Anyone who’s recently conducted a Google search has probably spotted the new feature appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
As an SEO professional at a law firm, you might already be familiar with it.
For anyone who isn’t, it’s called an AI Overview.
And it could be about to transform the way web users access information.
In this blog, we examine what an AI Overview is, what it could mean for your law firm SEO strategy, and how you should optimise for them to stay above your competitors in Google’s search rankings.
What is Google AI Overview?
Google has long been integrating AI into its search engine.
The first significant development came in 2015 following the introduction of RankBrain.
This AI-based algorithm better helped to understand search queries and improve relevance.
Fast forward almost a decade later and there’s now another hugely important update.
That is Google’s AI Overview.
In short, an AI Overview does exactly what it says on the tin.
The new Search feature scours information from various sources, including the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph, to provide an AI-generated answer to a particular search query.
Overviews are generated using Google’s Gemini language model, with answers appearing directly on SERPs.
This might not seem particularly groundbreaking when you consider Google has been using a similar feature in Snippets for several years now.
However, while Snippets only provide a short paragraph at most, AI Overviews have the capacity to offer much more detail.
In fact, users may receive all the answers they’re looking for solely from the SERP, eliminating the need to visit your website for information.
With that in mind, AI Overviews have the potential to significantly impact law firm SEO, which relies upon users visiting your website to explain complex legal processes and help generate clients.
How do Google AI Overviews impact SEO?
Google accounts for 91.54% of the Global Search Engine Market, as reported by Semrush.
Clearly, optimising your website content according to Google’s algorithm should be the priority within your legal marketing strategy.
This should involve staying on top of any significant changes impacting SEO, including the introduction of AI Overviews.
However, Overviews may limit the need for users to expand their search beyond results pages, potentially resulting in more zero-click searches.
According to research firm Gartner, traffic to websites from search engines could drop by as much as 25% by 2026.
You might be wondering why you should focus on AI Overviews if they’re just going to cause your organic traffic to decline regardless.
Let us explain.
It’s true that if your website doesn’t feature in an AI Overview, your traffic is likely to take a hit.
Understandably, AI Overviews have caused anxiety among marketers who invest significant sums into traditional SEO strategies.
That being said, you shouldn’t panic just yet.
That’s because featuring in AI Overviews could see you maintain your levels of traffic, or even enjoy an increase.
There are two reasons for this:
- Like Snippets, AI Overviews appear at the very top of SERPs. All Overviews provide links to the sources from which information has been taken, boosting your website’s visibility.
- The links to sources are prominently placed within the AI Overviews themselves, further increasing visibility and increasing the likelihood of users visiting your website if the Overview alone doesn’t offer all the information they were looking for.
Given the nature of law firms, often providing a wealth of services, each with specific details and processes, it’s likely that an Overview won’t fully resolve a legal query.
Even if it does, prospective legal clients will still need to access your website if they’re ready to take the next step, such as requesting a callback.
With that in mind, you don’t want to overlook Google’s AI Overviews when it comes to SEO if you want to gain an edge over your competitors who might not be taking it as seriously.
Are Google AI Overviews the future?
New search engine developments and features are constantly coming and going.
But Google’s AI Overviews appear to be here to stay.
Google states since launching Overviews in the US, people using them use search more and are more satisfied with their results.
That is despite AI Overviews only appearing for 7% of search queries on the 30th of June 2024, as reported by the Verge.
The AI Overview is still in its infancy so expect these figures to increase as Google learns more about the system’s performance and continues to optimise it further.
So, be sure to lay the foundations early and make AI Overviews an important element of your law firm’s SEO, preparing you for what’s to come later down the line.
SEO tips to rank in Google AI Overviews.
Currently, Google uses Automatic Inclusion, meaning it doesn’t offer any specific recommendations or tips as to how you should optimise your content for AI Overviews.
They suggest anyone following their standard SEO best practices has a good chance of being featured in an Overview.
This is supported by the fact that AI Overviews now match one or more of the webpages from the top 10 Google organic search results 99.5% of the time, according to recent data shared from Search Engine Land.
Clearly, following SEO recommendations is still the way to go for ranking highly, but there are a handful of best practices which are particularly important to whether your website will feature in AI Overviews.
Enhance your keyword research
Researching relevant keywords your target audience is using on search engines has always been vital to any SEO strategy.
This has remained the case ever since the launch of Google’s RankBrain, giving the search engine the ability to better understand human language, rather than relying on exact match keywords.
Likewise, AI Overviews are unlikely to spell the end of traditional keyword research any time soon.
But that doesn’t mean they won’t have an impact on the way it should be conducted.
With the algorithm’s ability to better understand natural language, there’s less need to base your content solely around target keywords.
If you aren’t already, be sure to conduct thorough research into relevant topics and questions asked by your target audience.
From here, you can call upon your legal expertise to provide natural answers which are easy to understand for both users and search engines.
Once you’ve conducted research into common queries, you’ll likely find your content naturally features many of the keywords you want to target.
You can also carefully work them in if you do want to improve your keyword content score, but data provided by ahrefs suggests a slight difference between your score and your competitors’ won’t make too much of a difference, so don’t obsess over it.
Ensuring you’re covering key topics insightfully and naturally will be much more beneficial for your rankings and make your content more favourable for AI Overviews.
