Read a chiropractor's replies to their Google reviews and you'll hear a particular voice. "Part of your health journey." "Support your wellness goals." Then read the reviews those replies answer. "I came in because I was dealing with lower back pain." "I couldn't even turn my head." "Always feel so much better after my adjustments."
Two vocabularies, one office. Many of the local ads we read already use the patient's word: "pain" turned up in more than 40 of 116 local chiropractic ads, from 14 of the 19 practices. The risk is drifting into the practice's own voice when it's time to write, because that's the voice the practice uses everywhere else.
This chapter is about keeping the ads in the second vocabulary: where to find the words, which words patients actually use and praise, and how Google's ad format turns a long list of them into the right ad for each search.
A Chiropractor's Condition Page Already Holds the Raw Material for the Ad
Don't start with a blank screen. A chiropractor's first ad draft is already written on the condition page the click will land on.
Chapter 4 built one ad group per condition, each pointing at that condition's page. So the sciatica ad's first draft is sitting on the sciatica page. Pull out everything a patient could check before calling:
- The condition, in the words the page uses: sciatica, leg pain, pinched nerve.
- The doctor: a name, credentials, years treating it.
- Proof: a review count, a short patient quote.
- The practical facts: insurance you take, evening or Saturday hours, how fast a new patient gets in.
Every one of those is a possible headline, and each one is something the page will back up when the patient lands. In Chapter 4, one Baltimore practice's ad offered same-day visits while its own site said same-week, the kind of break a patient notices.
If the page is thin, with no doctor's name, no hours and no reviews, the ad will be thin too.
Nearly Every Chiropractor Nearby Is Rated 4.8 Stars or Higher. Stars in the Ad Won't Set a Practice Apart.
Next, look at what the other practices say. Google's Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com) lets anyone search by advertiser name or website and filter by region and date. Type in the practices you found with the Ad Preview tool in Chapter 5 and read what they've been running.
We did this for the chiropractors in our example market, Baltimore, and read 116 ads from 19 local practices. The most common theme by far was the star rating. Sixty of the 116 ads showed a rating or a review count. Thirty-two pushed booking or scheduling, and 27 named a condition.
Stars make sense as proof, but patients see them everywhere. Of 85 Baltimore-area chiropractic listings with at least 20 reviews, 80 were rated 4.8 or higher. When nearly every practice in the results has the same rating, the rating stops helping anyone choose.
Several practices on the same website platform also ran an identical stock line promising top ratings, fast scheduling, friendly staff and lasting results. Nothing in it tells a patient which chiropractor wrote it.
Use the Transparency Center to find the gap, not to copy. If every local ad shows stars and nobody names sciatica, the sciatica headline is open.
Patients Write "Pain" in a Quarter of Reviews. Practices Write It in One Reply in Twenty.
The best source for headlines is one a practice rarely reads for that purpose: its own Google reviews.
We compared 1,266 Google reviews of Baltimore-area chiropractors with 745 replies the practices wrote back. The word "pain" appeared in 24.3% of the reviews and in 4.8% of the replies. "Adjustment" showed the same split: 14.6% of reviews and 2.8% of replies. Going the other way, practices wrote "wellness" more than twice as often as patients did, and "journey" five times as often.
That's the gap the headline of this chapter is about. The patient comes in with pain and says so. The practice talks about wellness and a journey. An ad written in the practice's voice is answering a question the searcher didn't ask.
Two more word choices are worth checking:
- "Adjustment," not "subluxation." Just 1 of the 1,266 reviews used the word "subluxation." On Reddit, most of the people who used the word were dismissing it.
- "Doctor" carries weight. Patients called the chiropractor "doctor" in 176 reviews, and "Dr." with a name appears in 530. A headline with your doctor's name is in the patient's own voice.
To do this for your practice, export or copy your last hundred or so reviews and highlight every word that describes the problem or the result. Those highlighted words are your first headline list.
Happy Chiropractic Patients Praise Friendly Staff Eight Times as Often as Fast Relief
Then read the reviews again for what patients praise. The answer isn't what most practices expect.
Among 1,060 four- and five-star reviews, friendly or welcoming staff came up 383 times, and thorough, knowledgeable or professional care 351 times. Explaining things came up 134 times, listening or taking time 127, and gentle or comfortable care 105. Fast relief came up 48 times.
Relief matters, but happy patients mostly write about how they were treated. One reviewer wrote: "He explained everything we were looking at in my x-ray and adjusted me based off of what he saw."
Those themes make honest headlines, provided they're true of your office: a doctor who explains your X-rays, a front desk that knows your name, gentle care for first-timers. Reviews tell you which of those you can claim.
The front desk is the other source. Ask them what callers ask most before booking, questions like whether you take their insurance or how soon they can get in. Every repeated question is a headline or description waiting to be written.
