David Arato on Why Zero Effort Content Has Zero Value

Jordan Lally:0:00
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Assistance Podcast. Everyone, please welcome the one and only Mr. David Arado. David, how you doing today, my friend? Absolutely, yes, sir. Now I ask everyone this question, what is your offer and who do you guys sell to? Or what do you sell and who is it to?

David Arato:0:08
Great, thanks for having me on,

David Arato:0:17
Right to it, I love it. So we create SEO and AEO focused content for law firms. We work both as a white label partner to digital marketing agencies that have law firm clients and directly with law firms.

Jordan Lally:0:29
Interesting, interesting. Which which do you prefer working directly with attorneys or white label services?

David Arato:0:36
So historically we have been mostly, I'd say about 60 to 70 % a white label provider. So often the end user doesn't even know we exist. So this is what happens. Agencies get law from clients. They tend not to be attorney owned, right? Or they don't have attorney leadership and they can build a beautiful website and they understand technical SEO and they can do back linking and outreach, et cetera. But the objection that they always get from their clients and not always often get from their clients is who's gonna write the content.

You're not a lawyer. You don't know the law. You don't know compliance. Like there are little things about legal marketing that people don't even, you wouldn't know it if you didn't know it. Most states, can't call yourself a specialist or an expert, even if you've been doing it for 20 years, right? But you need to be a lawyer. You don't need to be a lawyer, but most non-lawyers don't know that, right? So they outsource content to us, if that makes sense. So we are behind the curtain. But so that, go ahead.

Jordan Lally:1:24
No one else.

And you said you're your attorney led. I think on our first conversation, you said that you went to law school, got the degree. You said, forget that I'm going into business.

David Arato:1:37
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a licensed attorney. have the JD. use that, I use that professionally. My wife is co-owner of the business. She is an attorney licensed in Missouri. So we are attorney owned technically, but like there's a lot of legal education acumen in the organization. To go back to what you said, we are working more and more with law firms directly these days than as a white label partner, both strategically to own the relationship with the end client. There's a lot of risk if you have all your eggs in one basket, obviously like, and

Jordan Lally:1:45
nice.

David Arato:2:08
AI visibility has given us an opportunity to kind of, I'm going to say, distinguish content marketing from SEO writ large. So we're getting our clients into the AI overviews and AI results with just content, not the rest of the SEO package. So we're kind of breaking that off into its own service offering for law firms.

Jordan Lally:2:29
Talk to us about that. When you say content opposed to like the other aspects, what you mean?

David Arato:2:34
Sure. So I think you can divide SEO into three pillars, technical SEO, back linking, and content marketing. So content marketing, specifically what we do is we create text-based content. again, historically, this has been, we've been in business since 2012. Historically, it was a ton of blogging and press releases and practice area pages and homepage content.

Jordan Lally:2:44
time tomorrow.

David Arato:3:02
We are getting into video as more and more content being produced as video and it's indexed differently than it used to be. But that content is what, Google is crawling and returning as results to people who are searching for legal services. Also now, LLMs, Clawed, Chat, GBT, the infrastructure that they're running on is ingesting this content and using it to create its answers to user queries as well.

So basically there's a huge content machine, a huge content beast that is hungry all the time, and we're feeding it.

Jordan Lally:3:39
Gotcha. when, if I were an attorney and I wanted to work with you directly, what would I get as a total service package and like ballpark cost?

David Arato:3:48
Well, let me share my screen. No, I'm kidding. I'm not going to give you a proposal. So we have different packages and we're playing with these all the time, especially. this working directly with law firms, like law firms have approached us in the past and we've said yes, and we've worked with them, but we're now we're really focused on creating productizing our service in a way that's more, more attractive to law firms. So we're working on different packages. They can look anything like this. You're to get eight blogs. You're going to keep, we're going to do keyword research.

Jordan Lally:3:50
Hahaha!

Jordan Lally:4:06
Smart.

David Arato:4:15
to figure out what keywords to target, what's high volume and feasible to rank for. You're going to get the actual content. So that could look like this, eight blogs and two practice area pages and five content refreshes. And what that means is we go in and we refresh existing content to make it more attractive to the LLMs and to Google. absolutely. And we can totally get into that. We can nerd out about that all you want. Then you're get a report at the end of the day. There's a client platform.

Jordan Lally:4:35
It's important, yes.

David Arato:4:44
we're looking at anything on the low end from 2,400 bucks, 2,500 bucks to 5,000. And often these services are not, we're not trying to compete with your SEO agency or the people handling your website. We're trying to be additive, right? We're trying to add an additional service that they don't offer that is focused on creating content at scale that is hyper-targeted, hyper-personalized to your law firm and definitely not AI slop. So.

