Point Keyword Planner at three or four home care agencies' websites and it returns a list longer than any agency could ever use. Some are gold: "in home care," "24 hour home care services," "dementia home care." Many are people you will never serve: caregivers looking for work, families shopping for a nursing home, someone searching a competitor by name. And a few quietly combine two businesses you run separately, home care and home health, into a single line.
This chapter builds a home care keyword list the way our method does, from real competitors' sites, then cuts it down to the searches that belong in your ad groups. The cutting matters as much as the finding.
See Who Already Bids Before You Build, Without Clicking Their Ads
Start by looking at who is already buying your market's searches. Google's Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool, under Tools in your Google Ads account, shows the live results page for any search in any location you set, and Google notes that using it doesn't add impressions to anyone's ads the way a regular search would. Type "in home care," set your city, and write down who shows up.
Don't click a competitor's ad to look. It costs them money and teaches you nothing the preview tool doesn't.
In our example market, Chicago, the field was crowded. Of 62 provider and referral-site domains we checked in Google's Ads Transparency Center, 43 had run Search ads in the last 90 days. The franchise brands bid through many accounts at once: Always Best Care through 12, Assisting Hands through 11, Visiting Angels through 10, one for the national brand and others for local offices. Your market will look different, but the exercise is the same: find five to ten agencies that advertise where you want to win.
Feed Keyword Planner the Competitor's Service Page, With Your Market Set
Now give Keyword Planner something to read. Its "Start with a website" option takes any URL and returns searches related to that site's content; Google notes that it reads the page's own content, not the pages it links to. Two settings make the results useful:
- Set the location to your service area, so the volumes and bids describe your market, not the whole country.
- Feed it the right page. A franchise office's page or a competitor's dementia care page returns tighter ideas than a national homepage.
We ran 15 advertisers' sites from our example market this way, plus three short lists of seed searches for home care, home health and caregiver jobs. Together they returned 24,442 distinct searches for one metro area. The sites returned very different amounts. Visiting Angels' national site gave back 1,399 ideas, Home Instead's 731 and a single-office independent, Custom Home Care, 332. One site returned none at all. Bigger sites return more, but not always more you can use, which is why the sorting below matters more than the size of the pull. Then run your own site through the same tool. It shows you which services Google thinks your site is about, which is often not the list you'd give.
Read the numbers loosely. Google says its forecasts refresh daily from the last seven to ten days of data, adjusted for seasonality. Our method treats Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid range as a guide that can run 30% either way once real auctions start.
The Planner Pools Home Care and Home Health. Split Them Before They Reach an Ad Group.
Chapter 4 showed the trap: in our example market, Keyword Planner reported "home care services" and "home health care services" as one line of 9,900 searches, and "home care agency" and "home health care agencies" as one line of 8,100. A list that treats them as one will build ad groups that serve one ad to two different families.
So sort every search you keep into the service ad groups Chapter 4 set up: companion and personal care, dementia care, 24-hour and live-in care, respite care, skilled nursing at home, and therapy at home. Aim for five or six closely related searches per ad group, all ones the same ad and the same page can answer. From our example market's list, a dementia care ad group might hold "dementia home care" (720 searches a month), "in home memory care," "memory care in home," "in home care for dementia patients" and "alzheimer's home health care." Every one of them fits an ad about in-home dementia care and a page that explains it. What doesn't belong, even though the words overlap, is "care home for dementia," which is a family looking for a facility.
Our method keeps the working list in a Google Sheet, one row per search, tagged with its campaign and ad group, with formulas beside it that spell out the exact, phrase and broad forms. Once every row has a home, Google Ads Editor, Google's free bulk-editing app, loads the whole sheet in one pass. It is faster and harder to get wrong than building ad groups one at a time on the website.
About One in Five Searches in the List Is a Job Hunt
Now the cutting. Home care's biggest source of wasted searches is the one Chapter 1 flagged for tracking: people looking for work. Of the 24,442 searches in our list, 4,876 contained a job word, and 3,883 of those were for care work. "cna jobs near me" alone draws 6,600 searches a month in our example market.
