If you have put serious effort and attention into growing your law firm through search engine marketing strategies, chances are you have watched the growth of AI search with concern. Google’s AI mode, as well as other LLM (large language model) tools, generate answers from the searches they perform in the background and provide them directly to users, so users who are not very motivated to check the results for themselves often leave the search window without clicking on any links. The way these developments have dominated the debate over law firm digital marketing strategies over the past year or more has had the unfortunate side effect of overshadowing another important change that more and more digital marketing professionals are noticing: the rise of voice search for lawyers. Understanding and optimizing voice search is increasingly vital for online search visibility, especially for capturing the all-important local search activity. If your law firm hasn’t yet developed a voice search strategy, there’s a good chance you’re already losing clients.
How is voice search changing the law firm marketing landscape?
The accuracy with which digital programs interpret voice input has increased dramatically since the first talk-to-text programs made us all laugh (and cringe) at their often breathtaking results. Growing alongside the gradual adoption of voice-controlled “smart” devices for home use, this improvement in accuracy has allowed users to develop greater confidence in using voice commands for tools beyond telling Alexa to play music or asking Siri to list local restaurants.
Technology conditions behavior
Without going too far into the subject, it is important to note that the increasing ubiquity of devices operating naturally through voice control, without the errors that often plagued early voice control models, has had effects on user expectations and therefore their behavior. Scholars who study the intersection of culture and technology call the idea that the availability of a technology directly precipitates the emergence of specific cultural norms technological determinism. Most researchers seem to agree that reality is generally more complex, but one need not believe in a direct correlation between a given invention and the specific set of cultural norms that develop around its use to see that most people adapt their behaviors, at least to some extent, in response to the tools they recognize as available, and the capabilities of those tools that have proven reliable.
How voice search is reshaping user behavior
One area where we can see the availability of tools structuring search behavior is in the syntax of voice searches versus typed queries. As several voices in the search engine marketing field have pointed out, the queries that users voice tend to be phrased like questions in ordinary spoken conversation. This “natural language” format differs significantly from the grammatical structure of many typed searches with which we are all familiar.
Implications for Law Firm Digital Marketing Strategy
The bad news, for law firms looking to capitalize on the growing popularity of voice search to ensure they appear in front of potential clients searching for related services, is that you likely won’t be able to simply use your existing SEO content, built around long-tail keywords entered into Google, to effectively leverage voice search capabilities in your law firm’s digital marketing strategy. The good news is that the content you create to optimize for voice search will likely be more “readable” than conventional SEO content, and therefore easier to understand for people who visit your law firm’s website after finding it through voice search.
There has often been a tension between creating content that is easy for potential customers to find and creating content that will “convert” search appearances into calls or bookings once found. This tension is significantly eased in content optimized for voice search.
Real change versus hype
If you’ve been reading content about how voice search and LLM response engines are about to destroy your law firm’s SEO (search engine optimization), or maybe how they’re already destroying it, it’s time to take a deep breath and evaluate the facts. Simply putting the information already available into perspective can go a long way in helping you develop an up-to-date search engine marketing strategy that is based on data, not hype.
Fact #1: Voice Search is an Absolutely Different Ball Game From Conventional SEO
Conventional SEO places a lot of emphasis on identifying “long tail” keywords, testing them, and then developing a content strategy that creates articles around those keywords and places those articles on web pages optimized for “crawling” by search engines. The keywords themselves come from actual searches carried out by users of conventional search engines (primarily but not exclusively Google). Often, they have syntax that looks like what it is: a string of names that someone hoped would be related to the kind of thing they were looking for. It rarely, if ever, sounds “out loud” like most of us would think of structuring a sentence if we were participating in a real conversation with someone we expected to understand.
Fact #2: Keywords don’t lead anywhere
While “long tail” keywords, those that look like child custody divorce in Arizonamay not appear the same way in voice search as in conventional typed searches, users still perform searches that contain most of the same components. They are simply strung together in a different way, with prepositions and indefinite articles: custody of children during a divorce in Arizona. They can also appear in questions comprising entire sentences: What determines child custody in an Arizona divorce? Or Who gets custody of children in an Arizona divorce?
Fact #3: How We Identify and Use Keywords Will Likely Change
The paradox created by these developments is that voice search optimization must take into account both individual search terms and the multiple questions people might ask with them. Extract a long tail keyword like child custody divorce in Arizona makes it easy to see several different ways to combine the main components:
- Child care
- Police custody
- Divorce
- Arizona
- Divorce in Arizona
- Child Care in Arizona
What this means for creating voice search content is that law firms and digital marketers will need to create content incorporating many different combinations of shorter keywords. If you can use this content creation as an opportunity to directly identify and answer more of the questions people are starting to ask LLM answer engines, you have a decent chance of improving your ROI by optimizing for AI and voice search simultaneously.
To optimize voice search, think “local” and “contextual”
Chances are you’ll want to work with a legal marketing professional to develop a comprehensive strategy for integrating voice search optimizations into your law firm’s overall marketing plan. That said, the two things you’ll definitely want to focus on are local search (i.e. local SEO) and contextual keywords. You want to choose targeting keywords for your voice search that people are likely to use in the same contexts where they are likely to prefer voice search to “traditional” typed methods. Many of these contexts will also have a local dimension. Effectively targeting these overlaps can give your law firm an edge over the competition and put you in a position to get in front of potential clients who are actively seeking legal services in your practice area and location.
Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the founder and CEO of Feather of lawa legal marketing concierge agency for law firms. Annette is the author of the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals how to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought-after speaker for bar associations, legal associations and marketing conferences, Annette provides legal marketing information along with an entertaining twist. Annette was doing professional theater and comedy, which isn’t that different from the legal field if we’re all honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly by email to (email protected)
