A dad notices his ten-year-old's top teeth sit well in front of the bottom ones. That night he types "overbite" into Google and reads three articles, a forum thread and a hospital's patient page. He isn't calling anyone yet. Six weeks later, after the family dentist mentions it at a cleaning, his wife searches "pediatric orthodontist near me," reads two practices' reviews and books an exam before lunch.
Both searches are about the same child. Only one of them was ready to spend money with you, and a new Google Ads account can't afford to treat them as equals.
This chapter maps the orthodontic searches people make on the way to a first exam, and shows where a new account should put its first dollars. Search counts and bids below are nationwide Keyword Planner figures unless a line says otherwise; a handful come from our example market, Detroit, and say so. Your market's numbers will be different. The order of operations won't be.
Five Stages Sit Between Noticing Crooked Teeth and Booking an Orthodontic Exam.
Most marketing plans start at the top: make people aware, warm them up, and hope some of them eventually call. We build orthodontic accounts in reverse. It starts with the people already hunting for an orthodontist, uses their bookings to teach Google's bidding what a good patient looks like, and only then climbs up to the curious.
The climb has five rungs. Here they are in orthodontic terms, with US monthly searches from Keyword Planner.
Unaware. Nobody has noticed a problem, or a parent has noticed but hasn't connected it to treatment. There's no search to buy here. In the AAO's own economics survey, 42% of new patient exams come from a referral by a dentist or another specialist, which is how many families skip the searching altogether. The goal at this stage is simply to be known.
Problem aware. Someone can name what they see. "Overbite" gets about 49,500 searches a month, "underbite" 27,100 and "crooked teeth" 18,100. These are worried searches, not shopping ones. The goal is interest: be useful while they read.
Solution aware. Now they know treatment exists and are weighing it. "Palate expander" draws 40,500 a month, "how much are braces" 27,100, "braces for adults" 14,800. The goal is to influence a decision before it's made.
The cost questions sit here, and they're worth noticing even before you advertise on them. People searching "how much are braces" want a range, a monthly figure and a sense of whether insurance helps. A practice page that answers those three things plainly will serve this crowd later, when the account is ready to reach them, and it will help the people who arrive from the bottom-stage searches too. Chapter 14 covers the rules for putting monthly payments in an ad.
Service aware. They want a provider. "Near me orthodontist" is the giant here at 246,000 a month in Keyword Planner's records. "Braces near me" gets 40,500, "best orthodontist near me" 9,900, "pediatric orthodontist near me" 5,400 and "invisalign consultation near me" 480. The goal is action: book the exam.
Most aware. They know your practice, or one of your doctors, by name. A friend's teen wears your brackets, or the family dentist wrote your name on a card. The goal is to make sure the search for your name lands on you first.
This stage matters more in orthodontics than most fields because of how referrals work. A dentist hands a family a card with your name on it. Many of those families don't call the number on the card; they type the name into Google, often with "reviews" after it, to check you out first. A family typing your name after a dentist sent them is about as warm as a lead gets, and if your own ad isn't the first thing they see, someone else's result is. In the AAO's survey, referrals from dentists and other specialists brought in more than four in ten new exams.
A Big Search Isn't a Ready Search. "How to Fix Overbite" Tops Out at $5.82 a Click.
It's tempting to chase volume. "Overbite" is about nine times the size of "pediatric orthodontist near me," so on paper it looks like the bigger prize. Look at what sits inside it, though. Nested in that family is "how to fix overbite," at 6,600 a month, where even the high end of the bidding stops at $5.82. A range that low means few advertisers are competing hard for those clicks.
Now go to the bottom. The high end of the bid range for "pediatric orthodontist near me" is $34.01. For "invisalign consultation near me" it's $58.93. Advertisers fight much harder for those clicks, and the words explain why: the person typing is choosing a practice, not reading about jaws.
Price isn't a perfect readiness meter, though. "Underbite" reaches $37.08, higher than "braces near me," even though it's a symptom search. The words tell you the stage more reliably than the bid does: "near me," "consultation," a practice name or a treatment plus a place are booking words. A body part alone is a reading word.
One more quirk to know before Chapter 5 builds the keyword list. Keyword Planner reports no data at all for several ready-to-book phrasings, including "orthodontist near me," "braces cost" and "free orthodontic consultation," even when each is entered as an exact keyword. In its records, the near-me demand sits under the reversed phrasing "near me orthodontist." No data is not the same as no searches. It means the tool is filing them somewhere else.
