[00:00:00] Speaker A: When I first played with ChatGPT, I looked at my wife and business partner and I said, I'm gonna have to go take the bar because we're gonna be out of business in a year. What we're looking for now is writers who can craft a story, who can take that skeleton, that initial piece of content, and mold it into something that actually provides value to the reader. You actually might be hurting the website's performance by creating a content that has been written hundreds of thousands of times over the past 30 years on the Internet.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Lockbook podcast. I'm your host, Zachary Nerd. You can find me on Social at It's Zack B. In each episodes, I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about their strategies and insights driving extreme business growth. The Entrepreneur Lockbook Podcast is sponsored by weptpr, where we're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build their thought, leadership and business by getting them on podcasts and launching their own podcasts. Today we're joined by David Arato, founder of Lexicon Legal Content, a specialized content marketing agency that creates SEO optimized, paternity reviewed content exclusively for law firms and legal marketing agencies across North America. David brings a unique perspective to the legal marketing world with his JD From Saint Louis University School of Law and a background as a professional cellist before entering the legal field. Since founding Lexicon legal content in 2012, which is 14 years, he's helped over 300 law firms revolutionize your online presence through strategic content marketing. David, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Thanks for having me on.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: I love it. David, one of the first thing I always like to ask any guest that comes on this show, it is an entrepreneurship, it is a business podcast and you've been in this space for a little while here. I'd love to hear if you had to rebuild your company from scratch, knowing everything that you know, what's like the one thing that you would implement from day one that you feel a lot of entrepreneurs get, like totally wrong.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: That is a fantastic question and something I've been thinking a lot about actually lately. It is 100% documenting our processes.
You know, when you start a business and you're growing and you're busy and exciting and you're signing on new clients, it's easy to forget just how much you're doing intuitively.
And when it comes time to scale, you've got to get all that information out of your head and teach it to other people. And if I started this whole thing over, I would start documenting SOPs from the beginning and creating a library. So when you do onboard someone new, when you do start building your team out, those processes are there and they're clear and they're repeatable.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: That is so true. And I'll tell you, I just started rebuilding like a different service offering within our company and I just saw again like the amount of sops resources I had to create for this new service. Like I looked at the other service we had was like, that's a lot. We have so many resources here. I'm like, we have to build so much. But when you have those resources process in place, it makes your life so much easier because you don't have to go back and forth. People know how to do the task and you can just improve them over time.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Such a game changer.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: And that process should be iterative. Right. Like we're constantly looking at our SOPs. And here's the great thing. When you add another service offer and when you add another vertical to your agency, if that's a bill, if that's a company you're building and you have those SOPs, you're not starting from scratch. In other words, what it took me, as you pointed out, a decade and a half to build, I think we could do in two years now in a new place if we were just starting from scratch. Knowing what I know now. But that's also the entrepreneurial path is learning these things.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Beauty of it.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Another thing I would. I'm going to answer your question while I'm on the soapbox here. So we've been fully remote since the beginning. We have been remote, dispersed team. Never once have had a physical office outside of my home office. And like we receive our mail at a virtual office in Denver and we actually have a conference room there. So we do hold meetings there occasionally. But I digress. Building in isolation is really difficult and I think it's important for especially young entrepreneurs to remember that like the problems that you are experiencing are almost certainly not novel.
I don't know. Right. Unless you were at the cutting edge of business that has never been built before.
But even if you are, operational issues are the same across various industries. Right. So when you build in isolation, if you're remote and you're an Internet based entrepreneur, you still should build community because you can learn things from people in other industries that other people have solved the problems that you're facing. So don't try and sit there and bang your head against the wall for months and months trying to figure it out because the solution is out there. So do not discount the power of networking.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Oh yeah, I think one of the things I love doing like when we're trying to break a new vertical, learn new things, just pay people ahead of you to learn like what they've done, how they've done it and then just be able to skip some of the the issues in months you would have spent trying to build something new.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Years.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Oh years definitely. But yeah, I think you're spawn on the community aspect of things is something like really big on talking about the community. You guys have obviously worked with quite a lot of like law firms, agencies and stuff like that. And one of the things I'd love to understand is whenever you guys start working with someone like what's going to look the process from the moment a firm reaches out to you and when they start seeing results. Because obviously content marketing, there's so many different things that you can do if we think about SEO. So it's like a long term game, it takes a while. But I'd be curious to hear about your process and how you guys help your clients. Obviously crush.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Really depends on the client. So we work both with law firms and with marketing agencies that have law firm clients that don't have the in house capability to handle legal content. I'll go a little bit deeper on that. Legal is a regulated profession. As everyone knows. You've got to pass the bar. The bar does regulate the way attorneys advertise and all of the marketing materials, including your website, the blog on your website, the individual pages on your website, any press releases you put out, any sort of content your law firm creates that could be interpreted as marketing or advertising materials needs to be compliant with bar rules.
