Every podiatry practice that advertises in your area has already done some of your keyword research for you. Their websites list the foot problems they treat, the words their patients use and the neighborhoods they serve. Google's own Keyword Planner can read those websites and hand you back the searches that match.
It hands back a few other things too: the names of hospitals, the names of rival doctors, and searches from people who want a job, a degree or something free. Part of keyword research is knowing which of those belong in your account and which belong on the list of searches you refuse to pay for.
The Practices Already Bidding in Your Market Are Your First Keyword List
Start by finding out who's advertising. Inside every Google Ads account sits the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool, and it's free. Enter a podiatry search, pin the location to your service area, and you see the results page a patient in that area would get. Google says it doesn't touch your own impression numbers, so you can run it as often as you like.
Search the way your patients do: "podiatrist near me," "ingrown toenail removal," "heel pain doctor," "bunion surgeon." Write down every practice whose ad shows up, and which searches they show up for. Those are the practices whose websites you'll feed into Keyword Planner next.
Resist clicking a rival practice's ad out of curiosity. Every click costs that practice money and puts a stranger's visit into their data. The Ad Preview tool and the practice's own website tell you everything you need.
A Competitor's Website Is the Fastest Podiatry Keyword List You'll Get
In Keyword Planner, choose "Discover new keywords," then "Start with a website." Google reads the site's content and suggests the searches related to it. Two settings matter:
- Use the whole site, not one page. A podiatry group's website usually has a page for every foot problem it treats, and you want all of them.
- Set the location to your market. Without it, the volumes and prices are national, and a practice in Tulsa doesn't need Los Angeles numbers.
To see what this produces, we fed the websites of 12 podiatry practices that advertise in our example market, Los Angeles, into Keyword Planner. Each site returned between 22 and 805 keyword ideas, 4,749 unique ones in all. That's far more than any practice would sit down and brainstorm. They were real searches, with estimated monthly volumes and prices for the market.
Choose the seed sites the way you'd choose a referral partner. Seeded with one podiatry practice's website, Keyword Planner returned 805 ideas, and 739 of them were about foot problems or treatments. Seeded with an orthopedic group's website, it returned 548 ideas, and 329 were about knees, hips, backs and shoulders; not one was about feet. A second seed from a large health system came back mostly with general hospital searches. The tool reflects whatever site you hand it. Hand it a podiatrist's site if you want podiatry searches, and treat anything else it returns as a list to sort, not a list to upload.
Then run your own website through the same tool. The ideas that come back are Google's summary of your practice, and the summary can surprise you. If your site barely mentions bunions, don't expect Google to connect your pages to bunion searches, and don't expect a bunion ad to land somewhere useful until you fix the page. Chapter 4 covers why that matters.
Their Doctors' Names Go Negative. Yours Go in the Brand Campaign.
Here's where Keyword Planner gets careless. When you seed it with a competitor's website, it doesn't just return the conditions that practice treats. It returns the practice itself.
Three of the 12 competitor sites we tested gave back their own doctors' names as keyword ideas. One solo podiatrist's name drew about 260 searches a month; doctors at the other two practices drew 140 to 210 each. People searching those names aren't looking for a podiatrist. They're looking for that podiatrist.
Health systems do the same thing at a bigger scale. One of our seed sites was a practice affiliated with a university health system, and Keyword Planner answered it with 91 ideas for the health system itself: its hospital, its medical centers, its general care. The biggest drew 33,100 searches a month. None of those searchers want a private podiatry practice.
The rule is simple: competitor names are negative keywords. That covers rival practices, rival doctors, hospitals and health plans. Take "kaiser podiatrist," about 720 searches a month where we looked: that's a plan member hunting for a foot doctor inside their own network. Bidding on it buys a click from someone who is very unlikely to book with you.
Bidding on a rival's name on purpose is possible, in a campaign built only for that. It's rarely worth it, and never by accident inside your main campaign.
One detail makes name negatives leak. Google matches your keywords to close variants and misspellings, but it doesn't do that for negative keywords. A negative for one spelling of a rival doctor's last name won't block the version with one letter wrong, and people misspell doctors' names all the time. Add the common spellings of each name you block, and add the name with and without "dr" in front.
