An optometry practice runs two businesses under one roof: a medical office that examines eyes and a store that sells glasses and contact lenses. Google's Keyword Planner doesn't know which one you're advertising. Hand it a website and it will cheerfully return thousands of search ideas from both, plus a long tail of designer frame names and competitors' brands.
Keyword research for eye care is mostly a sorting job. The searches that book exams are in the pile. So are hundreds of searches from people shopping for frames who have no plan to see anyone. This chapter walks through how we find the exam searches, what to cut, and what to set aside.
One Eyewear Search Outdraws "Eye Exam Near Me"
Start with the scale of the eyewear market. Across the US, Google's Keyword Planner shows about 368,000 searches a month for "prescription glasses" and 135,000 for "eyeglasses near me." The exam side is big too: 246,000 for "eye exam near me," 301,000 for "optometrist near me" and 450,000 for "eye doctor near me."
Those are two different kinds of people. Someone typing "prescription glasses" is shopping, often online, often with a prescription already in hand. Someone typing "eye exam near me" wants an appointment. A practice with an optical shop serves both, but a Search campaign built to fill the exam book should only pay for the second.
See Who's Bidding Before You Research
Before opening Keyword Planner, find out who you're up against. The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool in your account shows the results page as a searcher in your area would see it, and viewing ads there doesn't count as an impression for anyone. Try the searches from Chapter 2: "eye exam near me," "optometrist near me," "eye doctor near me," plus your town's name.
Write down every practice and retailer that appears. Don't click their ads to look closer. You'd be spending their budget and learning nothing the preview tool can't show you.
Run a Competitor's Website Through Keyword Planner
Next, open Keyword Planner and pick the website option under "Discover new keywords." Paste in a competitor's address and Google mines that site's own content for search ideas. Set the location to your market so the volumes and bids reflect your area, not the whole country.
What comes back depends heavily on whose site you enter. In our example market, Chicago, we ran the websites of a dozen verified advertisers through it and sorted the ideas into exam and doctor searches, eyewear shopping, and brand names. Four results show the range:
- A national optical retailer's site returned 2,608 ideas. 1,610 of them were designer frame searches: Ray-Ban, Gucci, Prada and dozens of other labels.
- A value optical chain's site returned 1,356 ideas. Only 14 were about eye exams. The rest were mostly its own brand name and eyewear deals.
- An independent practice with a strong clinical focus returned 1,781 ideas, and 1,110 of them were about exams and eye doctors.
- An independent practice with a large optical boutique split almost exactly in half: 932 eyewear ideas and 928 exam ideas.
Your market will produce different numbers, but the lesson carries over. Give Keyword Planner a retailer's site and you get a shopping list. Seed it with a practice that talks about exams, medical care and its doctors, and you get exam searches.
Then Run Your Own Site Through It
Put your own website in next. This is the step most practices skip, and it's the most revealing. Keyword Planner shows you your site the way Google reads it.
If your homepage leads with a frame gallery, brand logos and sale banners, expect the ideas to lean toward eyewear. That's useful to know for two reasons. It tells you which searches your pages will support without extra work. And it connects to Chapter 4: if Google reads your site as a glasses store, your exam ads will have a harder time convincing it that the landing page matches the search. A clear exam page with prices, plans and doctors fixes both problems.
Sort the List Into Three Piles
Export every list into one Google Sheet and remove duplicates. Then sort each search into one of three piles.
Keep: the searches that book exams. "Eye exam near me," "optometrist near me," "eye doctor accepting new patients," "contact lens exam," "pediatric eye doctor near me," "eye doctor for pink eye." These become your ad groups, built by what the patient came for, the way Chapter 4 laid out.
Cut: the searches that will never be your patient. These become negative keywords:
- Chain and competitor names. They come back from every competitor-seeded list and, later, in much larger numbers from broad match. Paying for someone searching for a specific store is paying to be the second choice. Targeting competitors deliberately is a separate campaign, if you ever run one, and that's a big if.