So agencies rely on the fact that we have specialized legal professional leadership to ensure that the content they're providing their clients is legally accurate and compliant with the rules of professional conduct as they relate to advertising regarding moving the needle for clients and how long it takes to see results. As you pointed out, SEO is a long game. But I will tell you that recently with the AI overviews, content freshness is a huge factor in getting into the AI overviews. And we're seeing pieces of content that we write for ourselves, for lexicon specifically and for our clients. We're seeing those getting into AI reviews within a matter of hours.
Now I don't know, attribution is notoriously, excuse me, difficult generally, but attribution when it comes to AI overviews is even harder. Often these are zero click inquiries, right? Like the Google user will see the overview content, the law firm. And there's no attribution that this is coming from the AI overview. So how long does it take? Six months or six hours? I don't know.
It's really hard to say because attribution is so difficult.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Oh yeah. And I think attribution across so many different channel, like when you look at like Google, Facebook and everything like that, like some people it's going to be attributed to Google. It's. Oh no, it actually came from like Facebook. But, but they might have done a research about you and your company before committing to buying. So yeah, it's very crucial and I guess with AI, is there anything specific that you guys are doing to like get ahead of that, be able to provide more if not efficient but more clear metrics and like a, a general picture to like clients when you're talking about attribution.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: So I'm going to say this because of our business model and the fact that we work with agencies that are full service digital marketing and we are content only, we tend to rely on our agency partners to do the tracking for the major of our work. So those metrics look good. But again that attribution. So you brought up a really good point. I think more than ever in marketing, whether it's law or consumer products or whatever, it's more important than ever to be omnipresent because like how many touch. We all know this, we all know the statistic. It's seven touch points before client calls.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Isn'T it 11 now?
[00:08:08] Speaker A: I think, I'm not sure.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Something like that.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: You're probably right. But the, the point is that like you don't know that the client saw you on Instagram and then the client read a blog and then you shared a blog on Facebook and then like next thing you know, that's when they Google your, then they do a branded Google search and then that's when they call your law firm. Like how do you attribute that to any of the. So then like for us I think it's really important just to remember to be omnipresent in marketing generally. I think it's more important than ever.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: When you look at the big picture. It's hard to attribute these types of things. Like there has to be a solution later on, like some deep level that's going to be able to do it. But I think it's going to take a little while before we're there.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Semrush I see is trying to get me to sign up for their like most recent iteration of their AI. Tracking and I know Ahrefs is doing the same thing but I'm not sure how accurate the tools are. Also like in the big problem too is the zero click search. The zero click contact from the searcher. Like how do you can attribute it?
[00:09:04] Speaker B: And we were talking about like Google. One thing I think I saw, maybe it was on like your LinkedIn or something like that. We talk, you talk about the E A T principle like the experience, expertise, authority and like trust for like law firms specifically like how do you ensure that the content meet these standards and why is it like so critical for them compared to like other industries?
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Sure. So Google has categorized certain, categorizes certain websites and the content of those websites as relevant to your money and your life. And it's this is clearly outlined in the Google search rater quality guidelines and it is for any industry that deals with. And I'm going to get the language, I'm not going to get it exact but it's something having to do with if this content has a likelihood or a possibility of affecting someone's health, safety, finances or legal status or something like this. I'm paraphrasing here. Those sites are held to a higher standard. Google has categorized them as your money or your life sites in industry province YMYL sites. And we're going to keep going with the Alphabet soup here. If your site is ymyl, it needs to demonstrate expertise, experience, authority and trust. And that acronym is eeat. So the long, the short version is YMYL sites need eat. But yeah, like it's Alphabet soup as I mentioned. So when you're creating content for these industries, it has to demonstrate and align with these four principles of demonstrating these things. Experience, expertise, authority, interest. The way we do that for our clients.
Each pillar of EAT needs to be demonstrated separately, but they cohesively are all part. Google has identifies trust as the most important aspect and so the other three kind of support the idea that this is a trustworthy website that we assume, not assume that we strongly believe that the content of this website is accurate and is going to be helpful to our searchers. If you take each pillar individually, experience can be demonstrated in content by discussing the attorney or firm's years of practice, case results, educational achievements, publications, media appearances, and now we're moving to expertise.