You know, when AI came out three years ago, four years ago, guess now almost, not came out when ChatGPT launched and took everyone's, know, it took the attention of the SEO community. I thought we were out of business, but the truth is more content's being made than ever before, and it's even harder to stand out. So good content is a premium value right now.

Jordan Lally:5:36
I do agree. someone else mentioned this, they were in the PR industry and they said, if everyone uses AI to write your content, then no one is going to differentiate themselves from anyone in the marketplace. You're going to be an AI slot person. like people are going to lose respect for you almost, opposed to having your own bots.

David Arato:5:52
100%.

David Arato:5:57
Absolutely. think I heard one of my colleagues and a partner of ours say on a podcast, so I'm stealing his line. What is Google's incentive to even index articles that have been written hundreds or thousands of times before? And the output from chat, GBT or Claude is by design generic. Like that is how these operate. Like these LLMs are, I mean, it's a little reductionist to say this, but they're like highly advanced. predictive tech systems. So if they are just pumping out content that has been written 100 times before, it's not gonna rank. It's not gonna be different. We all have access to the same tools. So, my new slogan has been zero effort content has zero value. Either of us could go to ChatGPT today and pump out 50 or 500 articles on a topic we know nothing about and publish them and try and rank for

Jordan Lally:6:44
Mm.

David Arato:6:55
HVAC services in Los Angeles, right? But like, why would Google rank that website? It's not going to it's actually going to tank it. You know,

Jordan Lally:7:06
So let's talk about that and what your approach is when it comes to actually ranking for attorney.

David Arato:7:12
Sure, absolutely. We subscribe to Google's guidance on demonstrating EEAT. Experience, here we go. We're getting into the alphabet soup. So sites that deal with your money or your life, Y-M-Y-L, so finance, medicine, need to demonstrate expertise, experience, authority, and trust.

Jordan Lally:7:22
What is that? Okay.

David Arato:7:41
E E A T in the industry parlance. So you go to chat, GBT, and you say, give me a thousand words on car accident law, write me a thousand word article on what to do after a car accident. Well, first of all, it's probably going to pull very similar article to what my company has created over the past decade and a half. It's going to look a lot like that because we've done a lot of those articles in the past. And it's not going to demonstrate any of those things because AI does not have experience, expertise, authority and trust.

So all the content we're creating infuses, so another person in my industry, I'm stealing from Conrad's Psalm, I'm gonna shout you out right now. Do what the bots can't. Like a bot hasn't practiced law, right? A bot hasn't been in court. So infuse your content with firsthand experience, for example, biographical information, professional experience, professional publications, like have the content demonstrate those four pillars of EEAT. in whatever way makes sense. Like it doesn't make sense in a technical piece to talk about maybe your biography that much, but in your about us page, like lean heavy into your personal experience and professional experience as an attorney. Right? like demonstrating those four elements in a piece looks different to every piece that we're creating, but that's how you stand out from.

Jordan Lally:9:01
No, I love that perspective. think if you just rely on LLMs or AI to do all of your thinking for you, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You're not going to grow as a person or a human, et cetera. I do think that we can utilize LLMs that I'm sure you would agree to like speed up the process, but don't rely on the final output. We have to have human element 100%, no questions asked.

David Arato:9:25
Well, then where's the value in that, right? That's what it comes down to. Like if we all have the same output, none of it's gonna differentiate. So it has truly has no value. The cost of creating shitty content has gone to zero, right? The cost of creating great content is more than it used to be. Cause it's like more human intervention than it ever was.

Jordan Lally:9:44
Yeah. When you are creating content for attorneys, it primarily for their website to help them rank or is anything like with LinkedIn, Twitter maybe, because those also help with LLMs?

David Arato:9:56
That's a good question. Historically, no, we have stuck to, and this is, it wasn't strategic. It's a result of our partnerships. So with these big SEO agencies, we really followed what the market was ordering from us. We have big clients that are doing a high-value business with us, so we are servicing them in the way that they want to be serviced. So again, historically, it's been SEO-focused content, so on-site content, or... guest posts in order to attract backlinks or press releases back when that was a game and it's don't like I think those links are now excuse me often no follow press releases were a big deal for many many years there so typically it's been seo focused content that being said I mentioned we're getting into video we are getting into linkedin we are going to get into social those are things we're just expanding our service offering because as we work more

Jordan Lally:10:28
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:10:34
Yeah.

