically what's going to happen is Google is gonna serve up content that's optimized for Santa Clarita car accident lawyer, right? And so that all has to be part of your strategy, right? You need to have a page that's optimized for Santa Clarita car accident lawyer, and then you need to have a page that's optimized for Los Angeles car accident lawyer. And we'll map all of that out, you know, with our clients on an Excel spreadsheet before we even begin writing any content. then there's a whole detailed plan on how we structure it and navigation and dropdowns and stuff sidebars, that's really where like the secret sauce is, you know, but you got to have a plan to compete locally like that.
Dawood Bukhari (11:32) Walk us through how lawyers find SEO keywords that actually matter and all of the keywords that bring in legal leads, which ones have consistently delivered the best results for your clients.
Jason Hennessey (11:47) Yeah, that's the beauty about working with an agency that has been working in this specific niche for so long, right? It's like we have access to so much data, right? So like we know, you know, the keywords that convert, like we see precisely what was that keyword that somebody typed in in Dallas, Texas that was able to generate this $7 million case for this client, right? So like, you know, if we work with another firm in Connecticut that also does trucking accidents, guess we're going to start our focus, right? You know, so that's one of the benefits of working with an agency.
You can look for keywords all over the place. you know what I mean? There's multiple tools that you can use. You can reverse engineer competitors and see like what content do they have that's bringing in traffic? You know, you could also build out strategies where you go after keywords that don't have any search volume or don't have any competition. You know, a good example of that is we were working with a firm in South Florida, which is our one of the most competitive markets in the country. And so they could not compete with the big firms there like the Morgan and Morgan's of the world. So what we did was we built out a campaign where we building out pages based on specific cities and stores. And so, you know, might be like, did you get injured at Target in Fort Lauderdale, comma, can you sue? Did you get injured at Walmart, you know, in Fort Lauderdale? Can you sue, right?
These are queries for the most part that don't have any search volume. But at the same time, they probably don't have a lot of competition either. And so one of the clients that we did this for started generating a lot of phone calls and a lot of leads and started making money as a result of that strategy.
Dawood Bukhari (13:35) What are the highest CPC legal keywords right now? And does targeting those high value legal search terms in your law firm SEO campaign actually translate to better organic results?
Jason Hennessey (13:49) Yeah, you know, I've seen keywords that are over $1,000 per click, you know, when you start to get into like me so Thile, I'm a lawyer, birth injury lawyer, truck accident lawyer, any of those keywords that you know, there could be a $10 million case at the end of that. You've got these big firms that will just bid aggressively on those, right? And so should you be going after those keywords? Absolutely. But you come up with a strategy that works.
You might want to localize it, right? So you might want to have truck accident lawyer pages for all of the small cities around town. You might want to build out topical authority on a birth injury where you have a birth injury page that's optimized for Dallas birth injury lawyer. But then you really kind of go out and you answer every single question that anybody has ever asked about birth injuries, right? And you kind of map it so that you're building out that topical authority. Sometimes you might want to go in and listen to phone calls, right? Where you signed a birth injury case and just go listen to the questions that people are asking on that phone call, right? And that might actually give you interesting content that you can write about as well, right? So those are the things that we try to do at Hennessy Digital when we're working with clients in very competitive markets.
Dawood Bukhari (15:15) Do FAQ pages help law firm SEO or is that a tactic that's lost its edge and attorneys building content strategies should be putting their energy elsewhere?
Jason Hennessey (15:27) Yeah, I think FAQ pages definitely serve a purpose in any strategy if you are trying to compete in very competitive industries like legal. Typically an FAQ for the most part is usually top of funnel content. So like if you are a DUI lawyer, you know, a good FAQ might be, you know, how many points, you know, can you get on your record if you're arrested for a DUI, right? A lot of people might be searching for that top of the funnel. Maybe somebody's doing research on that and you get a link as a result of it. Maybe somebody got a DUI and you're looking for a DUI lawyer and then they start to kind of go down to the more of the bottom of the funnel. But that's the kind of content that sets you up to be a thought leader in your space. And so you certainly do want to take some of that content and then write about it, maybe create videos about that type of content, because that is what will drive traffic to the website. Traffic is also a variable. It's a ranking variable as well. It's not just a matter of ranking for super competitive terms that have low search volume, sometimes you want to be ranking for keywords that have higher search volume as well. Because that's the whole process to also generate links to your website, which boost the popularity. So the short answer is yes. I think FAQs are an important part of the strategy.