Produce high-quality content
As well as ensuring you answer your audience’s most common questions, you’ll also want to ensure the quality of your content is top-notch.
As law professionals, your audience is relying on your team to explain the complex legal matters they’re likely unfamiliar with.
Therefore, you need to lean on your own expertise and experience.
While AI can be useful for brainstorming and structuring, you shouldn’t rely on it to produce your content entirely.
If you do, you won’t be offering any unique insight your audience couldn’t access via an AI software themselves.
Not only that, AI-generated content often sounds robotic and generic, failing to capture the desired tone you need to resonate with your readers.
As well as being unfavourable for prospective clients, content which is obviously AI-generated may also be penalised by search engines.
Right now, Google’s only advice for featuring in AI Overviews is to follow their Search Essentials, which emphasise the importance of helpful, reliable, and people-first content.
One feature you can offer that AI can’t is citing your own credible sources.
Consider your content structure
Giving your content a logical structure is another aspect of ensuring it is high quality, suitable for AI Overviews, and optimised for SEO.
This starts by using clear, hierarchical headings which reflect your audience’s common questions and incorporate your target keywords where possible.
As a law firm SEO marketer, structuring your content in this way shouldn’t be unfamiliar to you.
This has long been an on-page SEO best practice but it’s more important than ever after the launch of AI Overviews.
While AI Overviews typically provide more detail than Snippets, they’re still there to provide fast, simple answers that save the user scouring various pages for the same information.
Therefore, using clear, query-based headers followed by direct, succinct answers not only makes it easier for search engines to identify the information but also makes it more favourable for AI Overviews.
In addition to your main body copy, you’ll also need to optimise the structure of your meta descriptions.
This can be tricky given the character limit, but there are a few techniques you can try.
Just like traditional page results on SERPs, meta descriptions also appear where sources of information are cited within the AI Overview section itself.
With AI Overviews and, consequently, your meta descriptions appearing at the top of the page, they present a good opportunity to entice users to visit your website.
You need to offer some value the user hasn’t already gained via the Overview.
This could be a CTA encouraging them to download a resource or request a call back from a solicitor, for example.
That way, you’re still driving traffic to your website, potentially leading to new clients later down the line.
These could include client stories, stats, and expert opinions from your legal team.
Creating author pages outlining each member’s expertise and experience helps to build trust with your prospective audience, and highlights to search engines that the content is reliable.
Be sure to link from any thought leadership articles to the associated author page.
Incorporating visuals such as images, videos, and infographics can also help to break down complex topics, further making your content more favourable for AI Overviews.
And finally, as with any piece of content, you’ll want to ensure all the information is accurate and error-free.
Apply schema markup
Schema markup, also known as structured data, plays a key role in enhancing your SEO performance and increasing your chances of featuring in rich results, of which AI Overviews are the latest to be introduced.
This markup can be added to your content, categorising it based on its type and structure, whether it be an Article, Product, HowTo, or otherwise.
It allows search engines to better understand your content, making it eligible to be displayed for users conducting relevant searches.
One way it could be displayed is in Google’s AI-driven content, such as Overviews, which are prominent and clearly visible on SERPS, potentially driving more traffic to your website.
Google highlighted a few cases where companies have seen significant upturns in traffic as a direct result of adding structured data to select pages.
For example, Rotten Tomatoes added structured data to 100,000 unique pages and measured a 25% higher click-through rate on those pages compared to those without structured data.
If you want to replicate this for your law firm website, take advantage of Google’s Structured Data Test to not only see which rich results can be produced from the structured data on your page, but also to preview how it will appear on SERPs.
Optimise website performance
As we know, links are provided to the sources of information used to generate an AI Overview.
With that in mind, it’s unlikely for Google to feature your website, encouraging people to visit if it’s lacking in performance.
Ensuring your website offers optimal performance is something you should already be doing, and the launch of AI Overviews makes it increasingly important for SEO.
Make sure your website offers fast loading speeds, enabling people to explore beyond the information provided in the Overview quickly and easily, reducing bounce rates which harm your search engine ranking.
Additionally, utilise responsive web design to ensure all the elements on your website, including images, copy, buttons, menus, and links automatically adjust to fit the size of the user’s screen.
This ensures nothing gets cut off and all the information the user needs is clearly visible, enhancing their experience and reducing the chances of them quickly leaving your site.
Again, this keeps your bounce rates low, benefitting your SEO performance and increasing your chances of featuring in AI Overviews.
Juggling heavy caseloads while keeping the technical elements of your law firm website in optimal condition is no mean feat.
That’s why we highly recommend leaving it to the experts.
Enlist the help of an experienced web development agency to monitor and update your website, ensuring it stays secure and performing to its full capacity at all times.
Stay on top of algorithm updates
Google’s AI Overview is still in its infancy, so much so that Google is still learning about the update itself.
As with any new feature, ongoing tweaks are likely to be made to optimise the effectiveness of AI Overviews, giving the user the best possible experience.
Google will share information about the changes they’ve made, which will inevitably impact your law firm’s SEO strategy, as well as altering or introducing techniques to feature in AI Overviews.
So, while Google provides next to no information about how you should optimise for AI Overviews besides following their standard SEO guidelines, this could change in the near future.
And you’ll want to know exactly when it does, allowing you to take advantage and gain the edge over your competitors in the race for a spot in the AI Overviews at the very top of the search engine results page.
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