Add the job words as negative keywords before launch: jobs, job, hiring, careers, career, salary, pay rate, CNA, certification, training and classes. Google's own help page adds a catch worth knowing: negative keywords don't cover close variants. "Career" doesn't block "careers," so add both forms of every word you care about. If you want caregivers to find you, and most agencies do, give recruiting its own campaign with its own budget, which Chapter 14 builds.
A Broad "Nursing Home" Negative Blocks the Families Comparing You to One
The second big group is facilities. About 2,700 searches in our list were for a place to move a parent rather than care at home: "nursing homes near me" at 12,100 searches a month in our example market, "assisted living residence near me" at 5,400. Those families aren't your clients today.
The easy fix is a broad negative on "nursing home" (plus "nursing homes" and "assisted living," since negatives don't cover variants). It is also a mistake. By Google's rules, a broad negative stops your ad on any search that includes every one of its words, whatever the order. The words "nursing" and "home" sit inside searches families type while they are choosing care at home, and both of these were in our list:
- "home care instead of nursing home"
- "skilled nursing home care near me"
A broad "nursing home" negative blocks both. The first is a family actively looking for an alternative to a facility, maybe the best search in the list.
Use precise negatives instead. Phrase negatives only fire when the words appear together and in the same order, and exact negatives only on the identical search. Negatives like "nursing homes near me," "nursing home near me" and "assisted living near me" as phrase negatives cut the facility shoppers and leave the comparers alone.
Competitor Names Are Negatives. Medicaid and Medicare Terms Are Your Call.
Two more groups need a decision.
Brand and franchise names. Our list held 1,521 searches built on other agencies' names: "addus in home care" at 6,600 searches a month, a cluster of "home instead" variants at 2,900 each, and every franchise brand in the market. A family typing a competitor's name has usually already chosen. Add those names as negatives in every campaign except your own brand campaign. Bidding on competitors' names is a separate campaign, a separate decision and, in our method, a rare one.
Payer terms. Our list held 857 searches naming a payer, from "medicare certified home health agency" at 1,600 to searches about Medicaid programs and VA benefits. These are not automatic negatives. A Medicare-certified agency wants the first one; a private-pay-only companion agency doesn't. Keep the payer terms that match what you accept and cut the rest. Chapter 15 gives each payer its own campaign.
Then a few smaller cuts:
- Hospice and palliative care (587 searches), unless you offer it.
- Symptom and definition searches such as "early signs of dementia" or "dementia stages." Worth an article on your site, not a paid click.
- "Free" and "cheap" searches (26 in our list), which rarely become paying clients.
Negatives Are Never Finished
Everything above is the starting list, built before a single ad runs. The real work begins later. When an account adds what our method calls an Exploration campaign, broad match with a cost-per-lead target to find searches no list predicted, the search terms report starts showing exactly what families typed before they clicked. For the first 30 days, open that report each morning and turn every wrong search into a negative before it costs you twice.
Keep the negatives organized from the start. Google lets you save negatives as shared lists and apply one list to several campaigns at once, so a word you add later reaches every campaign that uses the list. Build three: a job list, a facility list and a competitor list. Apply all three to every client campaign. Leave the job list off the recruiting campaign, or it will block the very applicants that campaign exists to find.
A few that tend to show up only after launch: new competitor names, facility names, caregiver-training schools and searches from people who need a single ride to an appointment rather than ongoing care. None of them is predictable from a spreadsheet. All of them are obvious in a search terms report.
Next: Families Type Things No Keyword List Predicts
With a clean list in service ad groups, the account is ready to start. Our method starts narrow: an Isolation campaign on exact match that buys only the searches you know become clients, and only later an Exploration campaign on broad match that goes looking for the searches your list never saw coming. Chapter 6 builds both and explains when to switch.
If you're jumping in here, Chapter 4 sets up the service ad groups this list fills, and Chapter 1 explains why job seekers need to stay out of your conversions as well as your keywords. The guide home lists all fifteen chapters.
Building this list from competitors' own pages, then cutting it hard, is the first real work we do on a new account under our Google Ads management.