Dawood Bukhari (17:02) What schema markup works best for attorneys and how big a ranking advantage does proper legal schema on a law firm website actually create?
Jason Hennessey (17:13) Yeah, so for one.
If you're watching this video and you don't even know what schema is, basically that's markup language that goes on a website. It goes within the source code of a website. So it's not something that people visually can see, but it's there to serve a purpose, right? It's there to create entity association with search engines and large language models so that they can understand like how a page is marked up like entities, right? So you can basically come in and you might have a schema that's specifically about, you know, maybe the founder of the firm, right? So from there, you can actually make the connection of this is the founder. This is where he went to college. This is all of his accolades, right? He's married to this person, right? You can literally kind of go in. I always like to say, you know, you could spend more time like writing schema for a website, than you do actually building the website, right? I mean, you can go like deep, deep, deep layer, layer, layer, right? But I think the more that you do that, the easier it is for Google and all of these large language models to kind of understand the context of the page and put together the entity association. So in most cases, like if I ever like study like a website, most cases, is law firms are using like the standard plugin, right? That is like very basic, like 101 schema. You can check the box that you actually have schema where we like to take it as like to the nth degree. You know what I mean? We go in and like, we're actually adding video schema, FAQ schema, you know, attorney schema, local, you name it, right? There's so many different schemas that you can add to a website and a strategy, but that's what's needed to have a competitive advantage in this market.
Dawood Bukhari (19:07) Are backlinks still important for law websites and what does an effective link building strategy for law firms look like today versus five years ago?
Jason Hennessey (19:18) Yeah, since I have been doing SEO dating back to 2001, you know popularity signals by way of links have forever been one of the most impactful things that law firms should be doing or just businesses in general should be doing, right? Because at the end of the day, Google is just an algorithm, right? And so there's so many people that are publishing an abundance of content, especially now in the day and age of AI, right? It's a lot easier to do that. How does Google truly understand the difference between one page versus another page, right? And so why should they rank them higher, like in Google, or why should ChatGPT rank it higher, right? And so they look at third party signals, and so those signals come in by way of links, right? And so if there's one law firm that is a badass trial lawyer, right? And so they've got a Better Business Bureau link, and then there's another lawyer that's just getting started, right? And they got a Better Business Bureau link. Great. All things are equal. They both got links, right, from the Better Business Bureau. But because this other lawyer who's a badass trial lawyer, you know, has been getting $5 million cases and has represented celebrities and has been featured in CNN and has been featured in Time Magazine and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times and they go and speak at all the conferences and they speak at all of the the associations and other lawyers like put so much respect into this lawyer and they all linked to him too right there's no chance that this one guy over here that has the one better business bureau link is going to compete with this one, right? And it's for all the right reasons, right? They should be ranking higher, right? Because they deserve that accolades, right? So that's the best way to kind of explain it. And so us as SEOs, our job is to kind of come in and reverse engineer the strategies of competition. That's one piece, but also coaching our clients to go out and figure out ways that they can get all of those other links naturally.
Dawood Bukhari (21:23) There's a lot of debate right now about whether AI content hurt law firm SEO. Where do you stand on that and what is the right way for attorneys to use AI in their content strategy without tanking their rankings?
Jason Hennessey (21:39) Yeah. I think you have to be very careful because I mean, there's definitely an easy button now, right? I mean, you can go to ChatGPT and you can say, Hey, you know, write me 50 articles about the topic of car accidents, right? And it'll spit that out within seconds. And then you could take that content and you could just immediately like publish it to your website. And will that work?