Patients Ask Google Whether a Chiropractor Is Safe Before They Book. The Ad Should Say What Happens at the First Appointment.
There's one more thing the searcher brings with them: worry.
When we ran 28 chiropractic searches for Baltimore, the "People also ask" box on the results page showed a red-flag question, such as "What are red flags for chiropractors?", on 14 of them. Of the 96 questions those boxes showed, 20 were about safety or skepticism. People who have never seen a chiropractor are often nervous.
The reviews show the same thing from the other side. "First time ever coming to a chiropractor, I was very nervous but I must say the staff made me completely comfortable," one patient wrote.
An ad can't argue anyone out of a fear, and it shouldn't try. What it can do is tell a nervous first-timer what to expect. A description is 90 characters, enough for something like: "First visit starts with an exam and a talk. We explain what we find before any adjustment." If your doctor takes X-rays only when they're needed, or never adjusts the neck without explaining why, and your page says so, those are reassuring facts worth a description.
Keep every claim to what your practice really does and what your page shows. A reassurance the visit doesn't live up to turns into a one-star review.
A Chain Sells a $29 First Visit. A Local Chiropractor Sells the Doctor Who Explains What's Wrong.
The chains write different ads. Of 43 ads we read from three national chiropractic chains, 21 named a price, mostly a $29 or $49 first visit. Of the 116 local ads, 8 did, from just 2 practices.
A low first-visit price brings people in. It also shows up in complaints. In the 1,266 reviews, every one of the seven that quoted a $29, $39 or $49 intro price was one to three stars. "The $39 thing is a way to get you in the door," one reviewer wrote. Sales pressure was one of the biggest complaint themes in the low-star reviews, and several describe the same sequence: X-rays, a long treatment plan, then a request to pay up front.
That gives a local practice a clear lane. Don't try to beat the chain's price. Offer what the chain's ad can't: the same doctor every visit, a plan explained in plain language, no package to buy on day one. Only claim what's true, but if it is, say it in the ad. A five-star reviewer at one practice put it simply: "There is no pressure at all and it feels personalized."
If you do offer a new patient special, say exactly what it includes and what comes after, so the number a patient saw on Google is never the surprise they write about later.
Fifteen Headlines Mean the Sciatica Patient and the Stiff-Neck Patient See Two Different Chiropractic Ads
Now the format. The standard text ad in a chiropractic Search campaign is a responsive search ad. The practice writes the pieces, up to 15 headlines of no more than 30 characters and 4 descriptions of no more than 90, and Google assembles them. For each search, Google picks and orders a few of them, up to three headlines in the top line, and it keeps testing which mixes bring the clicks.
That's where the word list from your reviews pays off. Inside the sciatica ad group, write headlines that come at sciatica from several angles:
- The condition, the patient's way: "Sciatica Shooting Down a Leg?"
- The doctor: your chiropractor's name and credentials
- The proof: your review count, or a short phrase patients use
- The practical facts: "Evening and Saturday Visits," "We Take Most Insurance," if true
- The first visit: "Exam and Plan on Visit One"
Every headline has to make sense next to any other, because Google decides the order. Leave them unpinned at launch so Google can test the combinations. Pinning locks a headline to one position. Google's help page says pinning "isn't recommended for most advertisers," and for a new chiropractic account the reason is simple: every pinned line is one fewer line Google can test against the sciatica or stiff-neck search. The exception is a headline the practice already trusts, say a slogan patients have mentioned for years, or a line the results have since proven.
Ad Strength Grades Variety, Not Whether the Ad Books Chiropractic Patients
As you type the headlines, Google scores the ad's Ad Strength on a scale that runs from Poor up to Excellent. It's useful as a checklist: it flags headlines that repeat each other and ads with too few of them. Google's own figure, averaged across its advertisers, is 15% more conversions for ads that move from Poor to Excellent.
That rating has nothing to do with where a chiropractor's ad lands on the page. Ad Strength isn't part of a chiropractic ad's Ad Rank, so a higher grade doesn't move the sciatica ad up the page. Google treats the score as a writing checklist. A chiropractic ad rated Average can bring in more new patients than one rated Excellent. The real test is the same one from Chapter 1: calls, forms and bookings that become kept first visits.
So treat the first version as a starting point. Once the practice has a few weeks of calls and bookings, swap the headlines that rarely get shown for fresh lines from new reviews or from what the front desk keeps hearing. Good chiropractic ad copy is rarely finished on day one. It gets better a few headlines at a time.
If you'd rather have someone turn your reviews into headlines, our Google Ads agency team writes and tests ad copy for the practices we work with.
Next: Google Switches On a Booking Goal a Chiropractor Shouldn't Use
The ads are written. Chapter 9 covers the settings to check before the first chiropractic campaign launches, including a booking goal Google may turn on by default that a healthcare practice should leave off. The earlier chapters, from bidding back to tracking, are on the Google Ads for Chiropractors guide home.
