Type "short term rehab" into Google's Keyword Planner and ask it for more ideas like that one. It will happily oblige. Somewhere in the first page of results, between "skilled rehab facilities near me" and "rehab after hospital stay," you'll find "inpatient drug treatment near me" and "7 day inpatient detox." Keyword Planner doesn't know you run a nursing home. It knows the word rehab, and to Google that word has two very different customers.
Chapter 4 split the account into a rehab side and a long-term side. This chapter fills both with keywords, and most of the work isn't finding searches. It's throwing the wrong ones out before they cost you anything.
Every Nursing Home Advertising in Your Market Is a Free Keyword List
Keyword research for a nursing home starts with the buildings already buying ads near you, because their websites describe exactly the services you offer.
First, find out who they are. In Google's Ad preview and diagnosis tool, pick your town as the location, and type "nursing homes near me": it shows the ads a family down the street would see. Use the tool rather than searching live and clicking around: clicking a rival's ad costs them money and teaches you nothing extra.
Then feed each rival's website to Keyword Planner. Give it one rival's web address and your market, and it combs that site for services and returns every search it thinks those services match. Do the same with your own website. You may discover Google thinks the respite line buried at the bottom of your services page is your specialty.
Two cautions about the numbers. The bid ranges Keyword Planner shows are estimates for broad match, so treat any figure as a range of about 30% either way. And close variants share one volume, so "nursing home near me" and "nursing homes near me" aren't two separate pools of families.
In our example market, Pittsburgh, eleven nursing homes and campuses running Google Search ads gave us 9,892 keyword ideas this way. Your market will return a different pile, but it'll be made of the same parts.
A Third of the Ideas From Nursing Home Websites Are Assisted Living Searches
Here's what those 9,892 ideas were actually about:
The biggest single block, 3,577 ideas or 36% of the pile, was assisted and independent living. That makes sense: many nursing homes sit on campuses that also run apartments and assisted living, and their websites say so. It doesn't make those searches yours. A family typing "assisted living near me" is shopping for a different level of care, and in Pittsburgh those clicks cost $5.70 to $23.00 for a top spot. If you don't offer assisted living, every one of them is a paid wrong number.
The next surprise is names. Facility and campus names made up 1,024 ideas, and some of them are among the busiest searches in the whole list: "concordia cabot pa" and "friendship village of south hills" each show 2,900 searches a month. Those are families who already know where they want to go, and it isn't to you. Competitor names belong on your negative list. Bidding on a rival's name is its own campaign with its own risks, and for most nursing homes the answer is not to. Your own facility's name is the exception, and it lives in the brand campaign Chapter 2 set up.
The smaller blocks sort the same way:
- Home care and hospice (146 and 177 ideas): other businesses' customers, unless you run a hospice program yourself.
- Low-income senior housing (66): subsidized apartments, not skilled nursing.
- Jobs (118): applicants, who belong in a separate recruiting campaign (Chapter 16), never in the family ad groups.
The block labeled general senior care (1,818 ideas) needs a human eye. It's full of phrases like "senior care" and "elder care," which get real volume ("senior care" shows 2,400 searches a month in the example market) but could mean home care, a day program or a nursing home. Leave the vague ones out of the launch. If they matter, broad match will show you which ones turn into calls once Exploration is running.
What's left after that sorting is the core: roughly 2,500 nursing home and rehab searches, plus the general senior care phrases you'll sort by hand.
"Rehab" Also Means Drug Detox, and Detox Centers Pay Up to $80 a Click
Now the trap in the chapter's title.
When we asked Keyword Planner for ideas around post-hospital rehab searches ("short term rehab," "rehab after hospital stay," "subacute rehab" and similar), it came back with 599 ideas. At least 8 of the 20 busiest were plainly addiction programs, "inpatient drug treatment near me" and "7 day inpatient detox" among them. Others named program lengths only addiction centers sell, like "28 days rehab."
Then look at what those advertisers are willing to pay:
In Pittsburgh a top spot on "nursing homes near me" goes for $2.09 to $10.11. The drug treatment searches run $14 to $65, and plain "inpatient rehab" tops out at $79.87 because addiction centers compete for it too. Even from the competitor websites, the generic phrase "rehab center" came back at $13.32 to $58.19. An addiction treatment center can pay those prices because a single admission is worth a lot to it. A nursing home that wanders into that auction pays detox prices for families who were never looking for a nursing home.
There's a second risk, and it's about policy rather than price. Google restricts ads for drug and alcohol addiction services to advertisers with a special certification. Its written rule covers addiction recovery only, not physical rehab after a hospital stay. But advertisers in Google's own help forum have described senior post-surgery rehab ads being flagged over the word rehab itself; that account comes from volunteer experts on the forum, not Google staff. The word is a magnet for the wrong auction and, sometimes, the wrong reviewer.
The fix is simple once you know it's needed:
- Never let "rehab" stand alone. Pair it with its context: "short term rehab," "skilled nursing rehab," "rehab after surgery," "rehab after hip replacement."
- Add the addiction words as negatives from day one (the list is below).
- If an ad gets flagged anyway, appeal it and point to the page: therapy, discharge planning, Medicare coverage. A reviewer who sees a nursing home's rehab page knows the difference.
Medicaid Searches Aren't Junk Traffic if You Have Medicaid Beds to Fill
One group of searches doesn't sort itself. Families search "nursing homes that accept medicaid," "medicaid nursing facilities" and "medicaid and nursing homes" (210 searches a month each in the example market, and "medicaid nursing home" gets 18,100 nationally).
It's tempting to treat those as low-value and block them. Don't do it by reflex. Medicaid is the main payer for most nursing home residents, and a facility with open Medicaid beds may want exactly those families. A facility with a full Medicaid wing, or none at all, should keep them out. It's a business decision about your census, not a keyword hygiene rule, and whoever builds the account should ask before deciding it. Before launch, check two numbers: how many Medicaid beds are open right now, and how many more you'd want filled in the next quarter. If the answer is none, block the searches. If it's several, they may be the most useful searches in the account.
Five Keywords per Ad Group on Exact Match Beat a Thousand-Keyword Dump
Once the pile is cleaned up, the keepers go into small, tight ad groups by type of stay, five or six keywords each:
- Rehab: "short term rehab near me," "skilled nursing rehab," "rehab after surgery" and close relatives.
- Long-term care: "nursing homes near me," "long term care facility near me," "nursing home near me" and close relatives.
- Memory care or respite, only if your building offers it and has a page for it.
At launch, those keywords run on exact match, in the campaign we call Isolation (our name for it): only the searches you chose, at bids you set. That keeps the first weeks clean while Google learns what a real inquiry looks like for you.
The negative list is where most of the ongoing work lives, and it's never finished. On exact match it barely matters. The list earns its keep later, when the Exploration campaign opens broad match (usually once calls and tours reach about 30 quality conversions a month). Broad match will find searches Keyword Planner never showed you, and some of them will be detox centers, assisted living and job seekers all over again. Budget ten minutes a day for the first month of Exploration to scroll the searches that triggered your ads and block the strays. Chapter 6 covers that routine.
Next: The Search You Can Predict and the Ones You Can't
Chapter 6 splits the keyword list again, this time by what you can predict: the handful of searches that bring most families, and the long tail of hip fractures, strokes and "does this place take my plan" that only broad match can reach.
Every chapter, from tracking through the hospital list and hiring, is on the guide's home page.
On every nursing home account we run in Google Ads management, the addiction negatives go in before the first ad does. If you're running your own, open your search terms report today and search it for "detox."
