Backlinks, Brand Mentions, and the Death of Traditional SEO with David Arato

Jared Correia (00:00):
Hello everybody. We’ve got a show that promises to be at least mildly interesting for your listening, watching, enjoyment. I’m your host, Jared Correia. For the monologue, I’m talking about how law firms can leverage outside marketing vendors to allow their attorneys to be personally authentic in certain marketing categories. In the interview, it’s David Arato of Lexicon Legal Marketing. In the counter program, David returns to walk me through shit call rodents say. Now, let’s talk about the nature of authentic marketing and why it’s important for every individual lawyer, regardless of firm size. Newsflash, lawyers are busy. Thank you for listening to this podcast, by the way. And about the only thing they have tolerance for with respect to being busy is when it comes to substantive legal work. Everything else is prelude. But that prelude is essentially important, especially when one considers that the prelude fuels everything else that a traditional lawyer wants to do.

(01:06):
Yes, it’s true. Without effective marketing, law firms cannot acquire the clients for whom they want to perform professional services. Your good work is not nearly enough. Of course, the most effective law firm marketing is delivered by lawyers themselves. So the question is how attorneys can engage law firm marketing while also focusing on the primary firm driver of hitting billable hour marks to keep the whole large machine chugging along. There are three things individual lawyers can do to help support law firm marketing efforts that will in turn supplement and support traditional marketing and networking efforts that most partners and associates still focus on for driving clients. First, select primary content programs. Law firms and lawyers usually take a broad approach to marketing. They try to do everything. In a solo or small law firm, you may have to make do with that strategy and try to make the most of it because there is no large group of content producers to rely on for segmenting efforts.

(02:12):
In other words, you might have to pick and choose where you publish. But in mid-sized and large law firms, lawyers can be marketing specialists and there are enough of those marketing specialists to cover all the bases, read, platforms. Vendors can manage the overall marketing approach for the business, i.e. Marketing in the law firm, and individual lawyers can create their own brands in essence. And that’s the main advantage of marshaling broad and specific marketing forces together. One lawyer can focus on maintaining a blog. Another can focus on recording videos. One can be very active on TikTok. Another can be very down with LinkedIn. If it’s a big enough firm, lawyers can even manage those specialty actions in groups. The ability to sit different lawyers on different content production genres and different social media services can substantially advance a content marketing campaign, supplementing those traditional networking approaches that bigger law firm lawyers have always relied upon and allow for medium to large firms to truly take advantage of their strength and numbers for ramping up client intake.

(03:24):
Niches work in law practice generally. It stands to reason that niches work when it comes to content marketing as well. And for those sole and small firms brave enough to hire digital marketing services, those individual or small group attorneys can do much the same things in terms of specializing. Two, carve out dedicated time pockets for marketing. Nobody wants to feel stretched thin. And prioritizing time blocks and sticking to your decisions about how you will spend your time is a great way to get done what you need to get done without becoming overwhelmed so long as you don’t get way laid. That works too for finding time to effectively market your law firm. If you’re doing it right, and especially if you’re part of a collective effort, finding time to market your practice should take far less time than actually performing the substantive work your clients bring in.

(04:16):
The trick is to be hyper-focused on what you do. And that means eliminating distractions during those time blocks you select. So set aside one hour power hours, which can take place before work hours, after work hours, or over the weekend, and just push through your marketing tasks. Grind. You may not even need much more time than that. Then you can get on with the rest of your work life. Three, be as efficient as possible in your marketing efforts. As I just alluded to, a close cousin of making time to market is being efficient during the time that you do make. If your task is to write an article or a blog post, record a video, or prepare a presentation, turn off your phone or the notifications. Disconnect from the internet. Abandon your family for a little while. Turn off the television or streaming service and just knock it out.

(05:11):
Get into that flow state. Well, maybe keep the internet on to get AI to handle a first draft for you, but don’t be posting AI slop. That’s about as inauthentic as you can get with respect to marketing yourself. In the same way that you would review any AI output that’s related to substantive law, you should also review AI output for your marketing. If you’re promoting yourself via social media, you can also utilize a posting service like Buffer or Vista Social and schedule your posts out into the future on a regular recurring basis so that there’s no need for you to log in regularly and slip down any time-killing rabbit holes. Many programs even have native features that allow you to schedule posts. In this way, you can also limit the time you spend on social media engagement. You can schedule for that too, by the way, while still effectively staying top of mind with your connections and followers.

(06:08):
Content marketing is still an essential tool for modern law firms, maybe even more so in an AI-driven search environment. But the best type of content comes from the lawyers themselves, not content marketing services, because that lawyer forward content is of the type that best resonates with consumers. To be sure, no one understands their own practices better than the lawyers who manage them. And the larger law firm, the more significant advantage exists in producing such content simply by dent of the fact that they have more lawyers and more money to spend on supporting vendors. However, these larger law firms can only maximize that advantage by creating thoughtful and efficient ways to aggregate the efforts of those individual content producers. In other words, everything works together better if everyone works together and pulls their own way. But that’s a management level that many law firms never even get to.

(07:04):
Next up, it’s David Arato of Lexicon Legal Content, with whom we’ll talk about how your authentic content can be molded for the modern era of web search via AEO. Stick around. We’ve got your AI overview right here. Well, I’ve effectively run out of things to say, which is awkward because this is a podcast. So I’m just going to learn to play the cello. That

David Arato (07:34):
Should be

Jared Correia (07:34):
Pretty easy, right? I’m sure it won’t take long. Hey, maybe our next guest can help. It’s David Arato, founder and CEO of Lexicon Legal Content. David, welcome to the show. You are actually a cellist. Is that

David Arato (07:46):
Correct?

