Google Ads for Orthopaedic Surgeons: Keywords, Negatives and Costs

A son types "knee replacement cost in Lucknow" on his lunch break. A retired teacher types "hip replacement surgeon near me" after a fall. A college footballer types "ACL tear treatment". Three very different people, three very different searches, and in most orthopaedic accounts we audit, all three land on the same homepage with the same ad.

That is where the money goes. Here is how we set up Google Ads for an orthopaedic practice so the budget reaches people who will actually walk in.

Which orthopaedic keywords should you bid on?

Start with one campaign for every treatment. Knee replacement is one campaign. Hip replacement is another. Sports injuries and arthroscopy is a third. Each gets its own budget, so you always know what each treatment is costing you.

Inside each campaign, group keywords by the four kinds of people searching. Keep matching tight at the start, with exact and phrase match.

The condition group is the widest. Some of those people need physiotherapy, not surgery. That is fine. Your page should say so honestly, and those patients still become future patients and referrers.

Sports injury campaigns behave differently. The searchers are younger, they often search late at night after a match, and words like "ACL", "meniscus" and "arthroscopy" carry most of the intent. Their landing page should talk about return to sport and timelines, not walking sticks. Keep this campaign's budget separate, because its cost per patient and its average ticket will look nothing like knee replacement, and mixing them hides both.

Which searches should an ortho clinic block?

Build the negative list before launch, not after. In orthopaedics, these are the searches that quietly eat budget:

1. Careers and education: job, salary, vacancy, course, MS ortho, fellowship, residency.
2. Free and government: free, government hospital, scheme hospital list.
3. Home care: home remedy, oil, exercises at home, yoga for knee pain.
4. Products: knee cap, knee brace, belt, buy, online, price of implant brand.
5. Research and media: pictures, video, ppt, pdf, notes.

If "knee surgeon job" or "free knee pain home remedy" can trigger your ad, you are paying for clicks from people who will never be patients. Then open the search terms report every single week. Add the bad searches as negatives and turn the good ones into new keywords. That one habit saves more money than anything else we do in these accounts.

What should the orthopaedic landing page say?

Never send an ad to the homepage. Send "knee replacement cost" to your knee replacement page, and "hip replacement surgeon" to your hip page.

A good orthopaedic condition page has a headline in the patient's words, like "Knee pain that stops you climbing stairs?", not "Advanced Arthroplasty Services". Then it covers who it is for, the causes, every treatment option including the non-surgical ones, what happens step by step from the first scan to walking without support, the risks stated plainly, how pricing works, your proof and eight to ten questions and answers.

Two things matter more in orthopaedics than in most specialities. First, show the empanelled insurers and explain cashless in plain words, because families check that first. Second, make the page easy to forward. The parent often reads it, then sends it to the child who decides. A downloadable one-page plan and a WhatsApp button do that job. Build the page in the local language if that is how your patients speak. More on page structure in Known Doctors Get Booked.

What should a treated orthopaedic patient cost on Google?

Judge everything by cost per surgery, not cost per click or lead. Here is a worked example.

Say your knee campaign spends ₹80,000 in a month at about ₹500 per lead, which gives you 160 leads. Your front desk books 30%, so 48 consultations. About 65% show up, so 31 patients are seen. You advise surgery for some of them, and over the next 60 to 90 days, 9 go ahead.

₹80,000 ÷ 9 = about ₹8,900 per surgery.

If your all-inclusive plan is ₹2,50,000, that is a healthy number. But the same campaign with a 15% booking rate would produce half the surgeries from the same spend. That is why we fix the front desk and follow-up before we raise the budget. A cheap lead who never picks up the phone is the most expensive lead you will ever buy.

How do you run an ortho account week to week?

Target where patients really come from. A realistic radius around the hospital, plus the specific towns and districts that already send you joint patients. Families will travel for a surgeon they trust.

Run ads when someone can answer the phone. Match the schedule to front desk hours, and use an instant WhatsApp reply for anything that comes in after them.

Protect your name. Run a small campaign on your hospital's name, your joint centre's name and your own name, so a competitor cannot sit above you when a referred family searches for you.

Send back real outcomes. Count calls, forms and WhatsApp clicks as conversions, then feed back which leads booked and had surgery, so Google learns what a real patient looks like. Don't switch on automated bidding until that data is steady.

Plan without remarketing. Google restricts personalised advertising based on health, so you cannot chase people who visited your knee page. You win on keywords, ads and pages instead.

Follow the rules. No guaranteed results, no "No.1 knee surgeon" without proof, and every claim on the page held to the same standard as the ad. Check the current Google policies and NMC guidance before each new campaign.

If you want us to look at an existing account, the search terms report and your last month of call logs tell us most of the story. That is usually where a free growth call starts, and you can see more about how we build these accounts on our orthopaedics page.

The short version

• One campaign per treatment, keywords grouped by treatment, cost, specialist and condition.
• Build negatives for jobs, courses, free care, home remedies and products before launch, then review search terms weekly.
• Send every ad to a matching page with package pricing, insurance details and a way to forward it to family.
• Judge by cost per surgery over a 60 to 90 day window, not cost per lead.
• Boring wins: negatives, the right page and a phone answered within a few rings.