Point Google's Keyword Planner at a few dermatology websites in your city and it will hand you thousands of searches in a few minutes. It feels like a gift. It's closer to a box of mixed mail: real patients looking for a dermatologist, people shopping for eczema cream, people looking for a competitor by name, people in a city two hours away, and a large pile of searches naming a drug you may not be allowed to bid on at all.
Keyword research in dermatology is mostly sorting. The tool does the finding. Your job is deciding what to keep, what to set aside and what to block, before a single dollar goes out.
Chapter 4 built a page for each condition you advertise. This chapter fills each of those pages' ad groups with the right searches, and keeps the wrong ones out.
Eight Competitor Websites Can Return Ten Thousand Searches
Before you open Keyword Planner, learn who you'll be bidding against. Look up the dermatology practices, groups and med spas near you in Google's Ads Transparency Center, which lists the ads each advertiser has been running, and note which ones are active. Don't click your competitors' ads to look at them. You'd be spending their budget, and it tells you nothing you can't see another way.
Then open Keyword Planner and choose the option to start with a website. Google says it will "look for keywords related to the content on that site." Enter a competitor's website, set the location to your own market, and run it. Repeat for each competitor, and then run your own website too. Your own run is the most revealing, because it shows you what Google thinks your practice offers, which is not always what you think it offers. A practice that thinks of itself as medical first can find that Google reads its site as a laser and injectables business, because that's where most of the pages and photos are. That's worth knowing before the ads go live.
To show what comes back, we ran the process on one example market, Atlanta, the city this guide uses for its real-world examples. We ran eight Atlanta dermatology websites through Keyword Planner, plus a handful of core terms such as "dermatologist" and "skin cancer screening," with the location set to that market. After removing duplicates and ideas that had nothing to do with dermatology, we had 10,498 searches. Your market's numbers will be different, whether you practice in Seattle, Omaha or Miami, but the piles you'll sort them into are the same. The rest of this chapter is how to sort them.
Thousands of Searches a Month Name a Drug on Google's Restricted List
The first surprise is how many searches name a prescription drug. In our example market's list, about 13,500 searches a month included a drug that appears on Google's list of restricted prescription terms. Almost all of that was Botox, at about 12,100 searches a month, including searches like "botox for migraines," which belong to neurology, not cosmetic dermatology. Finasteride was a distant second at about 1,200.
Google's rule for the United States splits these two ways. You can generally mention a prescription drug in your ad text and on your landing page. But to use the drug's name as a keyword, Google requires the advertiser to be certified. We walk through what that means for a dermatology practice, and how to advertise injectables without bidding on the drug name, in Chapter 14.
For now, the practical step is simple. When a drug name comes back in your keyword list, set it aside in its own tab. Don't load it into the account. It isn't a negative, because you may want those people. It's a search you can't buy directly until you know where you stand.
One catch in the other direction: not every medicine name is restricted. Minoxidil, which drew thousands of searches in our list, is sold over the counter and isn't on Google's list. That makes most minoxidil searches a different problem, which is the next section.
Creams, Shampoos and Serums Are Shopping Lists, Not Patients
A large share of skin searches come from people trying to fix the problem themselves. In the example list, about 11,600 searches a month were for products and at-home treatments: "eczema creams," "hair growth serum," "hydrocortisone ointment for eczema," "at home laser hair removal." Add the minoxidil shampoo and serum searches and the pile gets bigger.
These people have a real skin problem. They're not looking for a dermatologist today. They're looking for a store. Paying for their clicks trains the account to find shoppers, which is the opposite of what Chapter 1's tracking is trying to teach it.
So words like cream, serum, shampoo, lotion, ointment, "at home" and brand names of drugstore skin care go on your negative keyword list, the list of words that stop your ads from showing. Check the list against your own services first. If the practice sells its own skin care line and wants to advertise it, that's a separate campaign with separate tracking, not a reason to let product searches into the medical campaigns.