Jared Correia (07:47):
Yeah.

David Arato (07:47):
Thanks for having me. Yes, I did play cello for money at one point in my life.

Jared Correia (07:52):
You don’t play cello for free? You got to get paid for that shit.

David Arato (07:56):
These days it’s free. No one wants to pay me anymore. No, I’m kidding. I did play professionally for a while.

Jared Correia (08:02):
Is it hard to learn? I’m not a very musical person at all. I couldn’t play an instrument to save my life. That’s such a difficult – Is it difficult to do?

David Arato (08:12):
I would say yes. I mean, I started playing when I was five years old. So this is a. I can’t go back and think about what it was like when I was seven. It is an instrument that has no frets and is physically difficult to play. So I think adults. If you start after 14, 15 years old, there’s a cap as to how good you can get at it.

Jared Correia (08:41):
I feel like it’s pretty bad if I’m thinking about my ability to play a cello that I don’t know what a fret is. So maybe we could start there.

David Arato (08:51):
Picture a guitar in your mind. I don’t think it’s

Jared Correia (08:53):
Going to work out.

David Arato (08:54):
Picture a guitar in your mind. It has little bars on the fingerboard. Those are the frets. So you don’t have to be within millimeters – Still struggling. Okay. All right. All right. Let’s just not do it then.

Jared Correia (09:06):
Let’s do this. Let’s talk about your business. Let’s

David Arato (09:08):
Do it. You

Jared Correia (09:09):
Run Lexicon Legal Content. Tell me what that’s about. What’s going on over there?

David Arato (09:15):
We are a legal content marketing agency that works with law firms and marketing agencies with law firm clients as a white label partner. And we create written content that is intended and often does, mostly does, increase our client’s visibility in both traditional search engine results. So like a Google search. And now increasingly we’re focused on AI visibility. So in the Google AI overviews and in the LOM platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Jared Correia (09:54):
AI. I’ve

David Arato (09:55):
Heard of that. Yeah, it’s a thing.

Jared Correia (09:58):
Okay. So you’ve got a content business.

David Arato (10:01):
Yep.

Jared Correia (10:02):
When AI starts rolling out, are you like, “Fuck, we’re toast.”

David Arato (10:05):
100%. Are you

Jared Correia (10:06):
Like, “We can figure this out. We can do it.” Oh, I

David Arato (10:09):
Looked at it. Maybe it’s both. I don’t practice and I’m not licensed. And I looked at my wife and I was like, “Shit, I got to go take the Colorado bar because we’re fucked.” I was like, “This is done.” I

Jared Correia (10:24):
Have to be a lawyer.

David Arato (10:25):
Yeah, that’s right. Time to go pump out first time DUI recommendation cases for 9.99. I don’t know, whatever it is. No, luckily that didn’t happen because I’ve got so much inertia in this field and experience. It turns out that a bunch of people using AI to generate shitty generic content just increases the value of really great content. That adds something to the conversation because the AI systems are starving to cite new information. They want new because they need to ingest information in order to generate information. So we’re feeding the beats, so to speak.

Jared Correia (11:06):
So your pivot, it wasn’t really a pivot. You were just

David Arato (11:10):
Like, “Hey,

Jared Correia (11:10):
We’re doing high quality content already, so we’ll just keep doing that.”

David Arato (11:13):
At a very high level, I would say that’s accurate. In the nitty-gritty, the job looks completely differently than it did. Completely different than it did five years ago. Unrecognizable.

Jared Correia (11:23):
All right. So this is what I wanted to ask you about. So your view of AI in your business as a legal content creator, are you like, “Okay, this is now my partner that I never though I would have who’s helping me.”

David Arato (11:36):
100%.

Jared Correia (11:37):
Okay. So you’ve started using it on your own.

David Arato (11:42):
We would be doing our clients a disservice if we didn’t. So let me give an example of the before times and the after times. So let’s say a client wanted to target –

Jared Correia (11:55):
BAI? All right, let’s do it.

David Arato (11:57):
That’s right. That’s right. So let’s say a client wanted to target, they want to get into the car accident, or sorry, they want to focus on truck accidents, 18-wheelers, commercial trucking accidents. So they’d come to us and say, “We really want to focus on these kind of cases and we want to cast a very wide net. So let’s look what the keywords look like. Let’s look at high intent commercial keywords, what to do after a truck accident, who’s liable for commercial truck accident, et cetera.” So we would generate these ideas of what a potential victim would search for, and we would write that content, all of it by hand from scratch. And we would use data sources like Google Analytics and Google Ads to determine what people were searching for. Okay. In that content, let’s say we were doing 50 pieces of content to cast this very wide net.

(12:47):
In that content, each piece would end with a call to action paragraph that we would have to rewrite by hand 50 different ways because Google does not index duplicate content. We can’t copy and paste at 50 different times. So every time we’re doing this by hand, AI’s really good at that. So that’s decreased our labor costs. It’s increased our speed of speed to use AI to do that. Makes sense. Yeah. But we can’t use AI to just generate a piece of content from start to finish and expect it to ring because that’s what everyone is doing. And the new phrase I’m leaning into very publicly is zero effort content has zero value. Because everyone can go out there and do it, right?

