The fastest way to build a keyword list for a plastic surgery practice is not to brainstorm one. It is to borrow one.
Every practice that has been advertising in your market for a while has already paid to learn which searches bring in patients, and much of that learning is written into its website: the procedures it lists, the words it uses, the pages it built for the searches that pay. Google will read any of those websites for you and hand back the searches it thinks that site deserves.
This chapter walks through that process with a real market. We did it for Dallas-Fort Worth in September 2026, and the results include a few surprises that would quietly cost a practice patients if nobody caught them.
Twenty Dallas Websites Handed Us 17,000 Searches
Google's Keyword Planner, a free tool inside every Google Ads account, has an option most people skip. Instead of typing in keywords, you can give it a website address. Google reads the site and returns the searches it associates with it, along with monthly volume and an estimate of what the top of the page costs.
We gave it 20 websites: independent Dallas practices, larger multi-surgeon groups and the national chains that advertise in the market. We set the location to Dallas-Fort Worth, so every number reflects local searches, not national ones.
Each site returned between 224 and 1,773 ideas. Combined and cleaned of duplicates, that came to about 17,400 plastic surgery searches with Dallas volumes attached. No brainstorm gets close to that, and every search on the list is one that Google already connects to a real practice's website.
Most of those ideas are useful. Some are dangerous. The rest of this chapter is about telling them apart.
Find Out Who Is Bidding Before You Read Their Sites
Not every practice's website is worth borrowing from. The most useful are the ones that are actively advertising, because they are the ones paying to learn.
Google gives you two free ways to find them:
- The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool, inside Google Ads, shows the ads that appear for a search in a location you choose, without counting as a real search or a click. Set it to your city and try the procedures you care about.
- The Ads Transparency Center shows the ads any advertiser has run. In Dallas, it listed about 4,000 ads for Sono Bello, 300 for AirSculpt and 200 for North Texas Plastic Surgery, among others.
One rule on this step: never click a competitor's ad to see where it goes. It costs them money, it muddies both accounts' data, and the Ad Preview tool shows you everything you need without it.
Your Own Site Shows You What Google Thinks You Offer
Before you finish, run your own website through Keyword Planner too. It is the quickest way to see your practice the way Google sees it.
The results can be humbling. If a surgical practice's site comes back mostly with Botox, filler and laser ideas, the site is telling Google that the practice is a med spa. If it comes back with one or two procedures and little else, the other procedures probably don't have pages strong enough for Google to connect them to the practice. Either way, it is far better to learn this before the ads launch than from the search terms report afterward.
Patients Say "Nose Job." Your Negative List Might Not Let Them In.
Here is the surprise in the Dallas data, and it is one that catches careful advertisers.
Negative keywords are the searches you tell Google never to show your ads for. Almost every account adds a few words to keep out job seekers, and "job" or "jobs" is usually the first. In most industries, that is harmless. In plastic surgery, it blocks patients.
Patients use the slang. In Dallas-Fort Worth, Keyword Planner showed about 880 monthly searches for "nose job price," 720 for "boob job dallas," 390 for "nose job dallas," 390 for "boob jobs prices" and 320 for "boob job near me." Those are people pricing surgery and looking for a surgeon in their city. A negative keyword of "job" blocks every one of them, and "jobs" still blocks the plural.
The fix is to exclude the words job seekers actually use instead: "hiring," "careers," "salary," "job openings," "employment" and the like. Check any negative list you inherit from another account for this before it goes live.
Every Surgeon's Name That Comes Back Belongs on the Negative List
Competitor websites return competitor names. The Dallas list included about 7,600 monthly searches for other practices and surgeons by name, such as "dallas institute of plastic surgery" (about 1,000) and "rohrich plastic surgery" (about 720).
Those people are looking for a specific surgeon. Showing them your ad rarely changes their mind and usually costs you a click. So by default, other practices' and surgeons' names go on the negative list. That matters even more later: once the Exploration campaign (BrandRocket's name for the broad-match campaign that looks for searches you did not predict) is running, broad match will turn up competitor names you never saw in research, and the negative list has to keep up with it.
