Google Ads for Cardiologists: Keywords, Negatives and Patient Cost

A physician tells a patient, "Get an echo done and see a cardiologist." The patient walks out of the OPD, opens his phone and types "2D echo near me". His son, sitting in another city, types "best cardiologist in Lucknow".

Those two searches are the reason Google Ads work in cardiology. You are not creating demand. A doctor already created it. Your only job is to be the clearest answer on the page when it happens. Here is how I set this up for heart specialists, and what I tell them to stay away from.

What should a cardiologist bid on?

Start with one campaign per service, each with its own budget, so you always know what each one costs you. Inside each campaign, split the keywords by intent: the treatment, the cost, a specialist near me, and the condition.

Keep matching tight in the beginning, with exact and phrase match. Broad match without data will spend your budget on searches you never wanted.

One judgement call matters more in cardiology than anywhere else: emergency searches. If you do not run a round-the-clock cath lab with an answered emergency line, do not bid on searches that sound like an emergency in progress. A person with crushing chest pain right now should be calling an ambulance, not reading your landing page.

Which searches should a cardiology account block?

Build the negative keyword list before launch, not after. Cardiology attracts a lot of students, technicians and people looking for free information. Here is a starting list for most heart clinics:

1. Education words: course, training, DM cardiology, MBBS, NEET, admission, syllabus, notes.
2. Job words: job, vacancy, salary, technician, recruitment.
3. Equipment words: ECG machine, echo machine price, monitor price, stent manufacturer.
4. Free information words: pdf, ppt, wikipedia, meaning, diagram, home remedy, free.
5. Services you do not offer: bypass surgery, if you are not a cardiac surgeon, or paediatric cardiology, if you do not see children.

Be careful with language words. Do not block "Hindi". A patient searching "dil ka doctor" is a real patient. Block "meaning in Hindi" instead.

Then open the search terms report every week and keep adding. This one habit saves more money than any bidding trick.

Where should a cardiology ad send people?

Never to the homepage. A patient who searched "TMT test cost" and lands on a page listing fifteen services will leave.

Each test page should answer, in plain words: what the test is, how long it takes, how to prepare (written by your team), when the report comes, what it costs, and how to book a slot. Each procedure page goes further: what happens step by step, the honest risks, how pricing works, which insurers you are cashless with, and who the doctor is.

Then make the ad match the search. Someone typing "angiography cost" wants clarity about money, so talk about your all-inclusive pricing and cashless options. Someone typing "best cardiologist" wants proof, so lead with experience and procedures performed. Add call buttons, your location and links to key pages.

What should a treated cardiac patient cost?

This is where most cardiology accounts go wrong. They compare campaigns on cost per lead. A cheap echo lead and an expensive angiography lead are completely different patients.

Example: Say your echo campaign spends ₹40,000 in a month. It brings 160 leads at ₹250 each, and 64 people get the echo done. That is ₹625 per patient. If an echo patient is worth about ₹6,000 to you in the first year, that cost is roughly 10% of first-year value.

Your angiography campaign spends ₹60,000. It brings 50 leads at ₹1,200 each, and 6 patients go ahead with the procedure. That is ₹10,000 per patient. If each is worth ₹1.5 lakh in the first year, that is under 7%.

Both campaigns are healthy, even though one lead costs almost five times the other. The benchmark I use is a cost per new patient of about 10 to 20% of first-year value.

To see this, you need tracking. Count calls, form fills and WhatsApp clicks as conversions. Then, as soon as you can, send back which leads booked and which started treatment. That is how Google learns what a real cardiac patient looks like for you. Our CRM and WhatsApp setup is built to do exactly that.

How should you run the account week to week?

Keep the routine boring. Boring wins on Google.

• Schedule ads for when someone answers the phone. If your front desk leaves at 8 pm, a 10 pm click becomes a missed call. Either extend cover or pause the ads.
• Run a small campaign on your own name and your clinic's name, so a competitor cannot sit above you when patients search for you directly.
• Do not switch on automated bidding on day one. Wait until you have a steady flow of tracked conversions each month.
• Plan without remarketing. Google restricts personalised advertising based on health, so you cannot chase people who visited your angioplasty page. You win on keywords, ads and pages instead.
• Follow the policies. No prescription drug promotion, no guaranteed outcomes, nothing unproven, and nothing that frightens people into booking.

And remember, the ad is only the first step. In the accounts we take over, the biggest gains come from three things: a strong negative list, a dedicated page for every test and procedure, and someone picking up within a few rings.

The short version

• Bid on intent: tests, procedures, second opinions and "cardiologist near me", one campaign per service.
• Skip emergency searches unless you truly run a round-the-clock cath lab with an answered line.
• Block education, job, equipment and free-information searches before launch, and review search terms weekly.
• Send every ad to a matching page with timing, price and cashless details.
• Judge by cost per treated patient against first-year value. More on this in our patient acquisition work and on the cardiology page.