Jared Correia (13:31):
Yes, literally.

David Arato (13:33):
Why would Google have any incentive to waste indexing resources on a piece of content that is exactly like the one that’s been written 50 times before?

Jared Correia (13:45):
Okay. So let me ask you this. So I want to get to another aspect of your business in a second, but do you have law firms, clients of yours reaching out to you and being like, “Hey, I just drafted 75 blog posts in four minutes on ChatGPT while I was waiting for you to pick up the phone. Why do I need you?” Is that a conversation that’s happening? Or do you find that law firms are like, “Oh, I kind of intuitively get this. It’s got to be quality content. It can’t be just AI slop.”

David Arato (14:18):
Let me say this. If we don’t have that conversation, and I think it’s because if a law firm is reaching out to us at all, if we’ve made contact with that firm, they already know that they can’t just push out generic – Oh,

Jared Correia (14:32):
That’s fair.

David Arato (14:33):
AI content. So we’re not having that. With former clients, we had that conversation. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a very disruptive. The past four years have been extraordinarily disruptive for our business, both in terms of how we price our services, both in terms of what our ideal client looks like and who we work with. It’s been really disruptive. Right. We’re strong in a stronger position than we were, better client diversity. But we did lose clients in that. Some of the smaller agencies we worked with who were not very content heavy. We had some agency clients that we were white labeling through and using us as a white label partner, I should say, who were doing one or two pieces a month. I think their content was not a huge part of their deliverable monthly. They just took it in-house and decided to use ChatGPT or Claude or whoever to generate content.

(15:21):
So that has happened. But by the time we’re in a conversation these days with someone, they already know that they shouldn’t be doing that.

Jared Correia (15:29):
Are you seeing content online where you’re like, “That was some half-assed AI prompt?” Or are you not seeing it because only the quality content is ranking for the searches that you’re doing?

David Arato (15:43):
Number two is accurate. But number one, am I seeing it? Absolutely. So if a firm reaches out to us and they’re like, “Hey, we have lost visibility. We were ranking number one for this, or we were in the AI overviews, and we’ve fallen off their map, or traffic has tanked, we’re not getting citations, we’re not getting…” They’re looking at their rankings and they’re dropped. That’s when I’m seeing the shitty AI content. It is a direct correlation from posting generic shitty content to losing your rankings and losing your citations. And that’s when we go in there. When a client approaches us, we do an audit. We do a free audit for prospects. And we do an AI visibility audit and we go into their blog and the practice area pages and their homepage and see what’s going on. If someone’s reaching out to us because they got fucked by a Google update, it’s often because they have shitty content that I can look at it, not even read it, look at the formatting and see the ChatGPT-ness of it.

(16:38):
You know what I mean?

Jared Correia (16:39):
Look at all these M dashes. What the fuck

David Arato (16:41):
Is going

Jared Correia (16:41):
On?

David Arato (16:42):
M dash, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, header. I just see the formatting of it. I’m like, you use ChatGPT. I don’t even have to read what it says.

Jared Correia (16:52):
Yeah, that’s interesting. Okay. I mean, quality content in general is a good idea. But I think one thing that people struggle with is what is quality content? When do you rise to the level of this was not quality, but now it is?

David Arato (17:10):
How

Jared Correia (17:10):
Would I look at that as a law firm?

David Arato (17:12):
Google is shockingly transparent about this, at least superficially. Quality content in. Oh, I’m going to go acronyms here, man. Sorry about this. Do the

Jared Correia (17:23):
Acronyms.

David Arato (17:24):
I might

Jared Correia (17:24):
Make you explain them, but do the acronyms.

David Arato (17:26):
Please do. And I’ll just go ahead and preemptively do it. So Google, when it evaluates content, and it’s transparent about this, it has search quality rater guidelines. If you’re in a field that deals with your money or your life, YMYL for short, in the industry parlance, finance, healthcare, law, news to some extent, you have to have content that demonstrates EEAT, experience, expertise, authority, and trust. So obviously quality content is going to be well-written and grammatically correct and structured in a way that is easy for the user to understand or the reader to understand. Yeah. But when it comes to evaluating the actual quality of the content and determining how well it would rank, it will rank. EEAT is the name of the game. Again, experience, expertise, authority, and trust. So content that demonstrates or aligns rather with those four ideas is how I think the metric by which to judge what quality content is.

Jared Correia (18:26):
Okay. And part of that is not just one content piece, but an overall approach to content. And the other question I see people asking is hitting the right volume, right?

David Arato (18:38):
Sure.

Jared Correia (18:38):
Because the idea is not like AI gives you the ability to throw up a thousand blog posts a day, but you don’t want to do that. So what do you think of in terms of volume guidance for people? When is it too much?

David Arato (18:54):
It’s like the Goldilocks thing, man, truly, because there is now an explicit guideline against scaled content abuse. Google recognize that people can do exactly what you said. You don’t have to have gone to law school to write a thousand blog posts in car accident law anymore. Right. You just do it. So

(19:15):
What’s this going to do to the ecosystem of the internet? Just a bunch of shitty content that hasn’t been reviewed by an expert that’s going to be out there. So Google recognizes this as a risk and is penalizing sites that publish, like you mentioned, a thousand pieces of content in a couple days.That is clearly going to be just AI slup. On the other hand, you need a regular cadence. And like I said, Goldilocks, and maybe it’s more like, God, I’m going to blank on who said it, but I know it when I see it. Is the right cadence? You know what I mean? Is

Jared Correia (19:45):
That Brandeis maybe? Maybe. We’ll see. Somebody will check me.