David Arato:10:52
And this speaks more to our business structure than it does to our services. It's funny when you've been in business for 15 years and you take your same core service and like realize the different market segment has a completely different set of pain points. So you got to repackage it. It's the same product and service, I should say. It's the same service, but you got to package it differently. Anyway, like when we approach or we get approached by a law firm or if we approach a law firm, they often say to us, okay, great. You can handle our blog content and our, on our practice area page content, but can you do social for us? Like they want the whole package.

Right? And with our agency clients, often our services were duplicative of things that they were already offering. like, they're like, just give us the blog content. We don't really want to hear about the reporting part of it. We're handling that internally. The law firms may not have that infrastructure in place there.

Jordan Lally:11:40
Yeah, because I feel like they are busy. They're busy being attorneys, right? I mean, sure. They might make a random post on LinkedIn or X or Twitter, whatever the hell you want to call it randomly, sporadically. But when it comes to structure content, schedule posts, actually like real thought leadership from the attorney's perspective, I feel like they're not actively doing that, you know?

David Arato:11:45
100%.

David Arato:12:00
They're not, and they don't have time to do it. And the worst thing you can do is have your... So I think it's like they get themselves into a... And I understand, like I went to law school, so I understand the ethical issues here. You can't have incorrect information on your website. Like that could be a bar complaint. It could even be a malpractice lawsuit in certain situations. If a client, for example, relied on... If a current client relied on outdated or poor or incorrect information on your website and took action that affected their legal rights, that could be malpractice.

So you don't want your paralegal doing it. You don't want your associate, because you still have to review it, right? And then don't want your associate doing it, because your associate should be out there billing, right? Making money. So who can do it? Not a copywriter that you find in Fiverr. So I get where they're at. They don't necessarily know we exist. So hey, here we are. Call Lexicon. We can help.

Jordan Lally:12:52
No, for sure. Do you mind if we backtrack a bit? you went to, obviously went to college, you wanted to become an attorney, and then you decided to pivot. How come?

David Arato:13:01
Well, let's go back even further. was a professional cellist prior to going on.

Jordan Lally:13:04
That's awesome. I would not have guessed that. That's super cool though.

David Arato:13:09
Yeah, yeah, I just, so I was studying for the bar exam, summer after law school, and I started writing content. This was 2009, I'm gonna date myself here, but this was 2009 and horrible market. I didn't, was not a great law student. So, like the offers weren't rolling in on legal work. And I started

Jordan Lally:13:29
Yeah.

David Arato:13:38
writing during bar study, I started writing content for a small agency that no longer exists in the St. Louis market where I'd gone to law school. And my stuff was like ranking really quickly, like, like first page top ranking, right? And like, I like writing, and I think I've always been a decent writer. I mean, a good writer, I should say I'll own that I'm a good writer. And while waiting for bar results and all this, I quickly realized that there was a huge market for this. Again, this is 2009. This is like the wild west of content marketing. And this is back when keyword stuffing was still kind of a thing, but on its way out, but SEO was not nearly as sophisticated as it today. And I realized pretty quick, okay, so if this agency needs me, there probably are tons of agencies in the country that needs me, that needs this service. law firms need the service and I don't have to be licensed in 50 states to grow this business, know, nationwide, because I'm not practicing law. Like I'm using the JD, right? I'm trading on the, on the degree that I just got. Like I have the, I have the skills to make this happen. And I saw like a big market opportunity. And, and also there's like, there's another part of the story. When at that small agency I was at one day, the SEO specialist calls me. and goes, hey, Dave, I'm going out on my own. I'm gonna need a content vendor. And I tell Chris Dreier of Rankings, I go, I don't know what that means, man, but like, let's give it a try. Next thing I know, so they blew up. So they dragged us with us, right? Dragged us with them, I should say. We hitched our wagon to the right horse, so to speak. So like, we had a initial partner that grew the business really quickly and created infrastructure for us to... you know, it's the kind of thing with business, like you do once, insert, like rinse and repeat. So we organically became a white label in just industry partner to this agency and other agencies needed us as well.

Jordan Lally:15:43
Yeah, I feel like, from my perspective, the end goal for most people when going to college is to earn the money that they want to If you can earn the revenue without going to college, then by all means, like do that. Like that's, that's the path that I chose. got into sales immediately, did not go to college, but it sounds to me like what you're, what you're articulating here is I found a huge market gap. I can fill the fricking gap and make pretty decent money, why would I not do that? You know what I mean?