And again these are. While they're four vertical pillars, I think there's a lot of overlap between the two. Yeah, if you're demonstrating expertise, those exact same publications that demonstrate experience can be used to demonstrate expertise. Yeah, but also the depth of the content on the website is does this talk about whatever. Let's use personal injury as a practice area to discuss how deep does this content go on car accidents? How deep do we go into the law? Do we talk about nuance within the law? That's another way of authority is demonstrated by citing out to authoritative resources. So if I mention a statute in my content, as an attorney, I should link to the.govcitation of that statute or case law or media reports that or media stories that are supporting your. Your position.
All of these factors ultimately end up in a trustworthy website.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it goes like way beyond just like the surface level. There's so many like deep layers that no one like thinks about. I didn't know that. So I learned something new here.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: So you're peeling back the layers of the onion is what it is. And in law there's many layers to peel back. And more than ever, especially with AI gener generated content, I'm going to call it AI Slop right now.
And fundamentally, if it's just if all of us have the access to the same tools, which we do, if we have an Internet connection, we can all go to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Perplexity and ask it to write a 1000 word webpage on give me 1000 words of content for a website about Los Angeles car accidents. If we're all, if we all have access to those tools, that output is just the starting the same thing.
It is. And none of it's going to rank. It's going to be buried on page 100 if it's indexed so at all, more than ever if we. It's like the democratization of content creation more than ever. It's important to add real value to that content in order to a, get it to rank and B, to build trust with the reader and get them to call you and ask you to represent them in their legal issue.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: And I was actually going to touch on to that because there's so much AI content nowadays. I was just on a podcast earlier today and I was asked about this. Like, how do you maintain, like, how do you become like different? How do you maintain that voice? And I use Twitter X so like pretty often and I'll just scroll and I see so many people, you start reading tweets, you're like, okay, they didn't write that. Like it's AI. And this applies in so much context. And I mean you're, you're talking about AI Slop, AI garbage, whatever you want to call it here. You've been pretty vocal about, like, the difference about, like, having quality legal content. I feel like when we're talking about, like, legal, that's even, like, more important because you need to be very more accurate than just some business entrepreneurship type motivational content or anything like that. Absolutely. Like, how do you go about maintaining that, like, human expertise, like that human touch, but also having the legal accuracy, but still being able to scale that content production? Because you guys are obviously working with so many law firms and at scale, there has to be not a secret sauce, but you've definitely built something.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Let me be clear about this. Like, in this, we certainly use AI in our content creation process. Of course, everyone, I think it would be. There are people in my industry and competitors of ours who have like, dug very much into. This is human written, and all of our people are human and human.
And I understand the. I understand.
Yeah. But also I think it's coming from a place of wow. So this was me three years ago. Yeah, three years and a month ago now. When I first played with ChatGPT, I looked at my wife and business partner and I said, aaron, I was like, so I'm not licensed to practice law here in Colorado. And I was like, I'm gonna have to go take the bar, because we're gonna be out of business in a year. You know, I thought this when I played with ChatGPT, and I think that place of fear, like, the initial reaction was like, how do we differentiate ourselves from. How do we build a moat around what we've been doing, which is creating written, textual content for law firms. Right. We use AI in our process. And I think you would be doing your clients a disservice if you didn't use AI because it's allowing us to create better content more quickly and more inexpensively for our clients.
That said, the bar has just been raised as to what good content is. I think in being in this now for 15 years.
It's funny that before, like, what we were worried about is hiring writing staff that was very accurate grammatically.
That problem has been solved now by technology.
What we're looking for now is writers who can create, who can craft a story, who can make a piece of content that may have started with an AI draft, maybe not. Maybe it started with an AI outline. But take that skeleton, that initial piece of content, and mold it into something that actually provides value to the reader, actually adds something new to the online conversation. Because especially these days, there's no way you're going to get the piece for things to do after a car accident.
That piece is not going to rank because it's been written hundreds of thousands of times, likely over the past 20 years of content marketing, 30 years of content marketing and AI has ingested that content and will spit out that content again in a smooth generic way. And it's not going to rank. So what we. So we have a multi step process.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Of.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Determining the client's voice, generating the content, optimizing the content, ensuring that it's legally accurate, ensuring that it's compliant with the advertising rules, then optimizing it even further with internal links, external links, making sure it aligns with the law firm's voice.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Also there because you're writing to really three audiences here. I think you're writing to Google to get it to rank. You're writing to the reader to get them to call your law firm. But then you're also writing to the legal profession at large because referrals are huge.
You need to be sure that your firm is well represented. So in the we're. We're also the final review is making sure that it's a piece of content that reflects the firm's professionalism.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: And practice well.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: So many different layers to the onion that you could be.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: That's right. And when I look back at thinking. So this is kind of my point when I look back at after playing with Chat GPT, I remember it was right before Christmas and I was like this is going to ruin my holidays.