Potentially, I'm not saying it might not work, Would I build my law firm on that? Probably not. I think when people come to a website, they want to know about your experience. They want to know about your stories, right? They want it to be more custom to you, right? So while we at Hennessy Digital certainly use a lot of AI to enable and to be more efficient with the way in which we write content,
You know, there's also other things that are important, right? We, every single client has like a profile and a bio and things that they should say and not say. And, you know, and then we have a whole editing process that we kind of go through and there's very specific ways in which we kind of publish the content and link the content internally. so I would say, and then the other piece is, you know, making sure that it doesn't look like AI content too, right? So there's different tools that you can use that will show you whether or not these large language models or Google see it as 98 % AI. And if that's the case, then you probably don't want to publish it as is. You probably want to go in and rewrite the page a bit so that it doesn't show up in some of those different tools as well. And it's no different than college now. People are using AI to write essays in college, but the teachers have tools to kind to determine whether or not that's AI and they'll probably fail the class if they use too much AI, right? But if a sophisticated student used AI to come up with like the structure of the page and then put their own thoughts and creativity in there, then they should be fine, right? So it's no different with your content strategy on your law firm website.
Dawood Bukhari (23:51) That's a great analogy.
Jason, a law firm is getting traffic, but no leads from their website. What is usually broken and what converts best on a law firm website?
Jason Hennessey (24:02) Yeah, there's so many different things that could be happening. For one, I would make sure that the phone is going to the right location. you know what I mean? Sometimes you've seen it where there's an old phone number, right? And nobody went to check it might be that the phone number is dead. You know, sometimes people are using call tracking tools and for whatever reason, a tracking number just dies. Right. And nobody understands that. Like we've got tools within our company that goes out and test this stuff, like on a daily basis for our clients. Right. Because we've, we've encountered these problems before. Right. And we needed to come up with fixes for it. could it be that the form submission, is broken, right? You know, maybe if people are trying to fill out the form submission. And for whatever reason, it's giving an error and nobody has tested that. That's another thing that we do at Hennessy Digital is we test all of our forms on a regular basis. Sometimes you might be getting a lot of traffic. For example, we inherited a client that was based in Las Vegas and their most popular page on their website was, it legal to own a pet tiger in Las Vegas?
You know, it was generating all this traffic and we had to figure out like, do we really want this traffic? Is it helping or is it hurting us? You know? And so we came to the consensus that it's not relevant. You know I mean? Like anybody that's doing that search is not going to hire a personal injury lawyer. So, you know, while it's going to hurt, right? Because their traffic is going to drop a lot, right? But you know, for the right reasoning. So sometimes it comes down to like just studying the content that you have on the website and legacy content that's been published for years and pruning some of that.
And then the third piece is just, sometimes you just might want to go in and look at, you know, the website from a conversion rate optimization perspective, right? Maybe you need more CTAs, you know, maybe you put a phone number that's static at the top. Maybe the phone number is hidden. Maybe it's on the contact us page, really small at the bottom, you know, so there's so many different things that we would look at and audit if we encountered a client that was having that problem.
Dawood Bukhari (26:27) How do law firms measure SEO ROI properly? What are the metrics that actually matter when you are reporting on a law firm SEO campaign beyond just rankings and traffic?
Jason Hennessey (26:40) Yeah. So most SEO agencies, you know, they take great pride and they geek over, you know, things like, you know, rankings, you know, and keywords. And it's like, great news. You know, we moved three positions, you know, we're now at the bottom of page one for this keyword, right? And we started out at page like 47, right? So it's like huge high fives across the board, right?
