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100 Best Estate Planning Keywords for PPC and SEO Campaigns

Chris Dreyer SEO for Lawyers Expert
Chris Dreyer
CEO and Founder
Rankings.io
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100 Best Estate Planning Keywords for PPC and SEO Campaigns
COVERED ON THIS PAGE
Example H2

Selecting the right estate planning keywords is critical if you want to get more cases through digital marketing. Finding and using keywords that your ideal clients search for online is the cornerstone of any search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click (PPC) ad campaign.

But having a list of keywords and knowing how to use them for maximum effect are two different things.

Over half of all website traffic comes directly from keyword searches. Estate and probate lawyers have the opportunity to use these terms to tap into a pipeline of people looking for your help. Choosing the right keywords to rank for is the first step to that.

The table below lays out the top 100 keywords for estate attorneys.

And reading the rest of this guide will set you on the path to putting these keywords to use.

Keyword Volume Cost Per Click
power of attorney 77000 $0.80
durable power of attorney 27000 $0.90
power of attorney form 23000 $0.90
medical power of attorney 16000 $0.80
estate planning attorney 15000 $4.00
probate lawyer 12000 $3.50
probate attorney 11000 $5.00
what is power of attorney 7600 $0.15
what is a power of attorney 6000 $0.15
estate lawyer 5400 $3.50
estate attorney 4700 $13.00
estate planning lawyer 4000 $3.50
how to get power of attorney 3900 $0.70
who can override a power of attorney 3900 $0.80
what is a durable power of attorney 3800 $0.10
free power of attorney form 3700 $1.20
what is durable power of attorney 3500 $0.10
power of attorney forms 3500 $0.90
financial power of attorney 3300 $0.90
power of attorney definition 3200 $0.15
how to get a power of attorney 3100 $0.70
estate planning lawyers 3000 $3.50
will lawyer 2900 $2.00
durable power of attorney form 2800 $0.90
trust lawyer 2700 $2.50
medical power of attorney form 2600 $0.80
health care power of attorney 2400 $0.70
power of attorney meaning 2300 $0.15
trust attorney 2200 $3.50
power of attorney for health care 2100 $0.70
lawyer will 2100 $2.00
what does power of attorney mean 1900 $0.15
healthcare power of attorney 1900 $0.80
limited power of attorney 1900 $0.60
general power of attorney 1700 $0.90
power of attorney template 1700 $1.20
estate planning attorneys 1600 $4.00
estate lawyers 1600 $3.50
how to make a will without a lawyer 1600 $0.70
can you set up a trust without an attorney 1500 $1.10
types of power of attorney 1500 $0.20
will and trust attorney 1500 $3.00
power of attorney obligations to family members 1500 $1.40
probate lawyers 1500 $3.50
probate attorneys 1400 $5.00
power attorney 1400 $0.80
trust and estate attorney 1400 $4.00
power of attorney lawyer 1400 $2.00
durable power of attorney for health care 1400 $0.90
living trust attorney 1300 $3.50
power of attorney sample 1300 $0.80
how to get power of attorney when someone is incapacitated 1300 $0.90
does power of attorney end at death 1300 $1.30
power of attorney after death 1300 $1.20
lawyer for a will 1300 $2.00
irs power of attorney 1300 $0.40
how to sign as power of attorney 1200 $0.40
power of attorney vs guardianship 1200 $1.00
special power of attorney 1200 $0.70
power of attorney lawyers 1200 $2.00
guardianship vs power of attorney 1100 $1.00
where can i get a power of attorney form 1100 $0.70
power of attorney document 1100 $1.10
sample power of attorney 1100 $0.80
real estate lawyer salary 1100 $1.30
general power of attorney form 1100 $0.90
power of attorney medical 1100 $0.80
obtaining power of attorney without consent 1100 $1.00
how do you take power of attorney away from someone 1100 $0.60
cost of making a will with a lawyer 1100 $1.10
durable power of attorney definition 1000 $0.15
dual power of attorney 1000 $0.80
power of attorney form pdf 1000 $0.70
financial power of attorney form 1000 $0.90
what is a probate lawyer 1000 $1.70
do you need a lawyer to make a will 1000 $1.00
medical durable power of attorney 1000 $0.90
printable power of attorney form 1000 $0.80
power of attorney requirements by state 1000 $0.60
durable power of attorney for healthcare 1000 $0.90
living will vs power of attorney 900 $0.60
how do you prove power of attorney abuse 900 $1.00
durable power of attorney vs power of attorney 900 $0.15
how do you get power of attorney 900 $0.45
what does a power of attorney do 900 $0.15
power of attorney paperwork 800 $1.00
power of attorney documents 800 $1.10
living trust attorneys 800 $3.50
what rights does a durable power of attorney have 800 $0.70
how to become power of attorney 800 $0.70
trust lawyers 800 $2.50
how to revoke power of attorney 800 $0.30
limited power of attorney form 800 $0.70
will and estate lawyers 800 $2.50
durable financial power of attorney 800 $1.00
durable medical power of attorney 800 $0.90
what is a medical power of attorney 800 $0.30
probate litigation attorney 800 $4.50
simple power of attorney form 700 $0.90
trust litigation attorney 700 $3.50

We’ve sorted our keywords based on one variable. Monthly search volume.

