We pointed Google's Keyword Planner at the websites of five health systems that run urgent care in our example market, Philadelphia, and let it read each whole site. By our keyword filter, every one came back at 5% urgent care or less. And each missed in its own direction:
- Penn Medicine's list was led by "tummy tuck." Penn runs a cosmetic surgery practice, and its site covers it.
- Cooper's was led by carpal tunnel and other hand and shoulder searches.
- Virtua's was led by atrial fibrillation and bariatric surgery.
- Jefferson's was led by people searching for its hospitals by name.
- Nemours's top idea was "paediatric urgent care near me," and right behind it came its own brand and its careers pages.
Nothing was broken. Keyword Planner did exactly what it was told. It read each website it was pointed at, and each website was an entire health system: surgery, cardiology, orthopedics, children's hospitals, careers, and, somewhere in there, urgent care. Ask a health system's website what it's about and it will tell you the truth. It's about everything it does.
That's the first lesson of urgent care keyword research. The tool is only as good as the seed you hand it, and the biggest name in your market is often the worst seed you could pick.
Keyword Research Starts With Who Already Bids in Your Market
Before you seed anything, find out who's already paying for clicks near you. Two free tools do the job.
Start inside your own account, in a tool Google calls Ad preview and diagnosis. Pick one of your centers as the location, type "urgent care near me," and it shows you the results page a person standing at that corner would get. Google built it so you can look without adding impressions to your own numbers. That makes it better than checking on your phone, and far better than clicking a rival's ad to see its landing page, which only sends them a bill for your curiosity.
Then open Google's Ads Transparency Center. Type in a competitor's name or web address and it lists the ads that advertiser has been running. When we checked the urgent care sites in our example market, nine of the twelve we profiled had run urgent care Search ads in the previous 90 days: independents, a franchise location, a regional chain, hospital systems, pediatric centers and a retail clinic.
One thing to know before you search the Transparency Center: the name on an ad account isn't always the name on the door. In our example market, one franchise location ran ads under its own local account rather than the national brand's, and one health system's ads ran under a company name that appears nowhere on its website. Search by website address as well as by name, or you'll miss advertisers hiding in plain sight.
Now you have a list of the websites your competitors built to win those clicks. Those are your seeds.
A Health System's Whole Website Buries Urgent Care Under the Hospital
Here are those five whole-site pulls side by side. The number is the share of ideas that matched our urgent care filter: urgent care, walk-in care, physicals, X-rays, stitches and common urgent care conditions. It's a rough filter, and a single run, but the gap is too wide to be noise:
- Penn Medicine: 0%
- Cooper: 1%
- Virtua: 2%
- Jefferson: 3%
- Nemours: 5%
What filled the other 95% changed from system to system, which is the point. It wasn't one odd website. Five different health systems produced five different kinds of noise, each a reflection of what else that system does. For comparison, the urgent care operators' own sites, seeded the same way, came back between 54% and 84% on topic.
None of this means health systems are bad at urgent care. It means their websites are about many things at once, and Keyword Planner can't tell which of those things you care about unless you narrow it down.
One Setting Turns the Same Hospital Page Into a Useful Seed
Then we ran the same five health systems again, this time seeding with only the urgent care page instead of the whole site. The results flipped. Between 46% and 75% of the ideas were about urgent care. A single urgent care location page from vybe urgent care came back at 81%.
Keyword Planner can work either way. Google's own documentation for its keyword tools describes one seed type for "an entire site" and another for "the URL of a webpage." Same tool, same website, very different list. If you seed with a big organization's domain and the ideas look strange, the fix isn't a different tool. It's telling the tool to read one page instead of all of them.
Urgent Care Sites Make the Best Seeds, Starting With Your Own
The best seeds are pages that are about what you sell: urgent care location pages, service pages for X-rays or DOT physicals, pediatric urgent care pages. Seed with competitors' pages first, one at a time, with your market set as the location. Then seed with your own site.
That last step is the one people skip. Seeding with your own pages shows you what Google thinks your site is about. If you run a walk-in clinic and Keyword Planner comes back with ideas about primary care physicals and weight loss, your pages are telling Google a different story than your sign out front.
Two cautions on the numbers you'll see. The monthly search counts are ranges rounded by Google, and the top-of-page bid estimates are built for broad matching, so treat them as ballpark figures, give or take about 30%. They're a place to start, not a quote.
