Search "hand surgeon" on Google Maps in our example market, Nashville, and look at what comes back. It isn't a list of orthopedic practices. It's a list of people: Dr. So-and-So, hand and upper extremity surgery. Dr. Somebody Else, sports medicine.
That's how orthopedics looks on the map. Most practices think of their Google presence as one listing with the practice name on it. Patients see something else: a dozen surgeons, each with a listing of their own, each carrying hundreds of reviews, sitting next to the practice's.
That matters for advertising because your local ads pull from those listings. Set them up without thinking about it, and a patient searching for a knee surgeon may see your front desk's phone reviews instead of the surgeon patients rave about.
71 of 115 Orthopedic Listings on Google Maps Belong to One Surgeon
In that market we pulled every orthopedic Google listing with at least five reviews from 22 local searches: 115 listings in all. Seventy-one of them belong to an individual surgeon or physician. Thirty-one are practice or location listings. Eleven are orthopedic urgent cares. Two are a surgical hospital and a surgery center.
The surgeon listings aren't thin. The busiest carry roughly 650 to 820 reviews of their own, next to practice listings with 1,000 to 3,000. One group lists the same surgeon at three different office addresses, each with its own reviews. And on a "hand surgeon" search, the map results were surgeons' names, not practices'.
The surgeons show up beyond the map too. On the two hip replacement searches we ran, individual surgeons' own websites held 7 of 9 and 9 of 9 organic results. Yet none of the 15 individual hip, knee and spine surgeon websites we checked was running Search ads; the one individual surgeon in the market who advertised, a hand surgeon, had only started that year. The surgeons are winning the free results; the paid space around them is open.
Your market will have its own mix. The pattern is the point: in orthopedics, a big share of the map belongs to individual surgeons, and patients use it that way.
Google's Rules Give Each Surgeon a Listing and the Practice Its Own
This isn't a loophole. Google's guidelines for Business Profiles treat doctors as individual practitioners, public-facing professionals with their own patient base. A surgeon who works directly with patients and can be reached at the office during posted hours can have a dedicated profile.
The same guidelines set a few limits worth knowing:
- One profile per practitioner. A surgeon shouldn't have separate listings for knees, hips and sports medicine.
- Several surgeons at one location: the practice gets its own profile too, separate from theirs, and each surgeon's listing title carries only the surgeon's name, not the practice's.
- A solo surgeon at a branded location shares one profile with the organization, named with the brand first and the surgeon second.
So a group with eight surgeons in one building can properly have nine listings there: one for each surgeon and one for the practice. That's the structure patients already see. Orthopedic urgent cares are the exception. Only 17% of the reviews on their listings named a doctor; patients named physician assistants and front desk staff instead. The question for advertising is which listing shows up next to your ad.
Patients Praise the Surgeon on the Surgeon's Listing and Blame the Front Desk on the Practice's
The two kinds of listing collect different reviews. In our sample of 882 orthopedic reviews, 546 sat on surgeon listings, and 79% of those named the doctor. They're mostly about the person: the explanation, the time spent, the result. Loyalty shows up the same way. In 93 reviews on 56 listings, patients described years with one surgeon, repeat surgeries or family members sent to the same doctor. One patient wrote they would choose the same surgeon again, "just not" the same practice. Patients follow the surgeon. The listing that carries the surgeon's name is the one they trust.
The complaints go somewhere else. One- and two-star reviews made up about 5% of the reviews on surgeon listings, 12% on practice listings and 19% on orthopedic urgent care listings. Chapter 8 found the most common complaint in the whole sample was the front desk and phones, and those complaints land on the practice's listing, because that's the phone number patients called.
Both pulls of this sample leaned positive, so read the percentages as a comparison between listing types, not as ratings. The comparison is the useful part. For an ad about knee replacement, the surgeon's listing, with hundreds of reviews praising the surgeon who explained the knee, is a far stronger thing to show than the practice listing where last month's hold-time complaints sit on top.
Your Knee Ad Should Show the Surgeon's Listing, Not the Front Desk's
The one large group in the example market that leaned hardest on surgeons did it in its ads too: 78 of its 102 recent ads named a single surgeon and asked for an appointment with that surgeon. That works for people already searching the name, which is Chapter 15's territory. For procedure searches, the listing under the ad can do the introducing.
