Type an orthopedic practice's website into Google's Keyword Planner and it hands back thousands of search ideas, sorted by volume. The top of that list looks like gold: big numbers, real local demand.
Look closer and most of it is someone else's name. In our example market, Nashville, 37 of the 40 highest-volume ideas we pulled were the names of hospitals, hospital campuses and orthopedic groups. People searching those names have already picked where they're going. The patients you can actually win are further down the list, in searches for a knee, a hip, a torn rotator cuff and a surgeon who fixes it.
Keyword Planner Hands Every Orthopedic Practice the Same Top of the List: Other People's Names
We ran Keyword Planner on the websites of twelve orthopedic practices advertising in our example market, plus a set of common orthopedic searches, and merged the results: 9,945 different search ideas. Sorted by monthly searches, the top 40 ran from 18,100 down to 2,400. Thirty-seven of them were names: hospital campuses, a university medical center's nickname, the biggest orthopedic groups and their locations. Across the whole list, 1,288 ideas were a hospital's, practice's or surgeon's name.
Of the three that weren't names, one was a misspelling ("ortho pedic," 3,600 searches a month), one was a women's health term that a hospital's website had dragged in, and one was simply "hospital" plus the city. Your market will have its own names at the top. The pattern will be the same.
This isn't a flaw in the tool. It reflects how people actually search in a city with big health systems: most of the volume is navigation, people using Google as an address book. It only becomes a problem when a practice reads the top of the list as opportunity and starts bidding on it. Your own practice's name may well be in that top 40, and that search does belong to you. It just belongs in the brand campaign, not in the list you build new-patient ad groups from.
Whoever Shows Up on Your Searches Today Is Your First Keyword Clue
Before pulling keyword ideas from anyone's website, find out who's worth learning from. Google Ads has a preview tool that pulls up what a search in your city returns right now, minus the side effects of searching it yourself. Run the searches you care about most, like "orthopedic surgeon near me," "knee replacement surgeon" and "sports medicine doctor," and note which practices show up in the ads and the map results.
Leave their ads unclicked while you look. A curiosity click bills the other practice, skews its numbers and shows you nothing its website doesn't already.
The practices that keep showing up on the searches you want are your seed list. They've already done some of the work of figuring out what orthopedic patients in your market type.
A Knee Practice's Website Turns Up Knee Searches. A Hospital's Turns Up the Hospital.
Keyword Planner can build ideas from a website instead of a word list. You enter a site, set the location to your market, and Google reads that site's pages and suggests searches related to what's on them. Which site you feed it decides what you get back.
Feed it a whole health-system website and you get the whole hospital: in our example market, one medical center's site returned more than 1,400 ideas found nowhere else, and almost none were orthopedic. Neurology, women's health, heart care, cosmetic surgery. Feed it a practice that specializes in one body part and you get that body part in depth.
The example market shows how strong that effect is. In six of the eleven categories we sorted the list into, most of the ideas came from the one practice that specializes in it: the knee and joint replacement lists mostly from a practice built around knee replacement, the spine list from a spine practice, the hand list from a hand surgeon's own site, the walk-in list from an orthopedic urgent care chain, and the stem cell list from a regenerative medicine clinic.
So seed by body part. For each service you want to advertise, find the practice in your market, or in a comparable market, that specializes in it and run its site on its own. If a big group has a strong page for one service, you can seed with just that page instead of the whole site. Finally, feed Keyword Planner your own site. What comes back is how Google understands your pages, and a knee replacement page that returns mostly physical therapy ideas is telling you something.
Reading what comes back takes a different eye than the default sort. Keyword Planner orders ideas by volume, which puts names and broad terms first every time. Filter instead. Keyword Planner lets you include only ideas containing certain words, so run one pass for "knee," one for "hip," one for "shoulder" and so on, and read each list for intent: is this person looking for someone to treat them, or for information? A search with "surgeon," "doctor," "specialist," "near me" or a procedure name in it usually wants a person. A search built around "symptoms," "exercises" or "what is" usually wants an article. Keep the first kind for now.
What comes back goes straight into the structure from Chapter 4: tight ad groups of five or six closely related searches, one body part and one procedure at a time.
Top-of-Page Bids Are a Starting Guess
Every idea comes with a low and a high "top of page bid," and those numbers look like a price list. They're estimates. They're built from broad patterns across many advertisers, not from your exact-match keywords in your account, so we treat them as roughly accurate within about 30% in either direction.
For a sense of scale: in our example market, "orthopedic near me" and its close variants showed a range of about $2.00 to $8.76. Nationally, the same search runs about $2.05 to $11.70. Joint replacement searches sat lower on both, a pattern Chapter 3 uses to work out what you can afford. Use these ranges to decide which ad groups you can fund first, then let real costs from your own account replace them within the first few weeks.
The Names Go on the Negative List. The Price Searches Are Your Call.
Sorting the list is mostly deciding what not to pay for. In orthopedics it breaks into three piles.
Block. Competitor, hospital and surgeon names that aren't yours become negative keywords, so your ads stop showing for them. That was 1,288 ideas in the example-market list. Your own names work the other way around. The practice name and every surgeon's name get a campaign of their own, where clicks run cheap and the patients already hunting for you land on you, not a rival. Bidding on another group's name, if you ever decide to, belongs in its own campaign and is a big decision, not a routine one.
Cut. Searches from people who aren't patients: jobs and careers (41), schools and training programs (47), do-it-yourself exercises, taping and bracing how-tos (39), anything with "free" (6), and most "what is" and recovery-time questions (184). The questions can be good for your website's content. They're rarely worth a click at the start. Watch for medical-travel searches too: the example list included ideas like "free knee replacement surgery in india," from people shopping for surgery abroad, not in your city.
Decide. Two groups aren't automatic. Cost and insurance searches (152 in the example list) are a business choice, not a default negative: many practices want the patient who's comparing plans or asking what a knee replacement costs, especially if they're in network with the big local insurers or offer a self-pay price. Adjacent services like physical therapy and chiropractic (50) depend on what you offer. If your group runs physical therapy, those searches may be yours.
You don't need to chase misspellings. "Ortho pedic" and its cousins are caught by close variants, which Google applies to exact match automatically.
Negatives Are a Habit, Not a List
The negative list you build now is only the first draft. In a new account running exact match, very little junk gets through. The flood arrives later, once the account adds Exploration, which is what we call the broad-match campaign that goes looking for searches nobody would think to list. That usually happens a couple of months in, once the account is logging about 30 quality consults a month, and larger practices get there sooner.
Once it does, broad match will bring in competitor names you missed, surgeon names from three counties over, and plenty of searches from people looking for records, bills or a job. Once it's running, open the search terms report daily for a month and block the strays as they appear. After that, weekly. A negative list is never finished, because patients keep inventing new ways to search. Keep the competitor and hospital names in one shared negative list that every campaign uses, so a name you block once stays blocked everywhere, including in campaigns you add months from now. Keep a second shared list for the jobs, schools and do-it-yourself terms. Two lists, both growing, both reviewed whenever a new campaign launches.
Next: Which Searches Go Live First
You now have a clean list, sorted by body part, with the names blocked and the junk cut. Chapter 6 is about which of those searches deserve your first dollars: the short, predictable list of procedure searches in exact match, before the thousands of odd injury phrasings that come later.
The guide home has the whole sequence.
For orthopedic groups that hand us their Google Ads management, this sorting happens before the account launches, with the practice deciding the insurance and physical therapy calls.
