Most practices build their first keyword list the same way: somebody sits down and types what they think patients search for. The list comes out sounding like the practice's own website, full of the words doctors use, and it misses much of what patients actually type.
There's a better starting point, and it's free. The practices already advertising in your market have spent years writing pages about their services. Google has read every one of those pages. Aim Keyword Planner at a competitor's website and it hands back the searches that site is built to catch.
Ad Preview Shows Who Is Bidding Without Costing You an Impression
Start by finding out who you're up against. The tempting move is to search your specialty on your own phone and look at the ads. Resist it. Tapping a rival's ad bills them for your curiosity, and repeated searches from your own phone can change what Google shows you.
Google Ads has a tool built for this, called Ad Preview and Diagnosis. Pick a location, type a search, and it shows you what a local patient would get. Google's help center points out that it does this without piling up ad impressions or muddying your stats. Set the location to the area you serve, run the searches a new patient would type, and write down which practices show up. Those websites are your seeds.
Seed Keyword Planner With a Competing Practice's Website, Not a Guess
Keyword Planner, Google's free keyword tool inside Google Ads, has an option to start from a website instead of a list of words. Paste in any site and Google suggests searches drawn from what that site's pages are about. Set the location to your market first, or the volumes will be national.
We ran this on 14 practices advertising in our example market, San Diego, across primary care, cardiology, gastroenterology, allergy, pain management, psychiatry, therapy, physical therapy, men's health, LASIK and urgent care. Together they returned 20,328 different searches. Your market's numbers will differ; the method works the same anywhere. Run your own website through it too. Google's read of your own site is often a surprise.
Keyword Planner also shows a range for what advertisers pay to reach the top of the page. Treat it as an opening estimate, not a price. Those ranges lean on broad-match data, so our rule of thumb at BrandRocket is to read them as good to about 30% either way.
Every Seed Returns Junk, and Each Specialty Brings Its Own Kind
Here's what nobody warns you about: every site you seed comes back with searches that will never become patients. The surprise is that each specialty brings back its own kind of junk. From our example-market runs:
- Allergy: the single biggest search Keyword Planner suggested from an allergy practice's website was "dog allergy," at 3,600 a month. Some of those searchers want an allergist. Others just want to know if they can keep the puppy.
- Physical therapy: a physical therapy network's site returned 61 searches about jobs, salaries and degrees. Those are future therapists, not future patients.
- Cardiology: a cardiology practice's top suggestion was the practice's own name, at 4,400 a month. That's a search worth owning, but in its own campaign, not mixed into the new-patient list.
- Primary care: a primary care group's list was led by a health system's name, at 5,400 a month.
- Men's health: a men's health clinic's list included "testosterone supplementation," a search for pills on a shelf, not a doctor's visit.
Add the usual suspects on top: searches with "free" and "cheap" in them. A telehealth therapy network's site alone returned 28. Read every list line by line before a single keyword goes live.
Competitor and Health System Names Go on the Negative List. Insurance Is Your Call.
Some decisions are easy. Other practices' names and health systems' names go on your negative keyword list, so your ads stop showing to people looking for someone else. Advertising on a rival's name is a separate decision with a separate campaign and budget, and most practices never need it. Your own practice and doctor names go in a separate brand campaign, where they're cheap and protected.
Insurance is the decision that isn't easy. The primary care group's site returned 198 searches about insurance, plans or payers. Many practices want exactly those patients: someone searching for a doctor who takes their plan is close to booking. Others can't take the plan and shouldn't pay for the click. That's a business choice, not a keyword rule, and Chapter 16 walks through it.
Every Service Gets Five or Six Close Searches, Its Own Ad and Its Own Page
Now sort what's left. The rule from Chapter 4 applies here: small groups built around one service, each with its own ad and its own landing page. Five or six searches that mean the same thing to a patient belong together. A search that means something different starts a new group.
Here's what that looks like for an allergy practice, using searches from our example market:
- Allergist group: "allergist san diego" (720 a month) and "allergist near me" (210), plus the close variants. The ad says allergist and points to the practice's main allergy page.
- Allergy testing group: "allergy testing" (480) and the searches around it. The ad talks about testing and points to the testing page.
- Food allergy group: "food allergist" (210). A parent searching this is asking a different question, so it gets its own ad and its own page.
In a multi-specialty practice, this is where the account starts to look like the practice itself: a handful of tight groups for each service line, each one pointed at the page that answers it.
Exact Match Goes Live at Launch. Phrase and Broad Wait for Exploration.
Every keyword can run as exact, phrase or broad match. At launch, run exact match only. Isolation, as we call the first campaign at BrandRocket, buys only the searches you picked and shows Google what a genuine booking looks like. Exact match keeps it to those searches.
Phrase and broad match arrive with Exploration, the broad-match campaign we add when a service line is booking roughly 30 patients a month. By then the account knows what a patient looks like, and broad match has something to aim at. Chapter 6 builds Isolation keyword by keyword, and Chapter 7 covers the bidding for both.
Negatives Matter Most the Week Exploration Starts
The negative list you write before launch is a start, not a finish. When Exploration switches on, broad match starts matching searches you never saw coming, and competitor names come back in volume.
Through Exploration's first month, check the search terms report daily and block whatever doesn't belong. After that, keep a regular review on the calendar. Broad match without this step earns its bad reputation fast. With it, broad match finds patients your list never would. It just needs a gatekeeper.
Our specialty guides go deeper on the keyword traps in their own fields. The dermatology guide covers drug names that show up in dermatology keyword research. The optometry guide covers sorting eye exam searches from eyewear searches. The plastic surgery guide covers finding plastic surgery keywords on competitors' websites.
Next: Pick the Service Line That Launches First
With tight groups built and negatives in place, it's time to decide which service line goes live first. Chapter 6 builds the first exact-match campaign around the line where patients are ready to book.
Catch up on Chapter 4 on matching the ad and the page to each search, or see every chapter on the guide home for Google Ads for Healthcare. When a practice hires us for Google Ads management, competitor-seeded keyword research is how every new account starts.