Local ads in Google Ads mostly come from location assets: the address, distance and rating that appear under a Search ad, and the ads that show on Google Maps itself. Google pulls that information straight from Google Maps and the Business Profiles linked to your account. Link the account that manages your listings, and every listing in it becomes eligible. Several campaign types can reach Maps this way: Search campaigns with location assets, Performance Max from Chapter 10 and Demand Gen. No campaign runs on Maps alone; the listing rides along with the campaigns you already run.
Eligible isn't the same as right. By default, Google picks from all of them. Location groups let you choose. A location group is a saved set of listings that you can apply to a whole account, a campaign or a single ad group. For an orthopedic practice, a simple setup looks like this:
- Surgical ad groups (knee replacement, hip replacement, hand surgery) show the listings of the surgeons who do that procedure.
- General ad groups, the broad "orthopedic doctor" searches, show the practice listings.
- Walk-in and injury ads show the orthopedic urgent care listings, if you have them.
A surgeon who sees patients at three offices will usually have three listings. Put all three in that surgeon's location group. Google chooses which listing to show based on where the searcher is, or where they've shown interest, so a patient in the suburbs will usually see the suburban office's address and distance rather than downtown's.
Build the groups from what each surgeon actually operates on today, confirmed with the surgeon, not copied from a website bio that may be years old. Two conditions apply. It only works for listings the practice's Business Profile account actually manages, which is the next section. And the listing only decides what the ad looks like. Who sees the ad is still set by the Presence location and traveler counties from Chapter 9.
A Surgeon's 800 Reviews Help the Ads Only on a Listing the Practice Manages
Here's where orthopedic groups get caught out. A surgeon's listing may have been created years ago by the surgeon, a former office manager or a marketing vendor. If the practice's account doesn't manage it, Google Ads can't use it, and the practice can't fix the hours, update the phone number or answer the reviews.
So before building location groups, take inventory:
- List every surgeon's listing and find out who owns and manages each one. A Business Profile can have more than one owner and manager, so the practice can be added without taking anything away from the surgeon.
- Make the details match. The surgeon's listing, the practice's listing and the website should agree on name, address and phone. If calls to a surgeon's listing should go to the central scheduling line, that's the number it shows.
- Answer the reviews carefully. Thank people, respond to complaints about the office, and never confirm that someone is a patient in a reply. Federal health privacy regulators have fined practices for disclosing patient information in answers to online reviews.
Doing this once also sets up Chapter 15, where each surgeon gets a brand campaign for searches on their own name.
Make the inventory a habit, not a one-time project. New surgeons join, surgeons add an office, a vendor creates a listing nobody told the practice about. A quick check every quarter of who manages each surgeon's listing keeps the location groups pointing at listings the practice can actually update.
Local Services Ads List "Orthopedic Surgeon." They Still Come Last.
The last local option is Google's pay-per-lead format, Local Services Ads, the boxed listings that sometimes sit above everything else on a search. "Orthopedic surgeon" is on Google's list of US categories. Being on that list doesn't mean the format runs in your city, so confirm eligibility for your own practice address before planning around it.
Health care also gets a limited version. Google's help page says booking leads aren't available for health care, and neither are the pre-badge ads other categories can run while screening finishes. Leads that turn out to be junk aren't credited back automatically in health care either, so the practice has to watch lead quality itself. Ranking leans heavily on reviews and responsiveness, and missed calls count against you. The reviews come only from the Business Profile, which is one more reason the listing cleanup above comes first.
For an orthopedic group, these come near the very end, if at all. They offer less control than Search, and they only make sense once the practice has strong reviews and a phone line that reliably gets answered. Google is also moving Local Services into Performance Max in phases, starting with other categories in 2026 and with health care planned for 2027, so check what the format looks like when you get to it.
Next: AI Max Can Write Ads From the Wrong Page of an Orthopedic Site
Your local ads now show the right face for each search. Chapter 13 returns to AI Max, the automation Chapter 9 switched off, and why letting it write ads from an orthopedic website can put the account at risk.
The guide home has the full sequence.
For orthopedic groups that hand us their Google Ads management, the listing inventory comes first, and every ad group is matched to the listings patients already trust.
