bg-up-triangles

Author: Jason Bland

Insights & ideas to help your law firm grow.

All articles by Jason Bland

Jason Bland, co-founder of Custom Legal Marketing sits on a park bench with the quote "Every single client has signed cases from AI this year. We're ready for this."

It’s the End of Law Firm SEO As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

On May 19, Google announced on stage at its I/O conference that the search box you have used for the last 25 years is going away. They called it the biggest change to Search since the search box first showed up, and this time the hype is real. The ten blue links you are used…
Open box with cell phone, AI logo and icon representing client reviews.

We Just Solved Three AI Blind Spots for Law Firms

As our team continues to send more cases to law firms through answer engine optimization (AEO), we want to eliminate as many blind spots as possible. After all, that’s what keeps our AI marketing platform, Sequoia, light-years ahead of the competition. We’ve just rolled out three major upgrades to our platform, which lets us accurately…
Word Count and Law Firms

Words (What are they good for?)

The general assumption in law firm SEO for at least the last decade has been that longer content ranks better. And to be fair, there is enough surface-level truth to it that the advice has stuck around for years. The problem with most data about word count is that almost none of the research actually…
ChatGPT Ads for Lawyers - Mockup of ad for Steinberg Law Firm

Law Firms Can Now Sign Up as Advertisers on ChatGPT

UPDATE: June 4, 2026 – OpenAI has decided to exclude law firms from its ad platform. In their Disallowed Ads category, they now say “Ads for legal advice, representation, or legal services offered to individuals or businesses are not permitted. This includes services related to immigration, personal injury, legal claims, or document preparation.” While there…
Lies about Law Firm SEO and Other Bull to Watch Out For

Your Domain Authority Is Too Low and Other Lies That Don’t Affect Your Rankings

If you’re the managing partner or marketing director of a law firm, you know what spam looks like. Probably this week (or today) some SEO company you’ve never heard of ran your site through a tool and now they’re telling you that your Domain Authority is too low, your PageSpeed score is killing your rankings,…
AI Overview Ranking Signals vs. Google Search flowchart showing how Gemini turns one query into multiple sub queries

AI Overview Ranking Signals vs. Google Search: One Search Box. Two Ranking Systems.

Google is running two ranking systems behind one search box, and most law firms are only optimizing for one of them. For the past eighteen months, the ten blue links sitting below Google’s AI Overview panel have followed one set of signals, and the AI Overview citations sitting above those links have followed an increasingly different…
WordPress 7.0

WordPress Just Built AI Into Its Core. Here Is What Changes for Law Firm Websites.

WordPress 7.0 is the most consequential update to the platform that powers 43% of the internet in years. With 7.0, WordPress has been rebuilt from the inside out so that AI is a first-class part of the CMS rather than a collection of disconnected third-party plugins. For law firms running their websites on WordPress, and…
legal directories on search engine results page

Are Legal Directories Your Partner, Your Competitor, or Both?

If your law firm pays for a premium profile on Justia, Super Lawyers, Avvo, FindLaw, or any other legal directory, you are investing in a platform that is directly competing with your website for the same Google search results, for the same keywords, in the same cities, right now. That is not a criticism of…
Personal injury leads slow in Q1

Why Personal Injury Lawyers Get Fewer Cases in the First Quarter of Every Year

From most personal injury lawyers’ perspective, it doesn’t make sense. People are always getting into accidents, so why are there seasonal dips and surges in personal injury leads? I’ve been doing law firm SEO for a long time and it seems like every year, prospective clients call us wondering what happened after the holidays. My personal…
Website address bar

One of the Most Important SEO Elements Has Been Above the Top of the Page This Entire Time

Every law firm with a website has had a conversation about SEO. About content. About backlinks. About page speed, schema markup, mobile responsiveness, and whatever Google’s latest update decided to prioritize this quarter. These are important conversations about law firm SEO. But there’s an element of your website that shows up in every single Google…