Deliberately targeting a competitor's name is a different decision. If a practice ever does it, it gets its own campaign, its own budget and its own careful ads, and it is the exception, not a setting. Your own practice's name and your surgeons' names are the opposite case: they go in a brand campaign of their own from the first day.
Mexico, Miami and "Cheap" Aren't Your Patients
The rest of what comes back needs sorting too. In the Dallas list:
- Other cities: about 1,600 monthly searches mentioning Miami, Houston, Beverly Hills and elsewhere, mostly surfaced by the national chains that advertise in many cities.
- Medical tourism: about 820, such as "plastic surgery mexico" and "tijuana plastic surgery." These patients are shopping abroad on price.
- "Cheap" and "free": about 300. Whether any belong depends on how you price, but most practices exclude them.
- "Gone wrong": about 90. Curiosity, not intent.
- Non-surgical treatments: Botox, filler and med spa searches, about 83,500 a month. These are not unwanted, but they are a different business. They get their own campaign and budget, or none at all, and Chapter 15 covers that decision.
One category that is not a default negative: insurance. For cosmetic procedures, insurance searches barely registered in Dallas. But a practice that bills insurance for reconstructive work or medically necessary breast reductions may want those searches, so decide based on what your practice actually does.
Sort What's Left Into Ad Groups of Five or Six
What remains is a long list of genuine patient searches. The next job is to organize it so each search meets an ad and a page written for it.
We do this in a spreadsheet with three columns: campaign, ad group and keyword. Group the searches by procedure variant, following the pages from Chapter 4: "reverse tummy tuck" searches together, "mini tummy tuck" searches together, men's procedures together. Keep each ad group to about five or six closely related keywords. More than that and the ads start having to speak to too many different people at once.
Here is what one looks like, built from the Dallas list for the men's tummy tuck variant from Chapter 4. That ad group might hold five keywords:
- tummy tuck for men
- male tummy tuck
- abdominoplasty for men
- men's tummy tuck cost
- male tummy tuck price
Keyword Planner reported the first three as a single group of about 110 monthly searches in Dallas-Fort Worth, because Google treats them as the same request worded three ways. The two cost searches are smaller, about 20 a month, but they come from men who are already pricing the procedure. All five deserve the same ads, written for men, and the same page, with men's results on it. Put them in a general tummy tuck ad group instead and the ads have to speak to everyone, which means they speak to no one in particular.
Formulas in the sheet then write each keyword in the three forms Google Ads uses: exact match, [tummy tuck for men], in square brackets; phrase match, "tummy tuck for men", in quotation marks; and broad match, tummy tuck for men, with no punctuation at all. The sheet uploads straight into Google Ads Editor, Google's free desktop tool for building campaigns in bulk.
In the Isolation campaign that Chapter 6 builds (BrandRocket's name for the exact-match, manually bid campaign that protects your known searches), only the exact-match versions go live at first. The phrase and broad versions are already built and paused, ready for when the account has learned enough to use them.
Keyword Planner's Bid Range Is a Starting Point, Give or Take 30%
Keyword Planner shows a top-of-page bid range next to each search. In Dallas, "tummy tuck dallas" ran from about $3 to $13, and "mommy makeover dallas" from about $4 to $19.
Treat those ranges as a starting point, not a price. They are built on broad match, and real costs for exact-match keywords can land about 30% above or below them in either direction. The real prices appear in the first weeks of the campaign, and Chapter 7 covers how to bid with them once you have them.
Next: Win the Ready-to-Book Searches First
With a clean list, grouped by procedure and filtered of competitors, job seekers and the rest, the account is ready to be built. Chapter 6 covers which of these searches to launch first, and why the ready-to-book searches come before everything else.
Every chapter is on the Google Ads for Plastic Surgeons home page.
Borrowing the market's keywords and filtering them this carefully is the part of the job most accounts rush, and it is where our Google Ads management spends real time before launch. If you are building your own list, start by checking your negative keywords for "job."