David Arato (19:51):
Law school was a long time ago, I think for both of us. I’m not going to speak for you, but.

Jared Correia (19:55):
Oh, it was.

David Arato (19:59):
No, what I mean by that is I think it’s really. So on the other hand, let me get back into it. On the other hand, content freshness is a ranking factor. So you post a piece of content that ranks really well for six months, it might fall off. Either replace it with a fresher piece of content or update it with recent statistics. Industry parlance, again, information gain. Add something new to the confirmation conversation. So if you have a piece of content that cites the statistics from 2024, and the 25 statistics come out later this year, let’s say it’s like NHTSA data, for example, or your state DOT, update that content with that. You don’t necessarily need to publish new content. My point is it’s a really fine line, but whatever you do, don’t dump a thousand pieces of content on your website in a day.

Jared Correia (20:50):
Lawyers are interesting creatures to me because they live in gray areas all the time. They are really effective pushing around gray areas. But then if you ask them to do something that’s not legal practice, they want black and white for everything. Tell me exactly how many blog posts I have to create on a daily basis. Tell me exactly what they should include. So I think it’s a continuing point of struggle for

David Arato (21:16):
A lot of them. Absolutely. I mean, I’m going to say this. We don’t offer a package that is less than a weekly blog. To some extent, Google just wants to see that someone is minding the store of your website. They don’t want to see websites that are dead and not updated. So I’ve worked with firms that have been in highly competitive markets, Los Angeles, New York. I remember one firm in Houston that we worked with that we were publishing a daily piece of content. They did really well with it. They got a return on their investment.That’s

Jared Correia (21:51):
Not a crazy number though. I get

David Arato (21:52):
That. I don’t think it is. I don’t think it is. But I don’t think you have to do that in Cedar Rapids. It depends on how saturated is your market with attorneys in your practice area. Look at what your competition. To some extent too is this. If your competition in your market is not doing any content marketing, you will have less content. You don’t need to post as much because ultimately you’re just trying to get the top spot. So what’s the minimum amount of input to get the result you want? And that depends on a lot of different factors.

Jared Correia (22:22):
Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. Can we get back to this notion of information gain for a second? I think what some people are chasing, excuse me, with AI is a new spin on a topic, something that somebody hasn’t covered before. And I think they’re chasing like maybe I can get into the AI overview if somebody does this search and nobody else has covered it or nobody else has covered it effectively. Who’s not me? Is that a viable approach too? Should that be in the holster?

David Arato (22:52):
I think so. Absolutely.

Jared Correia (22:53):
Okay.

David Arato (22:54):
Like I said, I feel like Google and the AI platforms of which Google has become one are starved for new information because these LLMs, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature that they regurgitate the information that they have already ingested. So give it something new, it’s more likely to surface that. Because ultimately both the LLMs and Google, their incentive, they’re incentivized I should say, to provide the most up-to-date, most accurate information to whatever eyeballs are on their platform because that way they can sell more ads and make more money. So they want to give users the best, most accurate results. So by adding to the conversation, I think it’s almost like you’re baiting them into servicing your content and giving you that citation.

Jared Correia (23:48):
Although it’s an interesting conversation because you still need a human on the other side who’s a consumer to try to surface that information. That’s right. And the more arcane the question, the less likely they probably are to do it.

David Arato (24:02):
That’s right. And that’s why we really try and. I tell our attorney clients when they’re like, “What are you guys even going to talk about? How can you write a year’s worth of content about car accident law?” And I tell them, I’m like, “Think back to your client interviews, that initial interview. Think about how many questions they ask you. Lawyers live in this world. They live and breathe in this stuff. You and I know these things inside and out, but a layperson is going to come into your office and say,” I think the other guy might’ve been in fault for my accident. Does that even matter? “You and I both jumped into comparative negligence, right? But a layperson doesn’t think that way. So peel back the onion and you can dig into this so deeply. The thing about content creation is this. You want to think about how your clients would phrase the question, not how you would phrase the question.

(24:52):
Don’t write like a lawyer. And this is where we come in. If your day-to-day is communicating with other attorneys and judges, you’re going to default to lawyer speak. That’s not great for your SEO and it certainly isn’t great for communicating with your clients.

Jared Correia (25:03):
Yeah, it’s unintelligible to someone who’s a lay person. Yeah. That’s right. I was just talking about this with a law firm the other day. That’s all good advice, I think. I think there are all these tactics that could be used, but you don’t necessarily want to go overboard here.

David Arato (25:17):
That’s right. That’s right.

Jared Correia (25:19):
Okay. So let me ask you a little bit about alternative. So we’ve been talking a lot about text-based content, written content. We’re doing a podcast, obviously. I’m not writing shit. I haven’t written anything in years. So what about audio, video content in addition to text-based content? Is that useful? Because you could also strip the transcript of a conversation and potentially turn that into text as well.

David Arato (25:48):
Absolutely. I mean, people have been talking about omnipresence in marketing, omnipresent marketing for years. Omnichannel, I should say. Sorry, omnichannel marketing.

Jared Correia (25:59):
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

David Arato (25:59):
I think that is 100% the future. I think it’s very important. We have stayed in our lane of text-based content. We’re getting into social media now, social media videos now, just because we are content shop. We want to be a content shop writ large. And part of this, I mean, I’m just going to talk a little bit about our business structure. Part of this is – Go for it. Yeah,

Jared Correia (26:21):
That’s totally fine.