David Arato:16:14
100 % I mean, I was making more money than my friends who are practicing law like a year into business. And, and I love St. Louis and I live in Breckenridge, Colorado. It's beautiful. Like it's a beautiful place, right? And like, law practice is really geographically oriented for a lot of people like you get to know the courts, you get to be known in your community. And I think there's for even very successful lawyers, they're golden handcuffs often in terms of like, where you set up your practice, right? Like,

Jordan Lally:16:17
You know what I mean?

David Arato:16:42
And I'd grown up in Salem. I didn't want to live there necessarily, but I ended up getting a big scholarship to go to law school there. You know what I mean? Like that kind of thing. Like I have no regrets about my decision. Also, I had an entrepreneurial streak because like trying to make ends meet as a cellist, like a freelance musician, like that was hustle, man. Like I'm putting up flyers in the music stores like for cello lessons, right? Like in like

Jordan Lally:16:49
sure.

Jordan Lally:17:00
That's so funny.

Jordan Lally:17:08
I'm

David Arato:17:10
getting on the phone and trying to get gigs. like, I had known, I think a lot of people who go straight from high school to college, college to professional school or graduate school or not, or whatever, have never really had that hustle, had to hustle to make ends meet. Do know what I mean? Like they don't understand that they can just go offer a product or service and ask people for money. Like don't get me wrong, there's more to it than that. Like forming an LLC and tax compliance, et cetera. But fundamentally like, just go out there and do it.

Jordan Lally:17:24
Hmm.

Jordan Lally:17:40
Yeah. And I know absolutely in sales at a young adolescent age like that, late teenage, early twenties teaches you so much about yourself, life, grit, like you're describing hustle. You know, I got into insurance sales at 18 years old, did that for about a year, year and a half. I was cold calling, hitting the phones. It sucked. Not going to lie. Exactly. I eventually found my way into door to door solar sales.

David Arato:17:41
Hang up a shingle.

David Arato:17:47
Yeah.

David Arato:17:51
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

David Arato:18:03
Smiling down, smiling down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordan Lally:18:09
did that for about two and half years. It was okay. But again, taught me lot about sales, taught me a about myself, overcoming objections, getting comfortable with speaking.

David Arato:18:19
Sure. Getting a thick skin.

Jordan Lally:18:23
really thick skin, exactly. Then I was like, there has to be a better way. I'm sick of knocking on doors. And then I obviously started my agency now. I've been doing this for like six years. So that's how I got into this space. But anyways, how is it, if you don't mind describing, the dynamic with a husband and wife business?

David Arato:18:24
Yep.

David Arato:18:42
Well, we don't-

Jordan Lally:18:43
I ask because it is a dream or fantasy of mine to actually have that, but I want to hear your perspective.

David Arato:18:50
It's okay. There's really great things and really bad things just like everything in life, right? Like, so, disclaimer, we don't have kids. So that does change the dynamic. The business is kind of our baby, right? Like that's kind of the thing. So the good things, let me start with the good things. The good things are, our interests are completely aligned, right? Like if I wanted, if I said, Hey, let's get out of break, let's move to, let's move to Paris for a while. Let's go check it out. Like we could literally go do that.

Jordan Lally:19:01
That's all I have to

David Arato:19:20
And as a quick aside, I love working from Europe because you're eight hours ahead, seven hours ahead of New York, I think. Right. Like everyone's sleeping while you're working and then they get up and you have meetings in your afternoon. I might have an app or all spritz in my hand. You can't judge me. It's after five. Right. Right. Anyway, that's the good thing. Interest being aligned. Also, just the ability to like talk with your partner about like deeply about where the business is going and like be aligned on

Jordan Lally:19:33
Right, right.

David Arato:19:49
that and strategize together. Like that's been really fun. And it's been fun to grow something together, right? The bad stuff and I like, yeah, I'll get into this. It's difficult to work with someone like I can't direct. My wife is COO and she directs operations, right? I'm CEO. So my role has to do with business development, getting our name out there, doing this kind of stuff. I do owner led sales a bit. I also direct our sales team. but of course, like as CEO, there are things about operations that like, I might not like, and I might like not agree with right. And like, I cannot direct my wife to be like, this is the way we're doing it. You know what I mean? That's not gonna go well. Like Aaron would not be happy about that. like, there's got like, sometimes there's a bit of, I'm gonna say like a power vacuum. No, no, that's the wrong way to put it.

Like sometimes like a big decision needs to be made and we have, we disagree. And as a result, the decision doesn't get made and like no one owns the final, this is how we're doing it sort of thing. Right? So like there's been some, there've been hiccups in business growth because decisions that need to be made one way or the other don't get made because like no one has a final say. Right? Yeah.

