Voice Search For Lawyers: Why Your Firm May Already Be Losing Clients
If you’ve put serious effort and attention into growing your law firm through search engine marketing strategies, there’s a good chance you’ve watched the rise of AI search with concern. Google’s own AI Mode, as well as other LLM (large language model) tools, generate answers from searches they run in the background and provide them directly to users, so users who aren’t highly motivated to check the results 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 so 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 for voice search is increasingly important 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 chat-to-text programs made us all laugh (and cringe) at their often eyebrow-raising results. Developing 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 controls for tools beyond telling Alexa to play music or asking Siri to list local restaurants.
Technology Terms of Conduct
Without getting too “into the weeds” on the subject, it’s important to note that the growing ubiquity of voice-operated devices as a matter of course, without the pitfalls that often plagued early voice control models, has had effects on user 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 researchers 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 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 that structure search behavior is the syntax of voice searches compared to typed queries. As several voices in the search engine marketing space have pointed out, the questions that users initiate by voice tend to be phrased like questions in ordinary spoken conversation. This “natural language” format differs significantly from the grammatical structure of much printed research with which we are all familiar.
Implications for Law Firm Digital Marketing Strategy
The bad news, for law firms looking to take advantage of the growing popularity of voice search to ensure they get in front of potential clients looking for similar services, is that you likely won’t be able to simply use your existing SEO content, built around long-tail keywords typed on 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 is likely to be more “readable” compared to conventional SEO content, and therefore easier to understand by individuals visiting 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 views into calls or bookings once found. This tension is significantly reduced in content optimized for voice search.
Real Change vs. Hype
If you’ve read content about how voice search engines and LLM answers are about to destroy your law firm’s SEO (search engine optimization), or perhaps how they’re already destroying it, it’s time to take a deep breath and assess the facts. Simply putting the information already available into perspective can help you develop an up-to-date search engine marketing strategy that is based on data, not advertising.
Fact no. 1: Voice search is absolutely a different ball game compared to 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 websites optimized for “crawling” by search engines. The keywords themselves come from actual searches conducted by users of conventional search engines (mainly but not exclusively Google). Often they have a syntax that looks like what it is: a string of names that one hoped would be associated with the kind of thing they were looking for. This 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: The keywords aren’t going anywhere
While “long tail” keywords, those that look something like child custody divorce arizonamay not show up in the same way in voice search as they do in conventional print searches, people are still performing searches that contain most of the same components. They are just linked together in a different way, with prepositions and indefinite articles: child custody in an arizona divorce. They can also appear in full-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 certainly change
The paradox created by these developments is that voice search optimization must account for both individual search terms and the many questions people might ask about them. By pulling in a long tail keyword like child custody divorce arizona makes it easy to see several different ways of combining the basic components:
- Custody of the child
- guardian
- DIVORCE
- Arizona
- Divorce from Arizona
- Child custody in Arizona
What this means for voice search content creation is that law firms and digital marketing professionals will need to create content that includes many different combinations of shorter keywords. If you can use this content creation as an opportunity to identify and directly answer more questions that people are starting to ask LLM answer engines, you have a good 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’ll want to work with one 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’ll definitely want to target are local search (aka local SEO) and contextual keywords. You want to choose for your voice search targeted keywords that people are likely to use in the same contexts where they are likely to prefer voice search over “traditional” print methods. Many of these contexts will also have a local focus. Effectively targeting this overlap 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 Law Colla concierge legal marketing agency for law firms. Annette is the author of the best-selling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded the Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to use the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought-after speaker for Bar Associations, Law Societies and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing knowledge along with an entertaining twist. Annette was involved in professional theater and comedy, which isn’t that different from the legal field if we’re all being honest. Annette can be found at LinkedIn or directly via email at (email protected)
