Nobody wakes up and calls a solicitor about their will. They think about it after a health scare, a divorce, a new grandchild, a friend’s messy estate. Then they search.
The searching goes on for weeks, sometimes months, before anyone picks up a phone. Whoever answers those searches shapes the decision the phone call eventually confirms.
Right now, for most estate planning searches in Queensland, the answers come from the Public Trustee, government legal handbooks, and DIY will kit vendors. The firms that want the drafting work are largely absent from the moment the client is deciding what to do. Here is what that looks like in the actual search data.
What Queenslanders are asking, and how often
Keyword data for Queensland1 shows planning demand concentrated in a handful of queries, and growing fast.
“Testamentary trust” leads everything: around 1,800 searches a month in Queensland, up 136% year on year. That is a striking number for a technical term. It says sophisticated clients — blended families and business owners — are researching structures before they research lawyers. It is also the highest-value drafting work a wills and estates practice takes on.
“Estate planning lawyer” runs at roughly 530 monthly searches and is climbing steeply. These are people who have finished deciding whether to get advice and started deciding who from.
The practical will queries sit behind those. “Making a will qld” and “writing a will in Queensland” each draw around 210 searches a month. “Cost of making a will with a solicitor in Brisbane” — about 70 a month, up 53% — is a buying question. Someone typing it has already chosen a solicitor over a kit and wants a number.
The fear query rounds it out. “What happens if you die without a will” and “die intestate” variants together draw steady volume, and the ranking difficulty on those terms is close to zero. Nobody is competing for the question that starts the entire journey.
Who is answering them
Run those searches and look at page one.
For “making a will qld”, the Public Trustee of Queensland holds the top position.1 Government pages and the Queensland Law Handbook fill most of what follows. For “testamentary trust”, the visible answers come from public trustee bodies, the ATO, and general finance sites. Private wills and estates firms barely appear on either.
Consider what that routing does. The Public Trustee drafts wills.2 A person who starts at pt.qld.gov.au and finds a clear, reassuring answer has little reason to keep looking for a private firm. The searcher asking about testamentary trusts — the most valuable prospective client in the dataset — reads trustee organisations and accounting content, and forms their view of who handles this work without a single firm entering the picture.
“The competition for planning clients is quiet and structural. It happens in search results, weeks before any phone call, and the private profession is mostly losing it by forfeit.”
The competition for planning clients is quiet and structural. It happens in search results, weeks before any phone call, and the private profession is mostly losing it by forfeit.
AI answers have raised the stakes
Both “testamentary trust” and “making a will qld” now trigger Google’s AI Overview — a generated answer that sits above every traditional result.1 Those answers are assembled from the pages Google already trusts on the topic, which at present means the same government and trustee content that dominates the ordinary rankings.
A client who asks Google or ChatGPT “do I need a lawyer to make a will in Queensland” gets a synthesised answer drawn from whoever published the clearest explanation. Firms with no citable content are invisible to that answer. The pattern from the ordinary rankings repeats one level up, with less screen space and fewer alternatives visible.
What this means for a wills and estates practice
The planning client’s search journey has three stages, and each is winnable with content a firm can publish.
The question stage. “What happens if you die without a will in Queensland” is the entry point, and it is effectively uncontested. A firm page that answers it properly — QLD intestacy rules, who inherits, what it costs the family — meets the client at the moment the problem becomes real to them.
The structure stage. The testamentary trust searcher is researching a solution. A page explaining when a testamentary trust makes sense for a Queensland family, written by a practitioner, competes against trustee bodies and generic finance content. That is winnable ground, and the 136% growth means it gets more valuable every month it stays unclaimed.
The buying stage. The client comparing costs wants a straight answer. Firms avoid publishing fee guidance, and the silence hands the comparison to DIY kit vendors and the Public Trustee’s published rates. A page that explains what drafting costs, what determines the range, and what the fee includes converts the searcher who was one honest answer away from calling.
None of this requires volume. It requires a small set of pages, each built for one query the data shows Queenslanders actually typing, each written with the specificity that lets it be cited — by Google, by AI answers, and by the client repeating it to their spouse over dinner.
The firms winning planning clients in five years will be the ones a searcher met months before the phone call. The search data shows exactly where those meetings happen. Most of the seats are still empty.
This is the planning half of the demand. The other half arrives after a death, and it behaves very differently — we’ve covered how Queensland firms lose probate clients to the first result they see separately.
Felicity Jane Digital works with Queensland wills and estates firms on exactly this visibility problem. Our Legal SEO for wills and estates practices page sets out how we approach it, or request a confidential discussion.
Frequently asked
What do estate planning clients search for before choosing a Queensland solicitor?
The Queensland search data shows three clusters: fear queries such as “what happens if you die without a will”, structure queries led by “testamentary trust” at around 1,800 monthly searches, and buying queries such as the cost of making a will with a solicitor. Clients typically move through all three before making contact with a firm.
Why do government sites outrank law firms for estate planning searches?
Government and trustee pages answer the searcher’s question directly, in plain language, on pages built for that single purpose. Most firm websites cover estate planning in a brief services paragraph, which gives search engines nothing substantial to rank. The gap is content depth, and it is within any firm’s power to close.
Should a law firm publish its fees for wills and estate planning?
Publishing a fee range, with an explanation of what determines it, answers one of the highest-intent questions in the data — and the searcher asking it has already decided to use a solicitor. Firms that stay silent on cost leave that comparison to DIY will kit vendors and the Public Trustee’s published rates.
This article is general information about marketing measurement and search behaviour, not legal advice. Search volume and trend figures are Felicity Jane Digital’s own keyword research estimates, attributed in the references, and vary between tools and over time. Estate planning decisions should be made with advice from a qualified legal practitioner.
References
1. Search volume, trend, SERP position, and AI Overview figures cited above are drawn from Felicity Jane Digital’s own keyword research — Mangools KWFinder, Queensland (Australia) dataset, July 2026 — rather than from a third-party published study.
2. Public Trustee of Queensland, Will-making services, accessed July 2026. The Public Trustee provides will drafting to Queenslanders.
Jane Cluff