If you open Google Ads and ask it for keyword ideas, it will cheerfully hand you thousands. Some are exactly what you want. Many are searches from people who will never become patients: dental students, job seekers, people looking for free clinics, even people looking for a dentist for their dog. Bid on all of them and your budget disappears into searches that were never going to book.
Good keyword research works the other way around. You start with how real patients in your market actually search, what the practices already winning there are bidding on, and which searches mean someone is ready to book. Then you build a tight, deliberate list from that.
In Chapter 4 we saw why small, tightly themed groups of keywords earn better Quality Scores. This chapter is about finding the keywords that go in those groups. It is the most time-consuming part of building a dental account, and it is time well spent, because the research also teaches you your market and your competitors along the way.
Start by Seeing Who Already Wins Your Market
Before you write down a single keyword, look at who is already advertising where you practice. Google gives you a tool for exactly this, called Ad Preview and Diagnosis. You will find it in Google Ads under Tools, then Troubleshooting.
It lets you run a search as if you were in any city, on any device, and see which ads appear. Use it instead of searching Google directly for research, for two reasons. Google notes that searching live for your own ads can pile up impressions without clicks, which hurts your numbers. And you should never click a competitor's ad just to look at it, because that click costs them money and tells you nothing the preview would not.
When we did this for Phoenix and Scottsdale in September 2026, the picture was clear within a few searches. "Dentist near me" showed Local Services Ads at the top, then regular search ads, then sponsored map listings. Implant searches were dominated by implant specialists and a national implant chain. Aligner searches brought out orthodontists with price promotions. That tells you who you are up against, what they are offering, and which searches they think are worth paying for.
Run a handful of the obvious searches for your own town: "dentist near me," your city plus "dentist," and each service you want to grow. Note who shows up, what their ads say, and where they send people. That list of competitors is the raw material for the next step.
Read Your Competitors' Websites Through Google's Eyes
Google's Keyword Planner (under Tools, then Planning) has an option most practices never use. Instead of starting with words, choose "Start with a website" and enter a URL. Google reads the site and returns the keywords it associates with it.
Do this with the competitors you just found. When we entered the websites of seven real practices advertising in Phoenix, each one returned between 330 and 1,036 keyword ideas. Together, after removing everything that was not dental, that came to more than 8,000 dental keywords for a single market.
Then do it with your own website. It is an eye-opening exercise, because it shows you your site the way Google sees it. If your practice has a separate, well-built page for each service, the keywords Google returns will be clear and organized around those services. If the list comes back scattered and vague, that is Google telling you your site does not clearly say what you do, which also hurts the landing page experience from Chapter 4.
One setting matters here: change the location from the United States to your own market. Otherwise every number you see is national, and it will wildly overstate how many people near you are searching.
Dental Keywords Come in Families
Once you look at a few hundred dental keywords, you will notice they are not random. They come in families built from the same few patterns, repeated across every service.
The core pattern is a service plus a modifier. The services are the things you offer: dentist, family dentist, pediatric dentist, dental implants, emergency dentist, teeth cleaning, cosmetic dentistry, and so on. The modifiers are the ways people narrow it down:
- Location: near me, nearby, close to me, your city, your neighborhood, your ZIP code.
- Quality: best, top rated, good.
- Timing: open now, open Saturday, same day, walk in, emergency.
- Audience: for kids, for anxious patients, accepting new patients.
Here is what that looks like with real Phoenix numbers from September 2026. "Dentist near me" had about 40,500 searches a month. "Pediatric dentist near me" had 4,400. "Dental implants near me" had 2,900, as did "dentist phoenix." "Cosmetic dentistry near me" had 1,300, and "dental cleaning near me" had 1,000. Smaller variations like "best dentist near me" (590) and "walk in dentist near me" (260) add up quickly once you apply the same modifiers across every service.
This is why we build keyword lists in a spreadsheet rather than typing them into Google Ads one at a time. Once you have the patterns, a spreadsheet lets you combine every service with every modifier in minutes, keep each family together as its own theme, and share the list with your team before anything goes live. Each family then becomes one of the small, tightly themed ad groups from Chapter 4, with its own ads written for it.
Sort Every Keyword by How Ready the Patient Is
Not every keyword deserves the same treatment, and Chapter 2's awareness stages tell you why. The way a keyword is phrased reveals how close the person is to booking:
- Symptom searches are early. "Toothache," "bleeding gums," "chipped tooth." The person knows something is wrong but is not yet looking for a dentist.
- Treatment searches are in the middle. "Dental implants," "invisalign," "veneers," "dental implant cost." The person is researching an option, often for weeks.
- Provider searches are ready to book. "Dentist near me," "dentist phoenix," "emergency dentist," "dentist accepting new patients." The person is choosing a practice now.