David Arato (26:22):
So historically, we’ve been in business 15 years now, and historically our majority of our business was coming as white label partners to agencies that did not have the skillset or in-house expertise to do text-based content. We are now working more and more directly with law firms. And in pivoting who our ideal client is and who we’re working with, I’ve realized that we need to expand our suite of services, looking more like a traditional PR shop, I would say. Creating

(26:59):
Assets that can be distributed everywhere. And we have the skillset to do it. We just haven’t had the market. The market hasn’t required that from us yet. So we’re expanding. But to get back to your question, being omnichannel is huge. And these content formats play really well with each other. Let’s say we create a blog for you about child custody laws in Colorado. We can take that blog and turn it into a script, maybe five scripts for 30 second shorts. And then you can send us raw video and then our team will edit it and send it back to you in a way that’s good for social distribution. So yes, the answer is yes. I think all these formats are important and getting the same message out across various formats is the way to get in front of your potential clients because some of your clients are on TikTok.

(27:48):
Some of them are reading a blog. Some of them are still using Google. Some of them are asking ChatGPT. So get out there.

Jared Correia (27:57):
I’m still on Google. I feel seen here with my old computer.

David Arato (28:01):
I love it.

Jared Correia (28:03):
So we’ve talked a lot, I think, about on page

David Arato (28:08):
SEO

Jared Correia (28:09):
In the sense that you’re publishing a blog post that goes on your website and the

David Arato (28:14):
Idea

Jared Correia (28:15):
Is to get people to your website, but there are other ways to get people to the website as well. So now we’re talking about video content, social media content. That’s part of the whole package. So if you’re an attorney who’s thinking about remodeling your content structure, what goes on the site? What goes off the site? How do you make those choices?

David Arato (28:37):
Sure.

Jared Correia (28:37):
Or does everything that’s offsite also appear onsite as well?

David Arato (28:41):
So I think there are different considerations when posting onsite. When posting onsite, you’re thinking about SEO best practices, keyword density, using header tags, schema markup, technical stuff that might be outside of the scope of this conversation. That said, one of the pillars of SEO for 20 years now, 25 years now I’ll say, maybe even longer, has been backlinks. So backlinks are sites linking to your site. And backlinks are not all created equal. They have different quality. A backlink from above the law is more important than a backlink from a travel blog for a law firm.

Jared Correia (29:23):
Below the law. Yeah. Oh, anyway, go ahead. Yes. I don’t even know if there’s a below the law. There

David Arato (29:28):
Might be. I said above, above, above.

Jared Correia (29:31):
Oh, I know. I was trying to make a

David Arato (29:32):
Joke. Oh, sorry. I’m sorry. Excuse me. Excuse me.

Jared Correia (29:36):
Below the law has to be worse than above the law, right?

David Arato (29:38):
Well, hey, I got a business proposition for you after this. Okay.

Jared Correia (29:45):
Go

David Arato (29:45):
Ahead. So I’m just saying a relevant backlink from a legitimate source germane to your industry is going to be more important than buying a backlink from some link farm that’s advertising espraso machines. So backlinks have been really important. And content marketing is a You’ve been a huge part of attracting backlinks naturally. You post great content, people want to cite to it, and they link to you. So content marketing touches both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. It’s a path to both. These days, it seems that third party mentions, which I think someone who’s immersed in the SEO world, immediately they think backlink. I think a third party mention that it doesn’t even include a backlink anymore has becoming more important for AI visibility. AI is not – Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s not using the same signals. If you get mentioned in the New York Times, whether or not they link to you, AI is going to pick up on that mention and look at you as an authoritative entity in whatever space you’re in.

(30:49):
So in some ways, I feel like AI visibility is looking more like traditional public relations, PR work than it is technical SEO. And maybe that line is blurring, SEO and PR.

Jared Correia (31:04):
Can we piss everyone off?

David Arato (31:06):
Yeah, let’s do it.

Jared Correia (31:07):
Is technical SEO dead or a walking corpse and they’re just not aware of it?

David Arato (31:14):
I hate to prognosticate about this because first of all – I

Jared Correia (31:17):
Mean, I don’t know. How many people are getting past the AI overview even if they’re using Google? That’s

David Arato (31:22):
The thing. I’m going to throw out some numbers. 78, sorry. 78%. This is the last statistics I saw. 78% of legal searches result in AI overviews. And to your point, there’s AI overviews, there’s PPC, and there’s your organic result. How many human beings are scrolling down to the organic result these days? I don’t know the answer. But Gui Sakalakis of AttorneySync has very public – Out friend of

Jared Correia (31:53):
The pod. Yes.

David Arato (31:55):
You know Guy? He’s pointed out very, very publicly that the click-through rate on AI overviews is really shitty. We’ve kind of gone into back and forth on LinkedIn about this. My position has been get in the AI overviews now, stake your claim, be in there. Google’s going to figure out the attribution. There’s going to be inertia in being in there, in getting those citations. The people who are in there are more likely to stay in there is kind of my position, just like organic.

Jared Correia (32:22):
But

David Arato (32:22):
Gee’s saying people

Jared Correia (32:23):
Aren’t actually clicking on the links that appear.

David Arato (32:25):
So what’s the point? And we’ve gone back and forth. I don’t disagree with them. I mean, I can’t disagree with them. The data is there.People are not clicking through.

Jared Correia (32:31):
It could also be a timing thing, as you alluded to.

