Ask Google's Keyword Planner for veterinary keywords in a mid-size city and it will hand you a list with tens of thousands of lines. A large share of the biggest numbers on it will have nothing to do with vet care. They'll be people looking for a dog to adopt.
That's the surprise waiting in vet keyword research. The list you get back is part vet searches, part shelter searches, part competitors' names and part job hunting, and in our example market the junk carried some of the largest volumes. Spend on it and your budget disappears into the wrong questions.
This chapter walks through our method for building a vet keyword list, the one place where it needs a vet-specific fix, and how to cut what doesn't belong before a single ad runs. Chapter 4 explained how Google ranks your ads. This chapter decides what those ads compete for.
The Practices Already Advertising Near You Are Where Keyword Research Starts
Our method begins with the competition, because the practices already paying for clicks in your area have done a lot of the thinking for you.
First, see who shows up. Google's Ad preview and diagnosis tool lets you look at the search results page for a term, and set criteria "like language and location," so you can see what an owner in your neighborhood sees. It also "avoids accumulating ad impressions and impacting your performance statistics," which matters once your own ads are live. One rule: never click a competitor's ad to study it. Every click bills that practice, and the preview already shows you the ad.
Second, feed those practices' websites to Keyword Planner. Paste a practice's web address into the option that starts from a website, and Google reads the site and suggests searches connected to what's on it. Set the location to your own market so the volumes mean something. Then do the same for your own site, which shows you what Google thinks you offer.
In our example market, Denver, we ran the websites of 12 practices that were advertising on Google, from general practices to emergency hospitals to an in-home euthanasia service. Along with one extra run we'll explain in a moment, that returned 25,285 different keywords. Your market will return a different count, but expect the same mix.
Twelve Competitor Websites Returned Almost No Spay, Dental or Vaccine Searches
Here's where vet research needed a fix. The competitor sites returned thousands of keywords, but almost none for the services that fill a general practice's schedule.
From the 12 websites, Keyword Planner returned:
- 23 spay and neuter keywords, none with more than 10 searches a month.
- 5 dental keywords, none with more than 10.
- 13 vaccine keywords, only one with 50 or more.
Then we ran Keyword Planner once more, this time seeded with plain service words: "spay and neuter," "dog dental cleaning," "puppy shots," "rabies vaccine" and similar. That one run returned 1,818 spay and neuter keywords, 181 of them with 50 or more searches a month, led by "dog spay and neuter" at 720. It returned 674 dental keywords, led by "dog dental care" at 1,000, and 1,644 vaccine keywords, led by "rabies vaccine for dogs" at 1,600.
We can't see inside Keyword Planner to know exactly why, but the practical lesson is clear. Run the competitor sites, and then run the words owners use for the services you want to sell. In our review sample, owners wrote "shots" and "getting fixed" where practices write "immunizations" and "spay and neuter." Seed with both.
About One Keyword in 13 Is Someone Looking for a Shelter Pet
Now the cutting starts. Of the 25,285 keywords, 1,937 were searches for shelters, adoption or rescues, roughly one in every 13. And they weren't small. "Denver animal shelter" draws 33,100 searches a month in the example market and "animal shelters near me" 18,100, bigger than "vet near me."
Those owners may become clients someday, but not from a search ad today. Someone looking for a kitten to adopt isn't looking for a spay appointment yet, and a click from them is money spent answering the wrong question.
The same pass should catch three smaller groups:
- Job seekers. "Veterinary assistant jobs" draws 390 searches a month, and 192 job and career keywords came back in all.
- School searches. Vet tech programs and veterinary schools turned up too.
- Do-it-yourself searches. A handful, such as "over the counter puppy shots," from people trying to skip the visit altogether.
A Blunt "Shelter" or "Humane" Negative Can Block a Spay Search
The obvious move is to add "shelter," "adopt," "rescue" and "humane" as negative keywords and be done. Look before you do, because some real care searches hide inside those words.
In the example market, "humane society spay" draws 70 searches a month. "Free cat spay near me" draws 90. "Dumb friends league vet," a search for a local nonprofit's clinic, draws 140. Searches such as "animal shelter clinic" turn up too. For a general practice, many of these are other providers' names and can go. For a low-cost or nonprofit clinic, they may be exactly the owners it exists to serve.