Now flip it around. When you seed Keyword Planner with your own website, your doctors' names come back too. Those are yours, and they belong in a separate brand campaign: the practice name and every doctor's name, in their own campaign with their own small budget. These are the most-aware patients you'll ever pay for, often a returning patient looking for your phone number. Keeping them in their own campaign stops them from inflating the numbers of the campaigns that bring in new patients, and Chapter 10 shows how to keep Performance Max from buying them back.
A Podiatry Ad Group Belongs to One Foot Problem, Not One Match Type
With the names cleared out, sort what's left the way Chapter 4 set up: one ad group per foot problem, about five or six keywords in each, all meaning the same thing. Ingrown toenails in one group, heel pain in another, bunions, fungus and diabetic foot care each in their own.
Resist the urge to sort by match type or by volume. A group called "high volume" or "broad" tells Google nothing about the patient. A group called "ingrown toenail removal," with an ad and a page about ingrown toenails, tells it everything.
Next to each idea, Keyword Planner lists a low and a high price for landing at the top of the page. Treat those as rough guides, give or take about 30%. They're estimates from other advertisers' past auctions, not a quote for your ads or your pages. Your real costs show up after the account runs.
Cheap, Free, Jobs and Degrees Go. Insurance Is Your Call.
Some searches look close to your business but come from people who will never be patients. In our example market's keyword lists we found:
- "cheap foot doctor near me"
- "podiatrist free consultation"
- "podiatrist hospital jobs"
- "doctor of podiatry degree"
Each one is small, but they add up, and they tell you the words to exclude: "cheap," "free," "jobs," "salary," "degree," "school." Add those as negatives before the account goes live.
Two more groups came back in bulk. The first is people learning how to treat a foot problem themselves: 13 "how to" ideas in our pulls, like "plantar fasciitis how to treat" and "corn on toe how to remove," together drawing about 3,100 searches a month. Chapter 2 explained why those readers rarely book this week. Leave them out of the first campaign by never adding them, rather than by blocking the words "how to" everywhere, since a broad block can catch a ready patient's wording later.
The second is general insurance shopping. Our 12 seed sites returned 42 ideas with the word "insurance" in them, and the biggest had nothing to do with feet: "health insurance plans" alone drew about 49,500 searches a month in the example market. Those are people choosing a plan, not a podiatrist. They go on the negative list without a second thought.
Insurance questions from patients are different. It's tempting to exclude every search that mentions a health plan or Medicare, on the theory that those patients are shopping on coverage. Some practices should. Many shouldn't. "Podiatrist near me that accept medicare" draws about 1,600 searches a month nationally, and for a practice that takes Medicare and wants routine and diabetic foot care patients, that search is exactly the patient it wants. Whether insurance searches stay in or go out is a business decision about which patients you want, not a default setting. Chapter 14 covers what Medicare actually covers, and what your ads can and can't promise about it.
The Negative List Grows Fastest Once Broad Match Starts
A new podiatry account starts with a short negative list, because the first campaign, which we call Isolation, runs only on exact match. Exact match keeps the ad to searches with the same meaning as the keyword, so few stray podiatry searches get through.
That changes once Isolation is producing steady quality conversions, about 30 a month is what we look for, usually in the second or third month and sooner for bigger accounts. Then a second campaign, which we call Exploration, adds broad match to find new searches. Both names are ours; Google has no setting called either one. Broad match finds long-tail searches you'd never think to add, and it also finds rival practice names, hospital names and job searches in far larger numbers than Keyword Planner ever showed you.
During Exploration's first four weeks, the search terms report is a daily read, the first thing on the list before patients arrive. Every irrelevant search you find is either a new negative or a sign that an ad group needs tightening. After that, weekly is usually enough. The negative list is never finished; it grows as long as the account runs.
If you'd rather have someone build the keyword list, the negative list and the brand campaign from your competitors' websites, that's how our Google Ads management team starts every podiatry account.
Next: The Searches You Can Predict, and the Ones Broad Match Finds
Your keyword list now holds the searches you can predict: "podiatrist near me," ingrown toenail removal, the ready-to-book wordings of each foot problem. Chapter 6 explains why those belong in their own exact-match campaign first, and how broad match finds the long tail of heel and toenail searches you couldn't have guessed.
For why each of those keyword groups needs its own page, see Chapter 4. The guide home lists every chapter.
