"In home care" is an easy search to buy. So is "24 hour home care" and "home health care near me." Every agency in town knows those words, and every agency's keyword list starts with them.
The families who call you don't only type those words. A daughter who just watched her father struggle up the porch steps might type something long and specific that no keyword list has ever held. This chapter shows how our method buys both: the searches you already know, first, with tight control, and then the searches you couldn't have guessed, once the account has earned the data to find them.
Isolation Buys the Searches You Already Know Become Clients
The first campaign in our method is what we call an Isolation campaign. It isolates the proven searches: exact match only, manual bids, and only the plain, ready-to-call searches most likely to become a client. It uses the service ad groups from Chapter 4 and the clean keyword list from Chapter 5, so a home care Isolation campaign might start with searches such as:
- "in home care" and "in home care near me"
- "home care services near me"
- "24 hour home care"
- "home health care near me" (in a home health ad group, with its own page)
- "dementia home care"
One thing has changed about exact match that surprises people. Google's definition now lets an exact keyword match searches that mean the same thing or share its intent, whatever the exact wording. An exact-match keyword for "in home care" can show for a search worded a little differently if Google judges that it means the same thing. It is still the tightest control you have, but it isn't literal anymore, which is why Chapter 5's negatives matter even in an exact-match campaign.
Bid confidently at the start. A brand-new account has no Quality Score history, so it often takes a higher bid to earn a good position in the first weeks. As clicks and conversions build a record, bids can come down.
Keyword Planner gives you the starting point. In our example market, its top-of-page range for "in home care" ran from $4.20 to $16.20. A new Isolation campaign might start that ad group near the upper half of the range, then read the search impression share column after the first week: if the ad is showing near the top for most searches it's eligible for, bring the bid down a step; if it's missing most of them, the bid, the ad or the page needs work before the budget grows. Run your brand campaign alongside from the first day. It is the cheapest campaign in the account and it answers the families who already know your name, including the home health families holding a hospital's list that Chapter 2 described.
Most Home Care Searches Are Too Small to Find in Advance
Isolation covers the big searches. The trouble is how few big searches there are.
We counted the care searches in our example-market list for Chicago, after removing the job, facility, hospice and competitor searches from Chapter 5. Of 10,428 care searches:
- 272 get 1,000 or more searches a month.
- 427 get between 100 and 999.
- 8,215 get between 10 and 99.
- 1,514 are too small for Keyword Planner to report at all.
That is 93% of the list under 100 searches a month. (We counted keywords rather than adding up their volumes, because Keyword Planner repeats one number across close variants, and adding them would double-count.)
A zero in Keyword Planner doesn't mean nobody searches. It rounds small searches down; on BrandRocket's own site, Google Search Console recorded 421 impressions for a search that Keyword Planner listed at zero. No agency can build ad groups for 9,700 small searches, and the ones Keyword Planner never reports can't be listed at all. Yet together they are where a large share of families search. That is the job of the second campaign.
Families Describe the Problem Before They Name the Service
Read what families wrote in forums and reviews in our research and the language gap is obvious. They don't talk like a keyword list:
- "After a bad fall, my 93 year old mother needed 24 hour care."
- "Agency versus private caregiver??"
- "Wondering if there are good options for home healthcare that would have the equivalent care of a skilled nursing facility??"
- "A sudden hospitalization for my grandfather pointed out a much bigger issue--he could no longer live alone."
Our reading: when families like these turn to Google, many of their searches look more like those sentences than like "home care services." They are long, specific and personal, and most of them are too rare to show up in Keyword Planner. They are also often ready to act. A family searching for care that equals a skilled nursing facility, at home, has already made most of the decision.
Exploration Starts at 30 Client Leads a Month, Not Before
The second campaign in our method is what we call an Exploration campaign. It explores the searches no list could predict. Here is how it is built:
- A copy of Isolation, with the same service ad groups, ads and pages.
- Seeded with three to five searches that produced clients, taken from Isolation's real results, not guesses.