Jordan Lally:21:06
Yeah, I see that being challenging because at the same time you want to do what you think is best for the business, but you also don't want to offend your partner, make your partner upset. what I'm saying? Yeah.

David Arato:21:14
100%.

David Arato:21:19
That's right. No, that's that's absolutely correct. And like

Jordan Lally:21:23
If it was a business partner, like a male or even a female business partner, it's like, exactly, fuck you, my way, highway, you're done. But if like your wife or your husband, it's like, I love them, you know?

David Arato:21:26
Totally different. Totally different. Totally different. That's it. we don't have that we can't have that conversation. Like there's not my way or the highway or like I'm not going to be like you're fired and we're getting divorced. Like that's, you know what I mean? Like that's not happening. So like, there's just, yeah, there's a decisions have to be made in tandem. there's everything is every just, there are big decisions that are not every decision, there are big decisions that are made by committee and making decisions by committee is inherently inefficient.

Jordan Lally:21:42
for sure.

David Arato:21:59
Do see what I mean? I think that's the best way to put it. When you've got two people that have to make a decision together and you gotta get on the same page about it, that can be a lot harder than, you know, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm in the wrong. I admit it. Like, don't know everything about business. But sometimes even making the wrong decision is better than not making a decision at all in the business. Because go down the wrong path, realize you fucked up, turn around and then make the right one. But at least make the fucking decision. Right? I hope. Yeah, that's right.

Jordan Lally:22:25
because you can learn, you can learn. You can cut, I have to say that, totally fine.

David Arato:22:29
I'm like this one's getting R rated quick.

Jordan Lally:22:33
It's good. It's good. I love it. Let's see. Okay. Circling back to business, imagine I am an attorney and I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. What are some things that you would probably help me with in order to rank first page of personal injury attorney?

David Arato:22:37
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

David Arato:22:48
Sure, some of the ranking factor, so first of all, you would do keyword research and look at like what the competition is doing and who's ranking well and why they're ranking well, looking at backlinks and looking at content, not that we do backlinks, but like this part of the analysis. What would we do? We would create, so we would create content generally, but targeted content, so the more, I don't know if you follow, are you like a Google watcher?

Do you pay attention to what Google's doing? Okay, so last week they had an event. I'm tripping over myself. I'm gonna back up. We would create content in a conversational way that targets keywords that people are actually searching for. A combination of high volume, high competition keywords, but also lower volume long tail keywords. Those are the keywords that are lower volume, easier to rank for, but often have higher user intent.

So like if someone searches car accident attorney, Salt Lake City, they might be me doing research. They might be a person who got in a car accident. They might also be a law student who's looking to get an interview, right? If someone searches, I need a car accident attorney in Salt Lake City after a crash? They want an attorney. So these are higher intent. So we create content targeting different sets of keywords, whether that's blog content, updating your existing content, et cetera.

A thing too that we're really leaning into hard is creating content that sort of maps, follows a map of a searcher's journey with AI. AI has changed the way people search. Like I was talking about this on a podcast just the other day. I think being good at Googling was a thing 10 years ago. learning, do you know what I mean? Like learning how to like, what, like this is a result I want. What keywords should I use to find this? searches have become much more conversational because these AI platforms, whether it's chat, GPT, Claude, or AI overviews and AI mode, should say in Google, which I'm gonna go back to that. People are having conversations with AI now. They're like, who's a good lawyer? What do they charge? Do they have good reviews? Are they good standing with the bar? I'm just making them questions as they go. because people are having, rather than doing a search and getting static results and like,

Jordan Lally:25:11
sure.

David Arato:25:17
clicking through the top 10 blue links, they're actually talking to AI in a way that we would talk about it. So the content on your website, if you want it to surface your, if you want these platforms to surface your law firm or your business generally, your content has to respond to these secondary and tertiary questions that people are asking and going down a conversational route. So we're creating content that's more conversational. Go ahead, please.

Jordan Lally:25:46
Well, I was gonna ask how would you do that from a content marketing perspective? And I'll add this one thing. Some random statistic out there that those looking up buyer or search terms, search queries, inside of LLMs, they have like a 400 % times or 4X higher probability of like actually converting because of like being really there. Yeah, but it is how do you create more conversational content?

David Arato:26:04
I saw that. converting it.