One more quirk will fool you if you're not looking for it. In our example market, Keyword Planner listed eight different versions of the biggest search at exactly the same number, about 135,000 a month: "urgent care near me," "urgent care close by me," "urgentcarenearme," "urgent urgent care near me," "urgent care near me near me" and three more. That's not eight searches worth 135,000 each. It's one group of close variants, reported eight times. Add the cleanest version to your list, let Google's matching handle the typos and doubled words, and never add up rows that share an identical number.
Competitor and Hospital Names Pile Up Fast. They Belong on the Negative List.
Look at any urgent care keyword pull and you'll see names. Lots of them. In our example market's pulls, competitor brand searches made up 2,221 keywords and about 155,770 searches a month. "concentra urgentcare" alone drew 27,100 a month, "afc immediate care" 12,100 and "christianacare gohealth urgent care" 9,900. Searches for hospital names added about 231,500 more. About half of those brand searches came from seeding Concentra's own site, which is exactly how it works: seed a competitor's pages and Keyword Planner hands you the competitor's name, in every spelling people use.
Those people aren't shopping. They already know where they're going. Paying to show them your ad is paying to interrupt someone mid-errand. Competitor names go on your negative keyword list, and they'll keep arriving, especially once broad match starts running in the months ahead, so the list is never finished.
Could you run ads on a competitor's name on purpose? Only in a campaign of its own, with its own budget and a clear reason, and that's a big if. It's never a default. Your own name is different: it goes in its own brand campaign from day one, so a competitor can't park an ad on it. If you're a hospital-owned urgent care, the hospital-name searches in your pull are your own brand, not a competitor's. They still belong in the brand campaign, not mixed into the urgent care campaigns, where a person searching for the hospital's cafeteria hours can wander into your "urgent care near me" budget.
Careers, Free Tests and Old COVID Searches Are the Other Weeds
Beyond names, a few kinds of search show up in almost every urgent care pull and almost never become a patient:
- Jobs. 48 career searches, about 11,200 a month, led by "cooper careers" at 4,400. Job seekers click ads too.
- Free. 192 keywords with "free" in them, most of them about free TB tests. If you charge for TB tests, those clicks cost you twice: once for the click, and again for the disappointed phone call.
- COVID. 905 COVID keywords showed up, but together they drew only about 3,480 searches a month. They're leftovers from the pandemic years, and most are noise now.
Weeding isn't a one-time job. It's the part of keyword research that never stops, because every new competitor and every new broad-match search adds more.
Paying for Medicaid and Insurance Searches Is Your Call, Not a Rule
Some searches look like weeds and aren't. "urgent care that takes medicaid" draws about 5,400 searches a month across the US. Our example market's pulls included dozens of cost and coverage searches: "urgent care cost without insurance," "urgent care fees with insurance," "urgent care for no insurance."
Whether to pay for those is a business decision, not a rule. A center that takes Medicaid and wants those patients should bid on them happily. A center that doesn't take a plan shouldn't pay for people searching for it. The mistake is treating insurance searches as a reflex negative, or as a reflex yes. Decide on purpose, and write the decision down so the next person managing the account doesn't undo it.
Five or Six Keywords per Ad Group, Each Built Around One Service
Once the list is clean, sort the keepers into ad groups, one per service. Each group holds five or six searches that mean nearly the same thing, and each one points at its own page. At launch, only the exact-match versions go live. Phrase and broad wait for Exploration, which starts later from the keywords Isolation proves.
The groups are the ones from Chapter 4: "near me" and "open now," X-ray, DOT physicals, pediatric, stitches. Small groups let you write ads in the searcher's exact words and send each one to the page that finishes the sentence, which is where Quality Score comes from. Name each ad group the way a patient would say the service, "X-ray near me" rather than "Radiology Services," so that six months from now anyone opening the account can tell at a glance which searches live where.
Next: Services Before Symptoms
You have a clean list of the searches worth paying for. The next question is which of them to launch first. Chapter 6 makes the case for starting with searches that already name a service, like "urgent care with X-ray," before chasing the far bigger world of symptom searches.
Earlier chapters: Chapter 1 on counting check-ins, Chapter 3 on what a visit can pay for and Chapter 4 on the pages your ads land on. All sixteen are on the guide home.
When urgent care groups hire us for Google Ads management, the first keyword pull always starts one page at a time, and the negative list starts the same day.