The list above is a picture of the terms in your practice area that people search for the most often in a given month. We’ve also included the cost per click. That’s the estimated amount you would need to pay Google each time someone clicks on your ad.

Note: We limited this list to only show national search terms. Most parts of the country will also have high-volume terms specific to their region or city.

Having this list of keywords is a great first step into digital marketing, but there are a few things you should know about using them.

How to Use These Keywords

Keywords are valuable in two areas of law firm marketing:

  • Creating and optimizing SEO-driven content
  • Reaching ideal clients with PPC ad campaigns (through Google Ads)

Choosing between them is not always an either/or situation.

Where you use these keywords depends upon your law firm’s marketing strategy. Some firms choose to focus more on PPC, others go heavy on SEO, and some firms balance both.

Estate planning firms that are new to online marketing and need time to play the long game often choose to run PPC campaigns to begin with.

These firms create SEO-driven content in the background. They drive new clients to the site with ads while letting their SEO content gain traffic. Then they scale down their ad spend after seeing growth from SEO.

Here's how to put these keywords to work with both tactics.

Using Keywords for SEO-Driven Content

Building pages and posts on your site around relevant target keywords is the nucleus of law firm SEO.

The goal of search-optimized content is to capture the attention of your target audience. Your ideal client searches for these terms. It’s up to you to identify these terms and create content that satisfies the reader’s reason for searching.

Our list of estate law keywords is jumping off points for creating content on your website.

For example, some terms form the basis of blog posts, like the question what is an estate tax or the phrase asset protection. Other terms are best for service pages like estate planning or trust attorney.

A graphic Showing the places you should include your target keyword on a web page.

How and where you use your target keywords on each page you publish matters. The most common places include:

  • In page titles
  • As headings on the page
  • Within the page’s text
  • Within the page’s URL
  • As alt text for relevant photos on the page
  • In your meta descriptions

There’s a delicate balance to using keywords in each piece of content.

Working keywords into your content is a core part of on-page optimization. They help search engines like Google and Bing contextualize the meaning of each page on your site. This allows a search engine’s algorithm to determine when and where you should rank in search results.

But overusing keywords on a given page leads to something that’s stilted and hard to read.

The goal of SEO is to educate your clients and build trust with them. It’s a way to showcase your knowledge of their problem and give them a solution. Content that overuses keywords causes readers to walk away before you can build that trust.

SEO is a wise investment if you’re interested in playing the long game.

Your efforts will start to snowball with each piece of high-quality content you create. SEO-driven content gains traction when you start to build an interconnected web of pages centered on relevant keywords.

But adding PPC alongside your SEO efforts is worth considering. The traffic from ads will drive new clients to your firm while you wait for your SEO content to pick up steam.

Using Keywords to Reach Potential Clients with Google Ads

PPC advertising is a little simpler than creating SEO-driven content.

You pick the keywords that you think are most likely to convert the people who search for them into new clients.

Then you bid on those terms and create a landing page. Bidding on keywords in Google ads allows your ad to appear in the search results above the organic rankings. You pay a fee to Google each time someone clicks on your ad.

Then Google directs that person to your landing page.

That’s the simple part.

The harder part is choosing the keywords with conversion intent and building a good landing page. The best course of action is to run ads only on words and phrases that indicate someone is ready to hire a lawyer right now.

Jumping that hurdle is the key to Google ads for lawyers.

You’ll have a solid pipeline that brings new potential clients to your site if you get that step right. The only downside is that you have to pay for each click. The good news is that estate planning keywords have a much lower cost per click than hypercompetitive practice areas like personal injury. 

Finding the Right Keywords is Just the First Step to Successful Campaigns

It's too expensive and time-consuming to throw things at the wall and see what sticks with SEO or PPC campaigns. You need to know how to use these keywords to avoid that haphazard approach.

Too many lawyers get frustrated with organic search efforts and paid ad campaigns because they don't see the results. Most of the time, it's because something is off in the way they’ve set up their campaigns.

Here’s what you need to know to run successful campaigns.