David Arato:26:13
So, I mean, a lot of it's like structural, right? Like I don't want to get too technical on it, but like using a lot of subheadings on the content page, like using an FAQ format, example, like, using, and this is, these aren't new tactics. Like this is what we were doing 10 years ago to get people into featured snippets, which if you don't know, those were like the, if you asked a question, Google would surface an answer that was a zero click result. that would show the source of it, but it would be like, how do I, what is the statute of limitations for personal injury in Utah? Two years, I think it is, off the top of my head, I don't know. But it would just give you the answer on the top of the page without having to click on a result. That's what a featured snippet was. Well, we're in featured snippets 2.0. AI mode is just, it's just an instantly generated featured snippet rather than being static, right? So we're doing the same sort of stuff, like in a piece of content using a bunch of, header tags, H2s, H3s that Google looks at differently than regular text. And like we will use AI to generate a list of questions. What would a car accident victim want to know? And then answer those questions fully in the content in a way that is designed to get them to surface when the question is asked again into AI. I'm sorry, into Google or AI.

And in filling up and answering those questions, it's almost like filling out a form. That's why I said that. In answering those questions, we're using our clients, again, experience, expertise, authority and trust, those four signals, we are using our clients' unique identifiers and the things that are unique about their firms and their practice and themselves as attorneys. We're putting that in that content to get it to be more likely to surface to that query in the future.

Jordan Lally:28:08
Got you. Okay. No, no, you're totally good. And I think this is like a copywriting principle, but if whenever you're writing copy, like a sales letter or an advertisement, whatever, it's almost as if you're having a conversation with one person and they'll, you'll state something. They'll have a question with whatever the hell you just stated. And then you'll answer that question with like the next thing that you say. Is that kind of what you're referring to when the conversation or content is more? Yeah.

David Arato:28:09
That was long-winded,

David Arato:28:36
100%. You said it much better than I did. Thank you.

Jordan Lally:28:39
You're good. Let's see. I'm trying to think here You brought up something earlier that was You said let's go down that rabbit hole, but I forgot what the freaking thing was Do you know what it was? It was about was it refreshing blogs or refreshing?

David Arato:28:56
Sure, yeah, totally. So first of all, Google puts out guidance and it put out guidance for the first time ever, little four years too late, about how to optimize content for AI search. And like it did like a myth busting section and people have been, so like the industry, the SEO industry has four years now been trying to figure out for good, with good reason, how the hell do we get people in the AI results?

Jordan Lally:29:13
Okay.

David Arato:29:26
And some of the things that people have been talking about are the importance of schema markup structured data, chunking content. And this is kind of what I was referring to with like the H2 headers and creating FAQ content, like chunks of content, like ask a question, answer the question in a chunk. Google's guidance, the myth busting section, but it's basically like just stop worrying about all this create good content. Google.

Jordan Lally:29:45
Perfect.

David Arato:29:56
knows people are gaming the system and has an incentive to get people to stop gaming the system. I mean, it does, right? Like it wants to surface the best content it can to its users. But then like people like SEOs and people like us content marketers like, okay, but fine. I don't want to game it. But let me, how do I do this the best way? I want to get my, I want to move the needle for my clients. The rabbit hole is Google says one thing and then does another. Like

Jordan Lally:30:00
Yeah

David Arato:30:24
I have posted a piece of content without, it says structured data isn't that important. It's not more important than it used to be. I've posted a piece of content without structured data, waited a week, added schema markup structured data to it a week later. Boom, it's in the AI overviews. Similarly, like, it's one of the myth busting things was do not refresh content for AI search specifically. It says that in the guidance. That's fine, don't do it. But I've seen it work where, Content freshness is a big factor in getting yourself in the AI overviews. Like I've posted a piece of content, six hours later it's in the AI overviews, cause it's new and then it falls off. Now, what that means to me as a content marketer is that we should constantly be putting out new content or tweaking our existing content. Like if you have content with statistics from 2024, go in there, clean it up and add a fresh statistic from 2026. it's probably gonna surface it at the top. So like Google's telling you not to do this, but like the truth is it's working to do it, right? But it should work to do it because Google again, wants to surface the best content it can and fresher content with fresh information is going to be more relevant to users and older content. know?

Jordan Lally:31:43
It's just so interesting how they say one thing but then their best practices are another. What actually gets results is like...

