In our last series of blogs, we looked at how “content is king” in the world of SEO, and how your law firm can maximise this to greatest effect. In today’s blog we are delving into tomorrow’s world, which it transpires, has already arrived in the form of Google’s RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s latest and greatest artificial intelligence (AI) technology which uses “deep-learning” to help them determine how best to rank webpages based on searches.

What is AI?

AI broadly speaking is the idea that a machine has intelligence; a behaviour that we would typically associate with humans. AI is thought of in the broad levels of capability:

• Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – This is machine intelligence that is at least equal to or better than humans but in a single narrow area. Google translate is a good example of ANI.
• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – AGI is near the future and is the idea that a machine can be as intelligent as a human across all levels.
• Artificial Super-Intelligence (ANI) – ANI refers to a machine that is superior to humans in every field.

Right now, ANI is where Google’s RankBrain is at. So should we all run for the hills in anticipation of the robot’s taking over? There’s no need to panic just yet. There is no doubt that AI is going to change the world one day and for the better in many regards. For now we just need to understand how to best work with this emerging technology. How does Google RankBrain work? It is important to understand that RankBrain is only one part of the search process applied by Google (one of approximately 200), but is now considered to be the third most important process which determines how websites are ranked. According to contentmarketinginstitute.com, “RankBrain’s main purpose is to help Google analyse and produce relevant results to long, complex, and ambiguous search terms. This includes new “words” or jargon made up by industry experts or popular figures, queries that it has never encountered”. Given the ascendance of new technology such as Siri, Cortana and Google voice search, there is an increasing trend towards search terms entered by speaking into mobile devices, hence resulting in more natural language queries, which by their nature are more likely to be unique. These first-time queries are analysed to determine that highest quality results would be. RankBrain is able to learn; for example if a word or term is used that it doesn’t know, it will make a guess using other words or phrases that it thinks may have a similar meaning.

Does this mean I have to change how I do SEO?

It may.  In essence, RankBrain is geared towards Google showing more appropriate results, so your legal content absolutely needs to target particular audiences. The old model of SEO was to essentially perform keyword research for a particular area, and then write content that focuses on a single key phrase; for example – divorce. In this new world, RankBrain uses Co-occurrence to determine relevance to users. Co-occurrence is the frequency by which words or groups appear in a piece of content. This means you will now need to write a single, high quality piece geared towards an intended audience by integrating a range of key phrases / words. Take for the example the search term “divorce”; based on your key-phrase research.  You might write about related matters such as child custody, mediation and no-fault divorces. The best way to do this is to create sub-headings within your content and then regardless of what the searcher is looking for, they your content will cover it. Once you have worked out an initial set of headings, it is then best practice to then google these and look at the ‘related searches’ within the results and integrate these also into your content also. Most crucially, your aim is not to keyword stuff but to create a quality piece of content that includes many related phrases in a natural manner, that is provides useful information for the reader. The answer to the original question is ‘it may’ because some firms are already doing this but many are not. Ultimately it still comes down to good quality content. At The Legal Copywriting Company, we pride ourselves in writing the highest quality content in a manner that achieves the best results for our customers with the latest Google search technology in mind, so you will never get left behind. We have been highly successful in catapulting established law firms who have traditionally failed to achieve good SEO results as well as start-up firms to the top of key search rankings by producing not only their website content, but also weekly blogs, leadership and news content, precisely because we do so in a manner that is attractive to the latest search technology. Call us today on 01767 600544 to see what we can do for your law firm’s search rankings.