David Arato (32:34):
Absolutely. But here’s the question to me. Even if the click-through rate isn’t there, let’s say the user sees your name, your firm. The value might be in the visibility in the citation. If you see my law firm’s name in that citation and then you Google my law firm to make sure that we’re legit and read reviews, whatever you do, the customer journey is no longer keyword, first organic result, click. Signed case.That is no longer the journey that’s happening here. It’s I’m going to start with ChatGPT and have a conversation. Do I even need a lawyer? I see some citations. I go to Google. I see the AI overview. Then I click on. You know what I mean?

Jared Correia (33:17):
So SEO is maybe dead. Maybe

David Arato (33:19):
Dead.

Jared Correia (33:19):
We’ll have to bring Guillon for a rebuttal. That’s right. You mentioned this before, totally separate and aside from the SEO thing. What I think is partly interesting with what you’ve done is you used to be a white labeled provider effectively, which means very few people that you’re getting paid through, not directly by, even know you exist. That’s right. So I feel like that was probably a bigger challenge than trying to adopt to the AI stuff. How do you now become effectively like a public facing company to clients? How did you manage that?

David Arato (33:57):
Well, we’re working on it still to this day. I mean, the pivot started two years ago, three years ago, honestly. And we’ve always had law firm clients and they’ve come through referrals and they’ve come through. We’ve got pretty good SEO for our relevant search terms. But in some ways I feel like this is Lexicon 2.0 and it’s been a really exciting experience actually because we’re doing fine. Our agency partners, some of them left and came back after realizing that AI wasn’t easy. They thought it was. They thought they were like, “Oh shit, we don’t need Lexicon anymore.” It’s a huge line item. They hire one person to do a million words of content a month and they’re like, “Oh, we can’t do it.” And things are slipping through. So they’ve already boomerang back some of our agency clients. We’ve had longstanding partnerships that are still very strong and in place.

(34:45):
That said, mitigating risk, us working with law firms directly has been, as you mentioned, challenging to get our name out there. It’s almost like we’re operating like a startup a bit. Building out infrastructure that we didn’t have before. Our agency clients, that conversation was, what does this cost per word and what is your quality control like? And let’s get it done together. And our law firm clients shockingly wanted a nice looking portal to log into. They didn’t want a Google Drive that we shared with our agencies. You know what I mean? It’s taking the same core to deliver. We’re going from being Costco to being a nice looking public facing boutique on Main Street. That’s the analogy I’m using. We had to build out infrastructure that we didn’t have. Also, repackaging our services in a way that are more attractive to law firms. For example, and this was a blind spot rather in my leadership, was not owning the data of our content performance.

(35:48):
Oh,

Jared Correia (35:48):
Sure.

David Arato (35:49):
Historically, when we worked with agencies mostly, they would own the data and they would share it with – You didn’t need

Jared Correia (35:57):
To.

David Arato (35:57):
We didn’t need to. And here’s the thing, it performed well. It performed well or else they wouldn’t have continued working with us. But I didn’t have a bunch of case studies saying we got this law firm from page 20 to page one. The agency owned that data. So that’s been a challenge, but also – That’s super interesting.

Jared Correia (36:20):
Yeah.

David Arato (36:20):
We’ve been able to get that data ultimately. So now we have case studies with several law firms around the country. So it’s been exciting to really take this business and pivot it and build it out in a different way. But while we’re still offering the same core deliverable, right? High quality content that gets you noticed. It’s been fun. Yes.

Jared Correia (36:41):
It’s an interesting problem to solve. But

David Arato (36:43):
As a true

Jared Correia (36:44):
Entrepreneur, you’re working through it. That’s

David Arato (36:46):
Right. That’s right.

Jared Correia (36:48):
David, thank you. This was a lot of fun. Oh, absolutely. Do

David Arato (36:51):
You think

Jared Correia (36:51):
You can stick around for one last segment?

David Arato (36:54):
Absolutely. I’ve got time.

Jared Correia (36:55):
All right. Hang on everybody. We’ll be right back. Welcome back everybody. That’s right. It’s The Counter Program. It’s a podcast within a podcast. This is a conversational space where you can address usually unrelated topics that I want to explore in a greater depth with my guests. Expect no rhyme and very little reason. David, welcome back.

David Arato (37:22):
I’m here.

Jared Correia (37:23):
Okay. So this kind of dovetails nicely with what we were talking about off air before we started, because you called Evan, our producer, who is also a Coloradan, a flatlander. What is that all about?

David Arato (37:37):
Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through the state of Colorado. Have you ever done it?

Jared Correia (37:42):
I have many times.

David Arato (37:44):
You leave Kansas if you’re going west and you got three more hours. You think I’m in Colorado? It’s going to be beautiful. I’m in the mountains now. No, no, no, no. You got three more hours. Then you got Denver. Then depending on the time of day, tag on an extra 45 to an hour to get from the airport to the other side. And so they’re flatlanders and mountain people. Calling Evan a flatlander is not accurate. He’s in the foothills, I’d say. Fuck

Jared Correia (38:10):
Him. He’s a flatlander. You know you’re a flatlander, Evan. So this is perfect because we’re returning to one of our favorite segments where I explore regional dialects and examine local phrasing. Love

David Arato (38:29):
It. And

Jared Correia (38:29):
You are going to be my duly authorized expert for the state of Colorado. Everyone, this is shit Coloradans say. David, during this segment, I’m going to provide some common words and phrases only a real Coloradan would know. And then I would like you to explain this to me. If you haven’t heard. Now I know you’re not like, I don’t think you’re a native. You weren’t born in Colorado. You’ve lived there for a little while, right? Am I right on

David Arato (38:54):
That? Quick bio. Born in Hungary. Yes. Born in Hungary, raised in St. Louis. Iowa City, St. Louis, Breckenridge. Those are the places I’ve been.