But at the end of the day, think all of that, right, traffic, bounce rates, all of that stuff, right, the stuff that we all geek over, the things that we measure as agencies, that's all a means to an end, right? At the end of the day, the thing that really matters to a law firm is are they signing more clients, right? So what we try to do is we try to look at all of the different conversions that are coming in with a website, we track phone calls, right? And so we're trying to, you know, increase the number of leads to the website while lowering the cost per lead, right? So as we publish more content on a website, then they get more leads, right? But if they're still paying us the same amount of money every month after a year, right? The cost per lead has come down a lot, right? And then that lead then goes through their intake process and it becomes a signed case, right? And so then it's like, okay, great. How many leads are we getting? What is the average cost per lead? How many signed cases did we get this month? And what is the average cost per signed case, right? And I think over time, as you continue to invest in SEO, good SEO, your average cost per lead and your average cost per signed case, generally speaking, will go down, right?
There's been times where it goes down, right? But then it kind of goes back up a little bit, then it goes down, right? And that's sometimes it's just because the market is getting more competitive, right? And some of your competitors who weren't doing SEO are now doing SEO and they're spending a lot of money, right? And so there's just more competition. But at the end of the day, the true measurement of ROI for a law firm is, you know, how many signed cases are you getting as a result of your investment in SEO?
Dawood Bukhari (28:59) Right. Can law firms rank in Chat GPT answers and AI overviews? And what does law firm SEO for AI search actually look like as a strategy in 2026?
Jason Hennessey (29:13) Yeah, so there are people that have been saying SEO is dead for years.
Is SEO dead? Not as far as I see. think SEO serves as the baseline foundation, you know, to account for about 70 % of what a lot of these large language models look for, right? In order to pre-populate law firms when people are either doing searches or prompts within different large language models, right? And so for one, the content that you publish on your website, right? That is an SEO strategy historically, right? And that is because when we publish content on a website, we know that Google is going to crawl that content and then index that content and then rank that content. And then people come to the website, right? Well, guess what?
You know, there's more than one Google, right? There's now ChatGPT and there's Claude and there's perplexity and there's Gemini, right? And they're all going out and getting the same information the same way that Google gets it. And then they're just basically populating it within their own indexes. Right. Um, and so content serves as the foundation of, of, you know, now AI or GDO or whatever you want to call it. Now, don't get me wrong. Like I said, that accounts for 70%. You know, there's other things that are taken into consideration. For example, the sentiment and the reputation of the firm is very important. like where Yelp might not have impacted law firms from ranking high on Google, right? Now, like if you've got a lot of bad Yelp reviews or if you've got a lot of bad Glassdoor reviews or if you've got a lot of bad Better Business Bureau reviews, right? Those things are taken into consideration more favorably, right, in the ChatGPT algorithms, right? So you have to like look at your sentiment of your firm and it makes sense, right? Because ChatGPT can't get it wrong, right? It's not like they're giving you an option and you just click from a smorgasbord, right, a menu. They're telling you, right, if you type in like who are the best lawyers for a trucking case, they're telling you specifically these are the seven and why, right? So they can't get it.
Dawood Bukhari (31:29) Jason, you have built a successful law firm SEO agency, written the definitive book on SEO for lawyers, and generated over a billion dollars in leads for law firms. What is the one thing most attorneys still get wrong about how Google ranks law firm websites?
Jason Hennessey (31:51) Yeah, I think it comes down to A, having just the right strategy, right? I think that is the key. And then also making sure that the law firm realizes that it's a 50-50 partnership, right? There's only so much that the agency can do. The best agency in the world can only do so much, right?
If your law firm is just getting a bunch of bad reviews, right, and not responding to them, or if your agency is telling you that your competitors just got these seven links and we recommend that we also should maybe consider getting a link here or getting this link or paying to be on this directory and they're saying, no, well, guess what? We're not going to be as successful as you envision just because could lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, right? And so I think, A, finding an agency to work with that has a proven strategy that has worked in very competitive markets, and then B, either you showing up to the calls and being an active participant in the relationship and in strategy, or if not, putting somebody else in place at your law firm that will serve as that resource to work with the agency and to do all of the action items that are going to result in better result, you know, in better activity.
Dawood Bukhari (33:24) Jason, thank you so much for sharing your insights about law firm SEO, legal SEO, and how attorneys can benefit. Thank you so much.
Jason Hennessey (33:34) Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
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