There is a quick test when you are unsure. Search the keyword yourself, through the preview tool or in a private browser window. If the page is full of ads, practices and a map, advertisers have learned it is a buying search. If it is full of articles, questions and an AI Overview answering the question directly, it is a research search, and it belongs later in your plans, if at all.
For a new account, the provider searches come first. They are where patients are ready to book, and they produce the conversions Google learns from. Chapter 6 explains how to target them.
Half of Keyword Research Is Deciding What Not to Pay For
The other half of keyword research is deciding what you do not want to show up for. These are negative keywords, and a dental account needs a solid list from the first day. Every one of the examples below was a real search with real volume in the Phoenix market in September 2026.
- Jobs and careers. "Dental assistant jobs" (1,300 searches a month), "dental hygienist jobs" (320). These people want to work in a dental office, not visit one.
- Schools and training. "Dental assistant school" (480), plus courses and degree programs.
- Free and cheap. "Free dental clinic phoenix" (390), "cheap dentist near me" (480). Whether to exclude these depends on your practice. If you accept Medicaid or offer a membership plan for uninsured patients, some of these may be worth keeping and speaking to directly. If you do not, they are wasted clicks.
- Do-it-yourself and home remedies. "Teeth whitening at home" (140) and similar.
- Supplies and labs. "Dental supplies" (170) and dental lab searches.
- Pets. "Dog dentist" had 320 searches a month. It is a real search, and it is not for you.
- Other practices' names. When you seed Keyword Planner with competitors' websites, their practice names come back as keyword ideas. Leave them out of your list. They will show up again later, in much larger numbers, once you add broad match. That happens in what we call the Exploration campaign, our name for the broad-match campaign you add after your first campaign is producing real conversions. Broad match picks up plenty of searches for other practices, and those go on your negative list as they appear. If you ever decide to target competitors by name, that belongs in its own campaign, and it is a big decision, not a default.
Notice what is not on this list: insurance. Whether insurance searches are worth paying for depends on the kind of practice you run. Many practices go after patients searching by insurance plan, with searches like "dentist that accepts Delta Dental," and build campaigns around the plans they take. A practice that is fully out of network may decide differently. Either way, it is a deliberate choice for your practice, not a search to exclude by default.
Build this list before you launch, then keep adding to it. Once your ads are running, the search terms report shows you the exact searches that triggered them, and it will always turn up surprises.
Negative keywords matter most when the Exploration campaign goes live. It runs on broad match with target CPA bidding, where you tell Google the cost per new patient inquiry you are aiming for and let it find the searches. Broad match reaches far more searches than your list ever named, and many of them will be wrong for your practice. That is when the search terms report needs checking every day, with new negatives added as waste appears. Negative keywords are never finished. They are something you monitor for as long as the account runs.
Read Keyword Planner's Numbers the Way Google Means Them
Keyword Planner is the best free source of dental search data you have, but its numbers are easy to misread.
The bid range is a guide to the market, not a price. Google describes the "top of page bid (low range)" as roughly the 20th percentile of what advertisers have historically bid to show at the top of the page, and the "high range" as roughly the 80th percentile, based on the last 30 days and your location settings. Google also points out that reaching the top depends on a combination of bid, quality and other factors, not bid alone. So a range of $9 to $32 for "dentist near me" tells you the market is competitive. It does not tell you what you will pay.
Do not add up close variants. The planner often shows several versions of the same search, such as "pediatric dentist near me" and "pedia dentist near me," with the same volume. That is usually one group of searches reported more than once, not separate searches you can add together.
Some searches have no data at all. In our Phoenix research, Keyword Planner returned no data for "emergency dentist" in any form we tried, even though emergency dental ads were running in that market that same day. Research tools have gaps. The search terms report from your own live campaigns fills them.
Match Types Decide How Loosely Google Reads Your Keywords
The last piece is how each keyword is matched to searches. Google offers three match types, and its current definitions are worth reading carefully:
- Broad match: ads "may show on searches that are related to your keyword, which can include searches that don't contain the direct meaning of your keywords." Very wide.
- Phrase match, written in quotation marks: ads "may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword," including more specific versions of it.
- Exact match, written in square brackets: ads "may show on searches that have the same meaning or same intent as the keyword."
Notice that even exact match is no longer strictly exact. It matches the same meaning, not only the same words, so you still need to watch the search terms report. But it is by far the tightest option, and that is why a new dental account launches on exact match only. Chapter 6 explains why that matters so much, and when looser match types finally earn their place.
Next, Point Your Budget at the Searches That Book
You now have a way to find dental keywords from real market data, organize them into families, sort them by how ready the patient is, and keep the waste out. The next step is deciding which of those searches to target first, and how to protect them. That is Chapter 6, Targeting High-Intent Searches.
If you would rather have the research done for you, this is where we spend the most time on every dental account we build. Our Google Ads management starts with the keyword research in this chapter, done for your market and your services.
