James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley: 719% AI search case study increasing using AEO strategies. Today I'm joined with Kasra Dash and let's talk about this case study where we've increased a UK law firm by 719% in the LLMs.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. So, we have been getting some real nice results over the last several months across all of the LLMs. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, um, even Copilot, which is a bit of an odd one. Um, I don't, I don't know many people that are using Copilot, but it seems like it's the easiest one to rank for. Um, but yeah, this was for a UK law firm. They do services in a variety of different, um, spaces such as, um, immigration law, divorce law, uh, certain personal injury as well. Um, but we've been able to get their brand inside the AI Overviews. One of the things that came... That they came to us for specifically is they were already using an SEO agency. Um, however, they just weren't getting cited in AI, um, at all. Um, so they had, like, a separate AI SEO budget in comparison to their SEO, organic SEO budget.

James Dooley: Yeah. Do you know what? That's crazy. The amount of companies that we're dealing with nowadays where they've got an SEO budget and they've got an AEO budget, additional AEO budget, and the amount of times that an SEO agency isn't able to get them the increase in AI visibility is quite scary, to be fair. Because there is a Venn diagram overlap and similar techniques that's needed, but obviously a lot more in this AEO case study will be showing about the echoing of what's needed off-page, not just what's on your own website.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. So, like, this is, I reckon, this is probably the number one reason as to why websites that perform well in SEO don't perform well in AEO. Um, and it's basically to do with the fan-out. So, for example, what a fan-out is, is if somebody searches on ChatGPT, um, or asks in ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, best employment solicitor in London. Um, it's going to then take a look at employment lawyer near me. It's going to take a look at how much does an employment solicitor cost? Do I need a solicitor for unfair dismissal? Employment law firm reviews. Right? If you actually get cited in all four of these, or even three of these, right, there's a good chance that you're going to be... Your brand is going to be mentioned in the final answer to ChatGPT. Whereas, if you are only being mentioned in one of these or maybe even none of these at all, you're probably not going to get named. So, the query fan-out is arguably probably the most important part when it comes to AI search.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And you know what? Like, and I want to stress this part with regards to this UK law firm case study. So yes, the increase was 719%. And this sounds great on the face of it and, and it is, but the amount of work and effort that had to go into this case study was scary. And the main thing that I'm going to... What I'll touch upon here that you're going to go through in the slides is yes, awards and yes, case studies and yes, our success stories and yes, reviews is important. But in this one, I was very surprised when we started to do the query fan-out how we didn't just need it for the brand and the entity. We needed it for the brand plus the subcategory of what we was doing it for. So, we needed immigration lawyer reviews, immigration lawyer awards or personal injury reviews, personal injury awards. It was like when we started to do the fan-out, it was a fan-out of every single subcategory and it made it a big, big job. A much bigger job than what I thought it was going to be. And th... This is again another reason where an AEO and an SEO agency, there's different competition, there's different keywords, there's different KPIs being tracked. It's very different. And this AEO case study is a great example why majority of SEOs can't seem to grasp how to get that increase in AI visibility.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. Then one thing to just add to what everything that you've just said as well is when it comes to AI search and the answers that AI has spit out, it doesn't matter if it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, whatever you're using, um, there is no second page. So your brand is either mentioned or it's not, which is quite scary, especially the more and more we're seeing all of these companies tailor towards AI. Like, we saw Google releasing AI Mode. So you want to try and do everything you possibly can now to get into that paragraph of the brands, for example, in your industry. Um, so few things as well is especially when it comes to law, you want to make certain that you do have a good reputation online. So this is... Comes to a few of the things that James was saying about the reputation, about the awards, um, about the reviews, testimonials. If you can get those, for example, if you can get four or five of your clients on video on your YouTube channel saying, "Oh, I worked with James Dooley Law and it was brilliant because they solved all of my problems." That can actually help when it comes to the reputation of your brand and your brand sentiment. You want a positive brand sentiment online, especially when you are in law because law is very, um... It's, it's a bit of... It's one of those industries where they always look at reviews, your customers, before actually picking which law firm to go with.

