If you have been putting serious effort and attention into growing your law firm through search engine marketing strategies, there is a strong chance that you have been watching the growth of AI search with concern. Google’s own AI Mode, as well as other LLM (large language model) tools generate answers from the searches they run in the background and provide them to users directly, so that users who are not highly motivated to check the results for themselves often leave the search window without clicking any links. The way these developments have dominated the conversation about law firm digital marketing strategies for the past year or more has had the unfortunate side effect of overshadowing another important shift that more and more digital marketing professionals are noticing: The rise of voice search for lawyers. Understanding and optimizing for voice search is increasingly vital to online search visibility, especially for capturing the all-important local search activity. If your law firm has not developed a voice search strategy yet, 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 had us all laughing (and cringing) over their often eyebrow-raising outcomes. Developing alongside the gradual adoption of voice-controlled “smart” devices for household use, this improvement in accuracy has allowed users to develop greater confidence in using voice controls for tools beyond telling Alexa to play music, or asking Siri to list local restaurants.
The Technology Conditions the Behavior
Without getting too far “into the weeds” with the topic, it is important to note that the increasing ubiquity of devices that operate by voice command as a matter of course, without the errors that often plagued early voice control models, has had effects on user’s expectations and therefore on their behavior. Academics 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 scholars seem to agree that the reality is usually more complicated, but you don’t have to believe in a one-to-one correlation between any given invention and the specific set of cultural norms that develop around its use to see that most people do adapt their behaviors, to at least some degree, in response to the tools they recognize as available, and the capabilities of those tools that have proven reliable.
How Voice Search Reshapes User Behavior
One area in which we can see the availability of tools structuring search behavior is in the syntax of voice searches compared to typed queries. As several voices in the search engine marketing space have pointed out, the queries users initiate by voice tend to be phrased as questions in ordinary spoken conversation. This “natural language” format differs significantly from the grammatical structure of many typed searches with which we have all become 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 make sure they appear in front of the potential clients looking for related services, is that you likely will not be able to simply use your existing SEO content, built around the long-tail keywords typed into Google, to effectively leverage the capabilities of voice search 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” compared to conventional SEO content, and therefore easier for individuals who visit your law firm website after finding it through voice search to understand.
Often there has been a tension between creating content that is easy for prospective clients to find vs. creating content that will “convert” search appearance into calls or bookings once it’s found. That tension subsides considerably in content optimized for voice search.
Real Change vs. Hype
If you have been reading content about how voice search and LLM answer engines are about to destroy your law firm’s SEO (search engine optimization), or maybe about how they are already destroying it, it’s time to take a deep breath and assess the facts. Just putting the information already available into perspective can go a long way toward helping you develop an updated search engine marketing strategy that is based on data, not hype.
Fact No. 1: Voice Search Is Absolutely a Different Ballgame Compared to Conventional SEO
Conventional SEO puts 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 “crawlability” by search engines. The keywords themselves come from the actual searches run by users of conventional search engines (predominantly but not exclusively Google). Often they have a syntax that looks like what it is: a string of nouns somebody hoped would be related to the kind of thing they were looking for. That rarely, if ever, sounds “out loud” like any way most of us would think to structure a sentence if we were participating in a real conversation with someone we expected to understand.
Fact No. 2: Keywords Aren’t Going Anywhere
While “long-tail” keywords, the ones that look something like child custody Arizona divorce, may not show up the same way in voice search as they do in conventional typed searches, people are still running searches that contain most of the same components. They’re just strung together in a different way, with prepositions and indefinite articles: child custody in an Arizona divorce. They may also show up in whole-sentence questions: What determines child custody in an Arizona divorce? or Who gets child custody in an Arizona divorce?
Fact No. 3: The Way We Identify and Use Keywords Will Probably Change
The paradox created by these developments is that voice search optimization needs to account both for the individual search terms and for multiple questions people might ask with them. Pulling a long-tail keyword like child custody Arizona divorce makes it easy to see several different ways of combining the core components:
- Child custody
- Custody
- Divorce
- Arizona
- Arizona divorce
- Arizona child custody
What this means for voice search content creation is that law firms and digital marketing professionals will need to create content that incorporates many different combinations of shorter keywords. If you can use this content creation as an opportunity to also identify and directly answer more of the questions that people are beginning to ask of LLM answer engines, you have a decent chance to improve your ROI by optimizing for AI and voice search at the same time.
To Optimize for Voice Search, Think “Local” and “Contextual”
Chances are, you will want to work with a legal marketing professional to develop a comprehensive strategy for incorporating voice search optimizations within your overall law firm marketing plan. That said, the two elements you will definitely want to steer by are local search (aka local SEO) and contextual keywords. You want to choose for your voice search targeting keywords that people are likely to use in the same contexts where they are likely to prefer voice search over “traditional” typed methods. Many of these contexts are going to also have a local focus. Targeting that overlap effectively can give your law firm an edge over the competition, and put you in position to appear in front of prospective clients who are actively looking for legal services in your practice area and location.
Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms. Annette authored 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 to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com
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