Jared Correia (39:05):
The typical Hungary to Breckenridge.That’s right.

David Arato (39:07):
That’s right.

Jared Correia (39:08):
Which happens all the time.

David Arato (39:09):
Tale as oldest time. Yeah, that’s

Jared Correia (39:11):
Right. It’s like American tale here. It’s fucking nuts. All right, term number one. I am not, as a non-Coloradan, I could get some of these wrong, so just let me know if this is not actually common pronounced, but through the auspices of Google Gemini and Google search, I was able to come up with these. Number one, flannel blind, which I have the state of being so accustomed to seeing people in outdoor gear that you no longer notice someone wearing hiking boots, a puffy vest, and flannel to a formal dinner or professional meeting.

David Arato (39:50):
That’s a thing. 100% agree. Absolutely. You should check out my flannel collection. I’ve got home clothes and traveling clothes. I’ll tell you a quick story. Really? Okay.

(40:00):
Oh, 100%. So I’ve lived here for a couple years and kind of got rid of my stuff that I changed my wardrobe. And my wife and I went to New York to see a show on Broadway. Fantastic show. Waitress. But I’m in Times Square and I’m looking around and I’m like, why do I feel so out of place? I don’t know. Maybe it’s my flannel and my big belt buckle and my Levi’s. And I’m a city kid. I grew up in the city and I was like, I didn’t realize how much this had gotten to me. So that’s a thing. That’s

Jared Correia (40:33):
Kind of like the opposite of flannel. No one else in that area is flannel blind except for you.

David Arato (40:37):
That’s right. That’s right. Are

Jared Correia (40:39):
Good. We’re one for one.

David Arato (40:41):
Good.

Jared Correia (40:45):
Next, I think this is one many people probably know. Colorado Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid. Okay. Colorado Kool-Aid, slaying for Coors Banquet style beer.

David Arato (40:58):
Absolutely. Yes, totally.

Jared Correia (41:00):
Emanating from a Johnny Paycheck song, spoken word, 1977 Johnny Paycheck song. Love it. Of the same name. That’s still in use.

David Arato (41:10):
I love that. So up here, I’m in the small mountain communities and I would call. Okay, Coors Field is Coors Field. And keep in mind, I was raised in St. Louis.

Jared Correia (41:18):
We’re the Rockies play for those who are – That’s

David Arato (41:20):
Right. And then St. Louis. Beautiful

Jared Correia (41:22):
Stadium, by the way. One of my favorite stadiums in MLB. Love it.

David Arato (41:25):
Especially sunset, if you’ve got a westward facing seat, it’s great. But keep in mind, as a St. Louisan, I was used to Bud Light coming out of the tap. And it is true that Coors is everywhere. That being said, in the mountain communities are just microbrew after microbrew. Let me give you a Colorado afternoon. Let’s put on our flannels, get on the mountain bike and bike, do some mountain biking, and we’re going to stop and get a microbrew, hit the dispensary. A little bit of a campfire, and then do it all the next day. Here we go.

Jared Correia (42:03):
Sounds amazing. That’s why they call it the banquet beer. That’s

David Arato (42:06):
Right.

Jared Correia (42:07):
We’re doing well so far. All right. Number three, Blucifer.

David Arato (42:12):
Oh.

Jared Correia (42:13):
I

David Arato (42:13):
Mean, this one’s easy.

Jared Correia (42:15):
32 foot tall. Well, I don’t know. If you have not flown into and driven out of DIA, which is Denver International Airport, there’s a fucking giant blue Mustang with red eyes. Terrifying, terrifying.

David Arato (42:35):
I think it fell on its creator. A

Jared Correia (42:38):
Piece of it fell on the designer and killed him. And

David Arato (42:40):
Killed him. Is this true story? Bluesifer. And it’s got red eyes. It’s super creepy.

Jared Correia (42:46):
It’s got red eyes. I think it has a dick as well, which is off pudding. Not a huge fan as an East Coaster. I’m like, “Is there another pathway out of the airport?”

David Arato (43:01):
DI is the worst, man. It’s my home airport. There’s no such thing as a day trip. I don’t care if my flight is two hours or six hours. I am traveling the whole day.

Jared Correia (43:12):
Well, I was going to ask you this. So obviously the airport is way the fuck out there. If I’m a local, I guess it’s good that I don’t have the airport in my backyard or in downtown Denver, but it’s also a pain in the ass to get anywhere.

David Arato (43:27):
Well, think about it from Breck. I got to leave four hours before my flight. So let me put it this way. So I have family in Vegas and I go there at least quarterly, and I go there for work stuff too, like conferences and stuff. So think about it this way. If I get in my car and drive west from Breckenridge, I’m in Las Vegas in about 10 hours. Or if I fly, it’s an hour and a half flight. I’m in Las Vegas in about 10 hours. You see what I mean? After luggage. Yes. Four hours before my flight, hour and a half in the air, get off, and then the Uber out of the airport. Yeah, 10 hours. Fly or drive. Same way.

