Google Ads for Physiotherapy Clinics: What to Bid On and Block

A physiotherapy patient will not travel across the city three times a week for six weeks. That one fact should shape your entire Google Ads account.

Most physio accounts we review do the opposite. They target the whole city, send every click to the homepage, and pay for searches from students looking for BPT admission. The fix is not a bigger budget. It is a tighter, more local account built around how patients actually search.

What should a physiotherapy clinic bid on?

Split the account into campaigns by service, each with its own budget, and group keywords inside each by intent.

Start with exact and phrase match, and open things up only once the search terms show you what works.

How tight should the location targeting be?

Tighter than you think. For clinic campaigns, set a radius based on realistic travel time to your door during the hours your patients come, not on straight-line distance. A patient fifteen minutes away will complete a plan. A patient fifty minutes away in traffic usually will not.

For home visits, set the targeting to the areas your therapists can actually reach without losing half the day in travel. If you only cover four neighbourhoods, advertise only in those four.

Example: Say your clinic is in Kothrud. A patient in Baner may be close on a map but forty minutes away at 6 pm. A patient in Karve Nagar is ten minutes away. Target the areas your existing patients actually come from, then check your CRM after a month to see which areas produce patients who complete their plans.

Run ads when someone can answer the phone. Many desk workers search in the early morning and late evening, so either cover those hours or pause the ads.

Which searches should a physio account block?

Physiotherapy keywords attract a lot of people who will never be patients. Build the negative list before launch.

1. Education: BPT, MPT, admission, college, course, syllabus, fees for course, notes.
2. Jobs: job, vacancy, salary, hiring, internship.
3. Free help: exercises pdf, exercise video, YouTube, at home exercises, free.
4. Products: TENS machine, belt, brace, knee cap, pillow, price of equipment.
5. Services you do not offer: for example, paediatric therapy or neuro rehab, if you do not provide them.

Then review the search terms every week. Turn the good searches into keywords, and the bad ones into negatives.

What should a physio landing page say?

Every ad goes to the page that matches it. And every page should answer the questions that separate you from the clinic that "just puts on a machine".

• What the first assessment includes, and how long it takes.
• What a session looks like: how long, how much one-on-one time with a therapist, and what equipment is used.
• The usual shape of a plan for that condition, with phases and how progress is measured, without promising a number of sessions.
• Who your therapists are, with qualifications and special training.
• Prices: the assessment fee and how plans are priced. For home visits, the areas covered and the visit fee.
• Click-to-call, WhatsApp and a short form, all easy on a phone.

If many of your patients speak Hindi, Marathi, Kannada or another language at home, build the key condition pages in that language too, and write a separate ad group for searches in it. Families booking for an older parent often search in the language the parent speaks.

Match the ad to the search. "Physiotherapy at home for elderly" gets an ad about trained therapists, safety and families kept informed. "Sports physiotherapist" gets an ad about returning to the sport.

What should a new physio patient cost?

Do not compare campaigns on cost per lead. Compare them on cost per patient who starts a plan, and against what that patient is worth.

Example: Say your clinic campaign spends ₹25,000 a month, brings 125 leads at ₹200 each, and 25 patients start a plan worth ₹8,000 on average. That is ₹1,000 per patient, about 12.5% of the plan value.

Your home visit campaign spends ₹20,000, brings 50 leads at ₹400 each, and 10 start a home plan worth ₹15,000. That is ₹2,000 per patient, about 13%.

Both campaigns are healthy. But the home visit number only holds if travel time is priced into the visit. Check the margin, not just the revenue.

To see these numbers, track calls, forms and WhatsApp clicks as conversions, and send back which leads started a plan. Our CRM and WhatsApp setup tags every enquiry by source so this is automatic.

What else keeps a physio account healthy?

• Review search terms weekly, in one fixed half-hour. In physiotherapy, this is where you find new condition searches worth their own ad group, and junk you never thought to block.
• Run a small brand campaign on your clinic's name.
• Keep bidding simple until you have a steady flow of tracked conversions every month.
• Plan without remarketing. Google restricts personalised advertising based on health, so win with keywords, ads and pages instead.
• Stay honest. No "pain-free in three sessions", no guarantees and nothing that frightens people.

The short version

• Physio is hyper-local, so set tight radius targeting by travel time, and a separate one for home visits.
• Build one campaign per service: clinic, home visits, conditions, post-surgery and specialised care.
• Block education, job, free exercise and product searches before launch.
• Send every ad to a page that explains the assessment, the session, the plan and the price.
• Measure cost per patient who starts a plan. More in our patient acquisition service and on our physiotherapy page.