Two details of how negative keywords work matter here. First, Google says "Negative keywords don't match to close variants," so blocking "shelter" doesn't block "shelters," and blocking "adopt" doesn't block "adoption." You have to add the forms you mean. Second, the match type of a negative decides how much it blocks. A broad negative blocks any search that contains all of its words, in any order. A phrase negative blocks only searches with those words in that order. An exact negative blocks only that exact search.
So when a word cuts both ways, reach for phrase or exact negatives. Block "animal shelter near me" and "adopt a dog," not every search that mentions a shelter.
"Cheap" and "Free" Are Your Call, Not an Automatic Cut
It's tempting to block "cheap" and "free" on sight. For vet practices, that's a business decision, not a cleanup step.
Cost is one of the loudest themes in vet searches. In the example market, "cheap vet near me" and its close variants draw about 1,000 searches a month, "low cost vet near me" 720 and "low income vet near me" 210. Behind them are owners who need care and are worried about paying for it.
A nonprofit or low-cost clinic may want every one of those searches. True Companions, the nonprofit clinic in the example market, tells visitors, "You do not need to qualify for our services." A full-price practice might reasonably decide those owners are better served elsewhere and block the words. A practice in between might keep "affordable" and "payment plans" but drop "free."
Payment plans deserve a closer look before you cut anything. Most of the example-market practices we profiled take at least one financing option: CareCredit, Scratchpay, Cherry or Affirm turned up on the sites of emergency hospitals, general practices and the nonprofit clinic alike. If you accept one, an owner searching for a vet that takes CareCredit is someone you can help, and a "cheap" negative written too broadly could shut them out.
There's no right answer that fits every practice, which is exactly why it shouldn't happen by default.
Other Hospitals' Names Came Back 1,733 Times. Block Every One.
Competitor research returns competitors, and in vet care that means big names. Of the 25,285 keywords, 1,733 were searches for specific practices or brands. "Banfield animal hospital" draws 14,800 searches a month in the example market, "wheat ridge animal hospital colorado" 12,100 and "vet er group" 8,100. Retail clinics show up too: "petsmart vet clinic" and "vaccination clinic petco" each draw 390.
Put them on the negative list. Those owners asked for a specific hospital, and in our method competitor names are negatives. Bidding on competitors' names is a separate decision that, in our method, only ever happens in its own campaign, if it happens at all, and for most practices it shouldn't.
Your own practice's name is the opposite case. Give it a separate brand campaign, so the cheap, high-intent searches for you by name don't mix with everything else.
Group the Keepers by Service: Vaccines, Spay, Dental, Emergency, Cats
What survives the cuts becomes your ad groups. Use the service structure from Chapter 4:
- Wellness and vaccines
- Spay and neuter
- Dental
- Urgent and emergency care
- Cats, if you want an ad written for cat owners
Keep each group to five or six closely related keywords. We build them in a Google Sheet with columns for campaign, ad group and keyword, with formulas that write each keyword in all three match types, then load the sheet into the account with Google Ads Editor. The broader match types stay loaded and paused until the campaign that uses them launches.
Keyword Planner also shows a top-of-page bid range for each keyword. Think of that range as Google's guess at the going rate for a top-of-page spot on that search. Nobody bills you that number. Treat it as a rough guide. We plan on actual costs landing anywhere within about 30% of it, in either direction, and adjust once real clicks come in.
Negatives Matter Most the Day Broad Match Arrives
In the first campaign, the negative list does less work than you'd think. Isolation, our name for the exact-match campaign that launches first, only shows for the searches you chose, so a shelter search can't sneak in.
That changes once Exploration goes live. Exploration is BrandRocket's term for the follow-on campaign that runs broad match. Broad match finds searches you never listed, which is the point, and it will find more shelter searches, more competitor names and more job seekers along the way. When Exploration launches, read the search terms report every day for the first 30 days and add negatives as they appear. After that, keep checking every week. A vet negative list is never finished, because owners keep inventing new ways to search.
Next: Exact Match Holds "Vet Near Me." Broad Match Finds the Rest.
With a clean list grouped by service, the next step is deciding which searches to protect tightly and which to let Google explore. Chapter 6 builds Isolation and Exploration for a vet practice, and shows where each kind of search belongs.
The whole sequence, chapter by chapter, is on the Google Ads for Veterinarians guide home. And if you'd rather have us build and maintain the list, it's part of every account under our Google Ads management.