James Dooley: I think a big one in this case study as well, like with regards to AEO, and we did a... This in this scenario, there is other case studies of what we have. Check out the links in the description. But in this one where we got a 719% increase in AI visibility, another big one on this one was the... When you're talking about the reviews, and I think this is really important when we're looking at the query fan-out, is where them reviews need to be placed. So in certain markets, it could be Clutch, it could be G2, it could be Capterra, it could be, um, uh, Yelp. There's all these different places. And what people don't realise is ChatGPT is not able a lot of times to scrape the reviews that's on a Google Business Profile. And the amount of businesses that are trying to just get reviews on Google Business Profiles and not getting them on these other type of platforms. It's important to track with a site colon and the, and the websites of where they're looking for these reviews specifically in this case for a UK law firm company.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. So, what, what James is basically saying is, like, you've got all of these, like, directories that are specific for lawyers. So, for example, you've got Justia, um, and if we actually click through, let me see if I can actually find a page here. Um, we'll do Justia Lawyers New York, for, for example, right? So, they've got all of these different law firms, um, here. Now, what a lot of people do is they will just go and get a listing on this, which is fine. Um, I mean, at least you're, you're in the conversation. But what they don't do is they don't actually get any reviews. So, like, this guy here, he's only got one review. Um, this, this one here's got three. So, you also want to try and get reviews on these actual platforms, and that will increase the likeliness of you actually being in the actual final result as well.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. A nice little hack that you could be trying to do is where if you do have lots of reviews on your Google Business Profile, reaching out to them existing customers and asking them to leave it on another platform is great. But if they're not willing to do that, is going collecting your best, let's say, hundred five-star reviews and then maybe doing a press release or a case study on that, um, on your own website, but also on some guest posts, which is the text format, saying, like, what they're saying on there. And especially if you can then maybe go and put some of them reviews into an image and doing an image-sharing blast and sharing that on your social medias as well. All of this is being picked up by the large language models and getting that increase with regards to search visibility in the LLMs.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. So, a couple last things that we probably want to touch on. Um, again, I can't stress enough how important the query fan-out section is, but then you also want to be able to report, um, these numbers. So, especially if you're maybe doing this for a client, let's say, um, like what we were, you also want to actually report to them how much of an increase month on month or week on week they've also had as well. So, which tool did we actually use for the reporting of that, James?

James Dooley: Yeah, so on the reporting we use Semrush One. Um, there is other AI visibility tools like Radar Kit and Peec AI, but with regards to Semrush One, where I was already using Semrush for, um, SEO purposes, and in this scenario what we wanted to do is we wanted to kind of extract everything, load every single query fan-out term. We wanted to go... This was a big law firm case study of what we wanted to do. We wanted to make certain that this AEO case study was the biggest in the UK for UK law firms. And we used Semrush One for all the, um, visibility, um, and the tracking, which showed a 719% increase. But what tools did we use on the actual query fan-out? Because I don't think we used Semrush One on the query fan-out. I think we used one of yours from your Skool group.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, so for the query fan-outs we used RankOS, which is part of the Skool group. Um, you can obviously get access to... We'll have a link down below so you, you guys can get access to the Skool group. You automatically get access to RankOS as well. Um, and also on the right-hand side of this video, we will have other playlists of other, um, AEO case studies that we've done. We recently released one to do with construction. This one's obviously a law firm one, and we're also going to be releasing one to do with finance as well. So you guys can check out all of those. Strategy is a little bit different from website to website, but we've be... We've been able to get great results across the board on all three.

James Dooley: Yeah. So, we hope you like this AEO case study showing a 719% increase in AI visibility. If you do feel we've missed anything off, make sure you leave a comment in the comment section. We're always looking to try, strive to improve on anything related to GEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO, or whatever you want to call it. We're always looking to take that business onto the next level and try and get that increase in AEO visibility.