So because I wasn't I felt like it was an existential threat at the time. Yeah. It's all the things I just described are things that, that the AIs cannot do at this time, at this moment. As we have this conversation.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: For now.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: For now. Exactly. But then this becomes an absurdist argument. So AI gets better and it starts doing some of the stuff that I just listed off as things that we do manually. So let's say it starts doing some of it. But then there will still be an opportunity for human input to differentiate even that content from the stuff that again like the democratization the bar will raise. But then someone will do something different to differentiate it and get it to rank. Right.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: There's always going to be different ways of creating your moth and like how to like present yourself creating different type of like content. But I think like right now, as you said, it's about for the legal world there's three main like vertical audiences that you're trying to like cater that towards. And then in business it might be one vertical, two verticals. But it's about finding that authentic voice as well. Where you don't want to be just pushing out the same thing that AI just like generates in like a few seconds. Because I see so many people doing that and it's so easy to tell. It's okay. Those are not really some interesting insights. Anyone could have learned that. I'm not learning anything new and I think that's something very important.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: That's right. And frankly, if you're paying someone else to do that, you're lighting, you might as well light your money on fire. Oh yeah. And I see this in our industry and it's unfortunate. And I see marketing agencies look at some of them looking at content as just another deliverable, like it's another thing to check off the list, right? So they sign an agency and they're like, we're going to build a website, we're going to do the on site optimization, we're going to build some backlinks and we're going to do content.
And they want to check this box of content. We've delivered eight blogs per month and two have been posted every week.
And if you are charging your client to put AI generated content without an additional layer of like several, I should say several additional steps to actually make that first AI draft good content, you're, you actually might be hurting the website's performance.
Right? Creating a bloated website with content that has been written hundreds of thousands of times over the past 30 years on.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: The Internet, that's not going to rank.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Whatsoever if it gets indexed at all. And that's the thing, like I, I, one of the things we don't talk about, and this is not my area of expertise, but it's just something I've heard other people discuss. Google has a problem right now. The how is it going to keep up with the huge amount of content that's just like, how does it index it all? How much compute is that taking from Google? As people are generating 1,000 pieces of content in two days to build a website, right?
This is a, it's a strain on Google systems. So is it going to start ignoring low quality content? And if it does, in that case, why are you even making it? Why are you wasting your time and money? You know what I mean?
[00:20:28] Speaker B: So I think probably over the next couple months, couple like years or so, there's going to be so many different changes. Obviously Google is always updating their algorithm, searching and everything like that, but I think it's probably going to be more favorable towards more authentic content. Human Everything like that. And I know that still has been like their motto where like a lot of the AI content, they're going to penalize that. Like, I remember there was like a website that a couple months ago, I saw it, where they grew the website entirely with like AI content. They were publishing like an article every second. I think they got 5 million monthly visitors.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: And then it just boom. It got not shut down, but there was like no traffic going to it. And I was like, that's interesting.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: So it's interesting because Google has like spoken out of both sides of his mouth, so to speak. Yeah. On this, on the AI content thing, because their documentation towards people, website developers and people in the SEO space is very clear about their outward position is we don't care how content is produced so long as it provides value to readers.
Okay. On the other side of it, they're like, do not use AI to create content just to manipulate the search rankings. Which I think speaks to your point. You publish and they don't want scaled. Content abuse is what they call it internally.
So they're like, use AI, but use it. And I think that's actually fair guidance. That's fair. We should use these tools. Right. Like, we should use them to be as efficient as possible. That being said, we shouldn't try and game the system. I think that's Google's. I think that's the. I think that if you read between the lines, it's that.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And that was a pretty extreme example. I just remember seeing that. I was like, that is crazy. Like the infrastructure that you need to have behind that to make that work. That was crazy.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: But yeah, and now look at it. If the site's DE index. What a waste of time and money.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Exactly. David, really appreciate you coming on. We somewhat talked about like AIs and everything like that. I learned a few things. So I really appreciate coming on. And for anyone that wants to get in touch with you because I know decently active on LinkedIn, you got your website. What's like the best way for people to get in touch with you here?
[00:22:32] Speaker A: I'm working on that LinkedIn engagement, man.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Okay, fair enough.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: So people can email me directly. David, Lexicon legal content.com I'm easy to find on all the socials and Our website is www.Lexicon. legalcontent.com.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Perfect. So great. Everyone, you heard that? Lexical, lexicon, legal content.com if you want to learn more to listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You can also find more
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