David Arato:31:49
100%. You know, another thing about that too is I wanted to get into that earlier, I didn't about EAT, information gain is one thing we're seeing working a lot. So because these LLMs are producing content that is by design generic, and is by design based on the corpus of information that's ingested, giving Google or the LLMs any new data to work with gets contents like that's a big ranking factor that we're seeing. working to get people to the top of the results. Like give us some new information because like everyone's starved for it because we're all pumping out the same shit over and over and over again, right? And I don't mean that a law firm needs to go out there and commission a study on like a deep academic study into like car accident statistics. What that means is like, if no one's done the math of how many more or fewer accidents there were in Utah, between 2024 and 2025, do that math, that little bit, like that simple arithmetic, that delta in car accidents is new information that Google's going to want to surface, right? Like this is a really simplistic example, but you can do this with anything. And your state agencies pump out data all the time. Just go to like utahdot.gov, I don't know what it is. You're gonna see all kinds of statistics probably broken down into. trucks, motorcycles, and I'm just talking about personal injury. You could do this for divorce. You could do this for bankruptcy. You could do it for any practice area. Go get government statistics, make new data. In other words, look at the change in statistics year to year, publish it. You're adding new information to the online conversation and that can help you get surfaced.

Jordan Lally:33:36
I love that. That is great, great advice, actually. What else should we know?

David Arato:33:42
I can't give it all away, man. Come on.

Jordan Lally:33:46
Do you feel like you get better results for different practices or different, I guess, sectors with that? Thank

David Arato:33:53
practice areas. No, no, we get we get we get good results for everyone. That being said, like, I think I'm answering your question. We work most of our clients are personal injury. And I think that's just by virtue of it being the most heavily marketed like, you you drive down the street, you see the billboards, like, you know, it is the most heavily marketed area of law. That being said, we work in any consumer facing practice area. So we work with bankruptcy attorneys. work with family law attorneys, we work with small business attorneys, we work with intellectual property attorneys. like we're all over the place, but personal injury probably makes up about 60 % of our work.

Jordan Lally:34:32
Gotcha. Okay, cool. And then when it comes to other SEO agencies partnering with you guys for the white label services, do they typically find you for that?

David Arato:34:44
Um, it depends. Like I'm, I've been pretty heavily on the conference circuit for three years now. And that has really gotten us a lot of clients. Just meeting people. you know, I don't think people sit down and say white label content marketing for law firms, right? We do rank number one for that term. We should, we should. mean, there, we have, we have competitors in the space. Um, there's one,

Jordan Lally:35:05
As you should though, right? As you should.

David Arato:35:13
There's one company in our space that is like basically a clone of our business. there aren't, you know, there tons of copywriting agencies. That's fundamentally what we are, but a highly specialized one. So, you know, people go to Verblio and then they come to us. Verblio's huge. People go to Proof and then they come to us. So these are much bigger companies than us, but long and short, they'll find us. Like we had an inquiry yesterday from an agency guy who actually did Google white label legal content. I was happy that he Googled it. Yeah, it was funny.

But the conferences really move the needle. like, that was something that I think was a big mistake that we made for the first decade in business. Like, not going so like I you know, we're a online we've been fully remote since the inception of the business. Never had a physical office, we do keep a virtual office down in Denver. But because we're inherently an internet based company, like we do internet services.

Jordan Lally:35:53
mistake and not go.

David Arato:36:13
internet marketing services. I thought for a long time that, know, just kind of like the LinkedIn networking you do and like the, you know, just like getting a reputation in the space by working with a big agency would get us clients. And I was wrong because the first conference I went to, like, I'll tell a quick anecdote. There's a large agency in our space that I had been.

Jordan Lally:36:37
Sure.

David Arato:36:41
Working on for years, man. I'm talking about five years. I'm like, I'm emailing this guy. I get a cell phone number from a mutual connection. I'm texting him. I'm LinkedIning him. I'm LinkedIning him every quarter. I'm liking his LinkedIn posts. I'm commenting. Hi, I'm Dave Arato. Here I am, right? We can help you. We can help you. And like these, this is a huge company. Actually, they just got acquired. Long and short, I go to a conference. I see him. I introduce myself.

Jordan Lally:36:51
Good try!

David Arato:37:10
We have a vodka tonic, hang out for a minute. We're doing business the next day. The next day, right? Like, I think I convinced myself that like, and the fucked up thing is I love traveling too, like I love to travel. like why, you know what it was for me, was like, I'm looking at these legal conferences are expensive. I'm looking at the ticket prices. I'm like, 25 bucks for the ticket, another, you know, 1500 bucks for the nice hotel the conference is happening at for two nights or something, three nights maybe.

Jordan Lally:37:16
Yeah.