Jared Correia (44:06):
I think we’re doing great so far. All right, I got three more for you. Let’s

David Arato (44:09):
Do it.

Jared Correia (44:09):
Next one is Trustafarian.

David Arato (44:12):
Oh. This

Jared Correia (44:13):
Is a blending of Trust Fund and Rastafarian described for use with wealthy transplants who pretend to be greedy Bohemians, yet they live off their daddy’s trust fund. This is real. This

David Arato (44:28):
Is everywhere. This is everywhere.

Jared Correia (44:29):
Okay.

David Arato (44:29):
Everywhere. You like, it’s a

Jared Correia (44:32):
Fucking problem.

David Arato (44:33):
Go to Aspen. Go to Aspen. You’re a lifty in a $5 million condo that’s ski in, ski out, and you’ve got dreads and you’re smoking weed all day.

Jared Correia (44:47):
Right. Okay.

David Arato (44:50):
Trustafarian, 100%.

Jared Correia (44:52):
Okay. We’re kicking ass right now. All right, the next one. More of a traffic related one. Apparently the Denver interstate, what is it? Interstate 25 and Interstate 70, where they intersect in the city is called the mousetrap because it looks like a mousetrap from above. And then I note that this area or national prominence in 1984 when a truck carrying navy torpedoes flipped over in the center of the highway, paralyzing the city’s entire grid for hours. And then they just rebooted this area. There was a big redesign. That sounds terrible. Is that an issue?

David Arato (45:42):
It’s a bad intersection. Anytime I fly out of DIA, I have to go through it. And that’s where the traffic stops.

Jared Correia (45:47):
Really? There’s no way to avoid it. You have to drive through that space?

David Arato (45:52):
I could go down 285 and go through, it’s a little two-lane state highway and go up from the south of Denver and connect, I think, on four something. But it’s much longer and much more annoying. So you can’t really avoid. You can’t avoid 1725 unless you go way out of your way.

Jared Correia (46:09):
That’s terrible. And that’s right

David Arato (46:11):
Where Coors Field is actually, right there.

Jared Correia (46:14):
That’s exactly where Coors Field is in the Bronco Stadium. Is it called Invesco Field? Empower.

David Arato (46:21):
Empower. Yeah,

Jared Correia (46:22):
Yeah.That’s right off the highway too, right? Yep.

David Arato (46:24):
It’s right there. It’s all right there. I was actually down there last week.

Jared Correia (46:27):
So at least you got shit to look at. Okay, our last one. The potentially world famous Rocky Mountain oysters, which are, in case you don’t know, fileted and deep fried testicles of a bull bison or sheep, which I have actually, I have eaten a bull testicle before. Yeah. I’m a brave East coaster. I

David Arato (46:58):
Haven’t done that. You

Jared Correia (46:59):
Haven’t? I have

David Arato (46:59):
Not. Really? I see them on menus. I just haven’t done it.

Jared Correia (47:03):
It’s not very good. I didn’t like it.

David Arato (47:05):
Did it come as an appetizer? Are they fried?

Jared Correia (47:07):
Yes. Yes. Yeah. They look fried. So

David Arato (47:10):
Something I could share with a friend.

Jared Correia (47:12):
They almost look like fried cheese curs, if you’ve ever had fried cheese curves. I love it. Only balls. Is it

David Arato (47:18):
Bad?

Jared Correia (47:20):
I didn’t like it.

David Arato (47:21):
Wasn’t for you. I

Jared Correia (47:23):
Was not a fan. So there’s the Buckhorn Exchange in downtown Denver where they have all the strange game like elk and stuff like that. I had them. I had them there. I had rattlesnake nachos there, which is like chopped rattlesnake meat on top of nacho chips. That’s actually good.

David Arato (47:49):
Was it good? Yeah. Reminds me of an alligator cheesecake I had in Missouri.

Jared Correia (47:54):
Alligator, I don’t mind alligator. Do you like alligator? It was fine.

David Arato (47:59):
It

Jared Correia (48:00):
Was a Cajun place. It’s like a sausage.

David Arato (48:02):
Yeah,

Jared Correia (48:02):
That’s

David Arato (48:02):
Right. I agree. It was like a sausage. And like a savory cheesecake, not very popular, but don’t sleep on it.

Jared Correia (48:09):
Yeah, that’s good. Let’s stay testicle free. David, thanks for being on the show.

David Arato (48:13):
Pleasure. This is super fun. This is super fun.

Jared Correia (48:17):
All right. We’ll have to have you back sometime. Thanks for coming up. We’ll see you again. Thanks for our guest today, David Arato, who is the founder and CEO of Lexicon Legal Content. To learn more about David and Lexicon, visit lexiconlegalcontent.com. That’s L-E-X-I-C-O-N, legalcontent.com, lexiconlegalcontent.com. Now, because I’ll always be a ’90s kid who still thinks Flair baseball cards are dog shit compared to tops, but whose true passion is burning CDs for anyone who would listen. I’m now just doing the modern version of that, which is creating Spotify playlists for every podcast that I record when the songs are tangentially related to an episode topic. For this week’s playlist, I’ve got some Colorado adjacent stuff for y’all. It’s the Find Your Mountains playlist because fuck them flatlanders. And these songs about the mountains are brought to you by the Coors Brewing Company. Actually, they’re not. I think Coors is fucking terrible, by the way.

(49:22):
Banquet beer, my ass. Join us next time when I unroll an entire fruit by the foot and not any of that Annie’s bullshit. Okay?