- Designer frame names. Someone searching "gucci frames" is shopping for a brand. Even if you carry the line, an exam campaign shouldn't pay for that click.
- Jobs and training. "Careers," "jobs," "optometry school." They were rare in our example market's lists, but they turn up.
Park: general eyewear shopping. "Prescription glasses," "eyeglasses near me," "blue light glasses." These aren't exam patients, but they aren't worthless either. Whether a practice ever runs a separate campaign for its optical shop is a business decision, and one we'd make only after the exam campaigns are working. Until then, add them as negatives in the exam campaigns and keep the list.
"Free" and "Cheap" Are Negatives. Vision Plans and Medicaid Are Your Call.
Some searches look like exam patients but usually aren't worth the click. Nationally, "free eye exam" draws roughly 8,100 searches a month; in our example market the "cheap eye exam" family added about 2,400 more. Unless your practice truly offers a free or discount exam, those people are looking for something you don't sell. Cut them.
Insurance searches are different, and they shouldn't be cut by reflex. Plan searches ("vsp provider near me," "eye doctor that takes eyemed") and Medicaid searches ("eye care that takes medicaid" drew about 590 a month in our example market) come from people who know exactly how they'll pay. If you're in network with that plan, or you accept Medicaid, those searches may be among your best. If you're not, cut them. It's a deliberate choice for each practice, and Chapter 14 covers how to handle plan and medical insurance searches in detail.
Keyword Planner's Bids Are a Range, Not a Quote
Keyword Planner shows two bid columns, the low and high end of "top of page" bids. Google describes these estimates as "the bid you likely need to get your ad among the top ad positions." They're useful for sizing a budget (Chapter 3) and for comparing searches against each other.
Treat them as a range, not a price. In our experience running accounts, the real cost of an exact-match exam keyword can land well above or below the estimate, and we plan around roughly 30% either way until the account's own data takes over. Chapter 7 sets real bids from real auctions.
From Spreadsheet to Account
Once the keep pile is sorted into ad groups, build the account in the sheet before you build it in Google Ads. We use three columns (campaign, ad group, keyword) and let formulas write each keyword three ways: exact match, phrase match and broad match. At launch only the exact versions run, inside Isolation, which is what we call the tightly matched campaign where we set each bid by hand. Having the other two written and ready makes Exploration, the broad-match campaign, a quick build later.
Upload the sheet with Google Ads Editor rather than typing keywords into the web interface one at a time. Cap each ad group at roughly half a dozen keywords, every one of them asking for the same kind of appointment. Put your practice name and doctors' names in their own brand campaign so they don't mix with exam searches.
The sheet earns its keep before a dollar is spent. It's where the practice owner can scan every keyword and ask "would I want this patient?" line by line, and it's easy to hand to the front desk, who often know better than anyone which phrases callers actually use.
Broad Match Will Keep Finding New Ones to Cut
The negative list you build today is a starting point. Negatives matter most once Exploration launches, because broad match combined with a target cost per booking goes looking for searches you never listed. Some of those are wonderful: the long, specific searches that turn into patients. Plenty are chain names, frame brands and online stores you haven't seen yet.
For the first month of Exploration, open the search terms report daily and add a negative for every stray the moment you spot it. After that, a weekly pass usually keeps up.
Next: "Same Day" and "Walk In"
With the exam searches separated and the shopping set aside, the next step is deciding how tightly to match them. Chapter 6 covers Isolation and Exploration in detail, and why the searches patients write with words like "same day" and "walk in" are where broad match earns its keep.
The full sixteen-chapter plan is on the guide's home page.
When an eye care practice signs on for our Google Ads management, this three-pile sort is the first thing we sit down and do. Doing it yourself? Run three sites through Keyword Planner (a chain, an independent practice like yours, and your own) and compare the piles before you write a single ad.