David Arato:37:40
the flight, I'm like, I'm in five grand on this thing, even though it's a business expense, like, why am I going to spend $5,000 to go to to go drink vodka tonics with with people in my industry? Well, I'll tell you why I'm to do it. Because it's going to make me $500,000. You know what I mean? You know? Like, like, that's, that's the thing. Like, that was a mistake that I made. I think like, it was hard for me to wrap my head around for a long time.

Jordan Lally:37:48
for a week.

Jordan Lally:37:55
Right. Absolutely.

David Arato:38:08
looking at as truly as an investment rather than rather than like, this will be fun to go rub shoulders with people in the industry. Like I wouldn't spend $5,000 on a weekend for myself. Maybe it would in Europe. But you know, you don't you get the idea like, like, sounds like a lot of money for one person's one person to spend for a trip for themselves for three days. But it's a business expense. And like, the power of in person networking is more important than it's ever been, especially now because AI can send

Jordan Lally:38:22
set.

David Arato:38:36
500 emails to 500 prospects. You know, I get these emails every single day. Hey, I happen to be in Breckenridge. Do you like that coffee shop at the end of town? LaFrance says you're not in Breckwood. No one happens to be in Breckenridge. I live two and a half hours from the Denver airport. You don't happen to be coming through. Right. So

Jordan Lally:38:53
Right, right, right. Those are really funny, those AI personalizations.

David Arato:38:59
Totally. I love that coffee. You don't know that coffee. Anyway.

Jordan Lally:39:03
Brad Lee, I think said this, do you know that name at all? Brad Lee, no way. No way. anyways, he basically says the more hands you shake, the more money you make. And you can definitely testify to that. And I will agree that networking online is one thing, but shaking hands in person, laughing with someone, getting the vibe, getting the energy from that person is a whole different ball game.

David Arato:39:07
I'm Dylan.

David Arato:39:16
100%.

Jordan Lally:39:32
As soon as you shake someone's hand, like trust has been built. know, like you're in real life, you're in person. How are you? How are you? You know what I mean? It's just a night and day networking experience for sure.

David Arato:39:42
Two things, a really great salesperson I know said to me once, the hardest thing to get rid of is a body. It's a little morbid, but it's true. In other words, like go show up. they can hang up the phone, they can delete your email, but like they can't get you out of their office. The other thing is I think the old adage is true. Like people do business with people who they know like and trust. Right? Like that's, it's just real. It's real.

Jordan Lally:39:57
Yeah, I see. yeah, that's good, that's good.

Jordan Lally:40:07
Yeah, absolutely.

David Arato:40:11
buddies with someone and you have a relationship and like some of my business, some of my business acquaintances have turned into real friends and some are still business acquaintances. But all of it started with an angle. you know what I mean? Like, but like ultimately if someone likes you and wants and has hung out with you and has dinner with you quarterly because you see them at conferences and you guys hang out and hit the town wherever you're in right? Like a lot of my stuff happens in Vegas so like you know we'll go to the conference and go out for a night, whatever. Those are the people I'm doing business with, because I like hanging out with me and I like hanging out with them. And if there's an other vendor offering them the same thing at the same price, even if it's the same quality, which I don't think it is, but even if it were completely fungible, they would do business with me because they know I'm like me. You know what I mean?

Jordan Lally:40:58
100%, absolutely. Damn, we'll end on these two questions here. Number one is best piece of advice you've received, whether it's personal or business.

David Arato:41:11
Oh man. Oh man, that's really hard. Let's go back. Let's come back to that one. Let's go to let's do number two first.

Jordan Lally:41:13
I

Jordan Lally:41:18
Where can they find you?

David Arato:41:20
Okay.

I mean, I'm gonna go back to what I just said. This is gonna be, excuse me, I don't know why my phone's ringing. I'm gonna go back to what I just said. Business advice, I'm gonna stick to this, and it's top of mind, because I just said it, but the thing I said about people do business what they know I can trust. This client is a huge client of ours, the one I mentioned from this conference earlier. I wanted online networking to just be enough. I wanted it to be that, but it's not. And that piece of business advice,

Jordan Lally:41:28
But you're good.

David Arato:41:53
has changed our business for the better. go show up at the place and do the thing and talk to the people, right? So I'm just gonna go back to that, because it's top of mind. Where can people find me? David at Lexiconlegalcontent.com. I'm all over social, I'm super easy to find and I'm super responsive. So if anyone needs any help with their content or just wants to talk business, I'm happy to do it.

Jordan Lally:42:02
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:42:13
David, thank you so much for having me on, man. It was a pleasure. Thanks for listening. Is there an audience? Talk soon.

David Arato:42:16
Yeah, this is great Jordan. Thanks for having me on.