Every Competitor's Name That Comes Back Is a Negative
The biggest single pile in our list was searches for a specific practice: about 58,000 a month in the example market naming a local dermatology practice, a regional group, or a laser hair removal chain. Every market has its own version of this list. Some of them have huge volume, because patients search for a practice they already know by name.
Those people have already chosen someone else. Bidding on their search is expensive, rarely works, and sometimes starts a fight you don't need. Every competitor name that comes back from your research goes on the negative list. Expect more to appear later, too: when you run the broad-match Exploration campaign we build in Chapter 6, Google will find competitor-name searches you never thought of, and they should be blocked as they appear.
Advertising on competitors' names is only ever a deliberate choice, made in its own separate campaign so it can't blur the rest of the account. For most practices, most of the time, the answer is no.
Your own practice's name is the opposite. It goes into its own brand campaign, so people already looking for you find you first, at a low cost.
Other Cities, Job Seekers and Bargain Hunters Aren't Your Patients
Keyword Planner doesn't know how far your patients will drive. In the example market, about 6,000 searches a month named other cities in the same state, such as Athens, Macon and Augusta. Your list will name the cities around you. Unless the practice has an office there, those are negatives.
The same goes for a few smaller groups: searches about dermatology jobs, salaries and training, and searches that lead with "cheap" or "free." They're small in number, but each one is a click you'd pay for with no patient behind it.
One group is not an automatic negative: insurance. The example list had about 540 searches a month about Medicaid, Medicare or finding a dermatologist without insurance. Whether those are worth paying for depends entirely on the practice. A practice that accepts Medicaid may want exactly those patients; one that doesn't should block them. Make that call on purpose, rather than letting a generic negative list make it for you.
Sort What Stays Into Tight Condition Groups
What's left after the sorting is the list you'll actually use. Now it goes into a plain spreadsheet, one keyword per row, with a column for the campaign and a column for the ad group it belongs to. Keep each ad group tight, around five or six closely related keywords, and name each group after the condition page it points to from Chapter 4: eczema, acne, psoriasis, hair loss, skin checks, mole removal, Mohs.
Add formulas that produce each keyword in all three match types, exact, phrase and broad, so the sheet generates the full list for you. From the sheet, the whole structure goes into the account through Google Ads Editor, the free program Google offers for making bulk changes offline and posting them in one go. At launch, only the exact-match versions go live in the Isolation campaign. The others wait, preloaded, for later chapters.
A Negative List Is Never Finished
The negatives you build now are a starting point. Once the account is running, the search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, and it will always turn up things the research missed: a new product name, a competitor you hadn't heard of, a condition you don't treat, a city at the edge of your map.
In the first weeks, read that report every few days and add negatives as you go. When the broad-match Exploration campaign launches in Chapter 6, read it every day for the first month, because broad match reaches much further and brings back far more searches you don't want. The dermatology-specific patterns to watch for are the same ones in this chapter: products, drug names, other practices, and places you don't serve.
Keyword Planner's Bid Ranges Are Estimates, Not Prices
Keyword Planner also shows a bid range for each search. Google describes the low end as roughly the 20th percentile and the high end as roughly the 80th percentile of what advertisers have historically paid for a top-of-page position, based on the last 30 days, your location and your network settings.
That makes the range useful for planning and poor for predicting. It's history, averaged across other advertisers with other pages and other Quality Scores. Use it to see which searches are likely to be expensive, such as the psoriasis and eczema searches from Chapter 3, and which are cheap. Your account's real prices only show up once it's running.
Next: Start With "Dermatologist Near Me"
The list is organized, the negatives are in, and the ad groups match your pages. Now comes the question of which searches to switch on first. Chapter 6 shows why a new dermatology account should start with the plain, local searches that bring in booked patients, and add conditions only once those are working.
The Google Ads for Dermatologists guide home lists every chapter. Keyword sorting like this is the second week of every account we build under our Google Ads management.
