Alicia Patil, Director of SEO at Mockingbird Marketing, joins the show to break down what it really takes to rank and get cited in AI search today. With 14 years of SEO experience across corporate, niche, and agency environments, Alicia now leads SEO strategy for law firms and shares how her thinking has evolved.
In this episode, Alicia covers how to evaluate link quality and why indexation matters more than volume, why digital PR is shifting from “getting a name out there” to building AI relevancy, and why location pages are quietly outperforming informational blog content for AI-driven leads. She also unpacks how to structure service area pages without creating duplicate content, what actually builds E-E-A-T for multi-attorney law firms beyond bios, and the operational mistakes businesses make managing Google Business Profiles at scale.
Alicia also shares how AI overviews are reshaping the traffic picture, her cautious approach to testing AI-generated content with guardrails, and how she uses AI internally to turn technical SEO research into client-friendly visuals. Plus, her honest take on the rise and disappearance of featured snippets, and what SEO reporting looks like when leads matter more than rankings.
If you work in local SEO, digital PR, or law firm marketing, this conversation is full of practical, tested insight you can apply right away.
Takeaways:
- Local backlinks build relevancy even without high domain authority scores.
- Digital PR now focuses on AI visibility, not just link volume.
- Unindexed links provide zero value regardless of source quality.
- Location pages are driving unexpected AI search leads for clients.
- Service area pages need unique, locally relevant content, not templates.
- Law firm authority requires case studies, not just attorney bios.
- Manual Google Business Profile management beats relying only on automation tools.
- Leads and signed cases matter more than keyword rankings alone.