Search Ads Meet the Parent Typing "Braces Near Me." YouTube Reaches the One Still Reading About Overbites.
Every Google channel is a tool for a particular stage, and using the wrong one is like handing a consent form to someone still deciding whether to come in.
Search belongs to the bottom two stages. Someone types "braces near me" or your practice's name, and your ad appears at that exact moment. Nothing else Google sells is as close to the decision.
Demand Gen reaches people before they search: video on YouTube and Shorts, plus placements in Gmail, Discover and Google's display network, which Google is folding into Demand Gen. That makes it the natural home for the problem and solution stages, like a short video for parents about what an early orthodontic visit checks. Google's own guidance sizes a Demand Gen budget at ten or more times the cost you're targeting per conversion. A practice can't do that math until Search has shown what a booked exam costs, so video waits. Chapter 11 covers it in full.
Performance Max runs a single campaign across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Because it decides where your money goes, it needs months of real bookings from Search before it's trusted with the budget. Chapter 10 explains the timing.
There's one orthodontic wrinkle at the top of the funnel. Google doesn't show personalized ads to accounts belonging to people under 18. A thirteen-year-old with crooked teeth may well be the one watching YouTube, but your awareness ads are written for, and reach, the parent who books and pays.
A New Orthodontic Account's First Dollars Belong on "Braces Near Me," Not on Overbite Explainers.
A new account has a small budget and no history. Spending it on "overbite" readers is like buying a billboard for a practice that can't answer its phone yet: lots of eyeballs, no bookings, and nothing for Google to learn from.
So the account starts at the bottom. Campaign one is Isolation. That's our label, and you won't find it in Google's menus: a tight list of exact match keywords for searches that name a provider, with every bid typed in by a person. Next to it, a separate campaign covers the practice's name and each orthodontist's name. Those clicks are usually inexpensive, and they're the fastest way to prove the conversion tracking from Chapter 1 actually fires.
The pool at the bottom is smaller than you might expect, which is good news for a modest budget. In our example market, Detroit, Keyword Planner shows about 3,600 monthly searches for "near me orthodontist," 480 for "braces near me" and 480 for "orthodontist detroit" across the metro area. A smaller metro might see a tenth of that, a larger one several times more. Either way the list of searches that name a provider is short, and a modest budget can stay near the top of the page for most of them.
The higher stages come later, on a schedule set by results. Exploration, also our name, adds broad match and Google's automated bidding, and Performance Max follows it. For a typical practice those land around months two to three and months six to seven. Those months are a typical pace, not a rule. What actually opens each door is roughly 30 quality conversions a month that hold steady, and a busy practice with several offices may hit that number in its first weeks. A practice with a large budget can also reach upward earlier. Everyone else earns the right to climb.
"Pediatric Orthodontist Near Me" and "Invisalign Consultation Near Me" Are Both Ready to Book. They Need Different Ads.
The bottom of the funnel isn't one crowd. It's at least two.
One is the parent. "Pediatric orthodontist near me" names a child in the search itself. That person wants to hear that your practice is good with kids, how early treatment works, what the first visit involves and whether insurance helps.
The other is the adult buying for themselves. "Invisalign consultation near me" and "braces for adults" sound like a grown-up who has thought about this for years and wants discretion, a clear price and a schedule that fits around work.
The reviews in our example market show both voices. Of 817 Google reviews of Detroit-area orthodontic practices we read, 167 were written by a parent about a child and 140 by a patient about themselves, with most of the rest impossible to call either way. Write one ad for both and the parent sees grown-up language while the adult sees cartoons.
So each gets its own ad group, its own headlines and its own landing page from day one. Chapter 16 goes deeper on the adult patient.
An orthodontist who would rather have this mapped and built for them can see what our Google Ads management covers.
Next: Two in Three Orthodontic Exams Turn Into a Case. Chapter 3 Prices the Click From There.
Now the first searches are picked. Chapter 1 wired the account to report which of them ended in a signed contract. Chapter 3 works out how much a click on them is worth, starting from the exams that become cases.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Orthodontists, our sixteen-chapter guide for orthodontic practices anywhere in the US.