Keywords Only Provide the Initial Direction for SEO Actions

Your content needs to rank if you want to win in organic search.

Having a list of keywords is no guarantee that the content you publish based on it will rank. There’s more to consider than which terms have the highest search volume.

First, you need to consider the search intent of every potential target keyword.

Search intent is all about what the reader is actually looking for when they type a specific phrase or word into Google. Content that’s not aligned with the intent will lose the reader’s interest. So they'll visit your site, but quickly bounce back to the search results.

And that’s a clear signal to Google that your page should not rank.

For example, let's say you choose something like living trust attorney as a target keyword. What if the actual intent of that search is for an article about when and why someone needs a living trust attorney? And what if you create a living trust service page instead?

Missing the intent like that shows Google that your page doesn’t help that searcher.

Investing your time into uncovering search intent helps you create pages that meet searchers’ needs. It also prevents you from having to backtrack and rewrite content. But it takes significant time investment before each piece you make.

Second, you need to select keywords in a way that protects your pages from cannibalization.

Cannibalization happens when you have more than one page targeting a given keyword. This isn’t just a problem of duplicated effort. It also confuses Google because the algorithm won’t be able to tell which of the two (or more) pages should rank.

The end result is having your cannibalized content compete against each other for a slot on the second page of Google.

A graphic showing an example of two clusters of keywords.

There’s a way to prevent cannibalization before it happens, though.

Keywords fall into clusters. Google sees terms like estate planning lawyer and estate planning attorney as the same thing, for example. Identifying those clusters lets you determine which group of keywords a single page should target.

But clustering those keywords takes a ton of time and effort.

You have to find massive lists of related terms. Then you need to compare the search results for each term against each other to see if they belong together. That’s a massive time sink for lawyers who just want to create content that stands a chance of ranking.

That brings us to the third aspect of putting keywords to work for you—the time it takes to create pages.

Planning, writing, editing, and publishing don’t just take valuable time away from your schedule as an attorney. It's also a different writing style than what most attorneys use every day.

Writing for SEO is its own skill set that calls on knowing how to write for people on the web. This involves things like:

  • Eliminating jargon
  • Developing structured content
  • Checking for readability
  • Making each page easy for the readers’ eye to scan

You also have to know how to optimize your content for both search engines and people. That requires balancing both the technical aspects of SEO while also providing helpful, targeted information to a human reader.

But SEO isn't the only place where lawyers struggle to get success when they take the DIY route.

Looking Before You Leap with PPC Keywords is a Recipe for Disaster

Using your keywords for PPC is a little more of a plug-and-play scenario than SEO.

Google is good at getting your ads in front of the right people once you select your keyword set. But there are still a few things to think about for successful campaigns.

The first is knowing how to validate keywords for conversion potential.

It's a waste of your money to bid on terms for people who are not yet ready to hire a lawyer. You have to spend time qualifying terms to see if they have conversion potential. It’s a lot like checking your keywords for search intent. But it’s even more of a guessing game since someone who is new to PPC won’t have historical data that shows conversion trends.

A good example of this is the keyword power of attorney.

That’s a term that has a high monthly search volume. It’s also directly related to something in your practice area. But the intent is anything but conversion-focused. People who search for that want Rocket Lawyer, not a flesh-and-blood attorney.

The next thing to keep tabs on is your budget.

Estate planning keywords aren't as competitive as the personal injury field, but every click counts against your budget. You need a way to determine what your bidding budget should look like to stop yourself from spending too much or too little. You also need to watch your results so that you can make budget adjustments.

The third consideration with PPC is that it's not as simple as picking a good keyword and throwing money at it.

You have to have a place for those clicks to go. That means creating high-quality landing pages that convince people to contact you for legal help.

This poses a similar problem to SEO content creation. You’ll need to set aside time to create each landing page. And you’ll need to invest in persuasive copywriting since landing pages need to be much more conversion-focused than many SEO pages.

There is a way to sidestep all of these problems with both PPC and SEO.

Partnering with a team of law firm marketing experts takes all the weight off your shoulders. You can focus on the things you do best for your clients. And you can rest easy knowing that an experienced team has the marketing planning and execution in hand.

Work with an Expert to Get Results for Your Estate Planning Law Firm

A quote from Gabriel Levin

You stand the best chance of improving your traffic and bottom line when you know the right ways to use your estate planning keywords.

But keeping track of SEO and PPC efforts is a long and involved process. The most successful law firms partner with outside marketing agencies who are well-versed in SEO and PPC to get the most out of every aspect of their plans.

At Rankings.io, we're known for delivering results with our SEO services for lawyers and PPC campaigns. Contact us today for a call to discuss your content marketing goals.

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