- Broad match only. In Google's terms, broad match can show your ad for searches connected to the keyword even when none of its words appear.
- Maximize Conversions with a target cost per lead, set from what Isolation actually paid per lead and what Chapter 3 says a client can cost.
Google is blunt about the pairing. It calls using Smart Bidding with broad match "critical," because each search is different and its bid should reflect the signals present at that moment. Broad match with manual bids is how accounts buy thousands of irrelevant clicks.
The timing matters as much as the settings. Exploration needs something to learn from, so our method waits until the account produces about 30 real client leads a month, counted the way Chapter 1 sets up, with job applicants excluded. Start sooner and the bidding has only a handful of families to learn from, not enough to separate a promising search from a costly one. Give it a month or two after that before judging its cost per lead; the early weeks are tuition.
Give Home Care and Home Health Their Own Broad-Match Campaigns
Chapter 5 showed Keyword Planner pooling "home care services" with "home health care services." Broad match will blend them too, and more freely. A broad keyword for companion care can reach a family looking for a visiting nurse, and the other way around.
That matters for bidding. A private-pay companion client and a Medicare home health patient are worth different amounts, as Chapter 3 priced them, and they convert differently. If one Exploration campaign holds both, its target cost per lead has to be a blend that fits neither. So an agency that runs both businesses should run two Exploration campaigns, one seeded with its best home care searches and one with its best home health searches, each with its own target and its own pages. Each campaign's search terms report then tells a clean story: the home health campaign's wrong searches are companion care families, and they belong in its negatives, not in the budget.
An agency that only offers one of the two needs just one Exploration campaign, with the other business's words added as negatives.
The First Month of Broad Match Is a Daily Search-Terms Job
Broad match finds the families your list missed. It also finds everyone else. In a home care account, the first weeks of Exploration bring in searches like:
- Job seekers who slipped past Chapter 5's list with words it didn't include.
- Facility shoppers looking for a nursing home or assisted living by name.
- Competitor names, especially new franchise offices.
- Families outside your service area searching for care somewhere you don't serve.
- One-time needs, such as a single ride to a doctor's appointment, that aren't ongoing care.
The search terms report shows every one of them. For the first 30 days of Exploration, open it every morning and add each wrong search to the right shared negative list from Chapter 5: jobs, facilities or competitors. After the first month, a few times a week is usually enough.
This daily habit is the difference between broad match that finds your best clients and broad match that spends your budget on the whole internet.
The report also hands you good news. A long search that brings in family after family deserves promotion: copy it into Isolation as its own exact keyword and bid on it directly. Over a few months, the searches no list could predict become part of the list, and the Isolation campaign that restarts later is stronger than the one that launched.
Once Broad Match Carries the Leads, Exact Match Becomes the Backup
Over time, the two campaigns trade roles. Once Exploration is producing most of the client leads at a cost you're happy with, Isolation can be paused. It isn't deleted. Suppose "24 hour home care," one of your best searches, sinks to the bottom of the page. Turn that one Isolation keyword back on and bid for its old spot directly.
One more automation comes later still. Google's AI Max for Search goes beyond broad match, and it is on by default in new Search campaigns. It belongs at the very end of the rollout, in an account that already runs well on broad match, and never in an exact-match Isolation campaign. Chapter 13 covers when to use it and the guardrails it needs.
Next: A Private-Pay Client and a Medicaid Client Need Different Bids
Both campaigns bid, one manually and one with a target cost per lead. The next question is what those bids should be, and in home care the answer depends on who pays. A private-pay client billed at $35 an hour and a Medicaid client billed at a state rate shouldn't share one target. Chapter 7 sets the numbers.
If you're starting here, Chapter 5 builds the list and negatives this chapter launches, and Chapter 4 sets up the service ad groups. The guide home lists all fifteen chapters.
Isolation first, then Exploration at 30 leads a month, is the order every account follows under our Google Ads management.
