This page is for orthopedic practice owners, administrators and marketing leads who run or oversee Google Ads. It covers ad targeting and has nothing to say about care decisions.
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“Orthopedic” is an awkward word to buy. It sits inside searches for surgeons, and also inside searches for shoes, pillows, nursing jobs and a veterinary clinic. Left alone, a broad campaign can spend on all of them. I cannot tell you how much that costs your practice, because I have no verified orthopedic figure and I would not trust anyone quoting one without showing the account. Your own search terms report will tell you.
Negative keywords are also only half of the job. When I ran the same checks on 21 orthopedic practice homepages for my website study on November 1, 2026, nine had neither a form nor any sign of online scheduling. That study did not look at ads or landing pages, and it covers a small hand-picked sample. But if your ads send traffic to a homepage like those, cleaner traffic still arrives at a page with one way forward. I would fix both.
How Google treats negatives
Three details from Google’s negative keyword help page change how you should build a list.
| Negative match type | Your ad will not show when the search | Example: negative “knee brace” |
|---|---|---|
| Broad (the default) | Contains all the terms, in any order | Blocks “brace for knee pain”, still shows for “knee surgeon” |
| Phrase | Contains the terms in that order, extra words allowed | Blocks “best knee brace”, still shows for “brace for knee” |
| Exact | Is exactly those terms, with no extra words | Blocks “knee brace”, still shows for “best knee brace” |
The first detail is the one that catches people out. Google says negatives do not match close variants. So excluding “job” does not exclude “jobs”, and you need both, with plurals and misspellings added by hand.
The second is that terms added from the search terms report go in as negative exact match by default. A single click there blocks one precise phrase and nothing else, so change the match type when you mean something wider.
The third is a caution. Google warns that too many negatives can reduce your reach. A long list copied from somewhere else, including this page, can quietly block people you want.
The starter list
Treat this as a starting point to check against your own account. Each entry is my judgment about intent, and it is not a Google recommendation. Single words below would go in as broad, and my default is to use phrase match for anything longer. Remove anything your practice actually does.
Jobs and careers
- job, jobs, career, careers, hiring, salary, salaries, wage, pay scale
- recruiter, recruiting, locum, locums, staffing, resume, internship
- “nurse practitioner jobs”, “physician assistant jobs”, “surgical tech”, “medical assistant”, “orthopedic nurse”
If you recruit through ads, keep those in a separate campaign and leave the rest of the list as it is.
Students and education
- school, college, university, degree, course, courses, class, classes, certification, exam, textbook, scholarship
- residency, fellowship, rotation, rotations, shadowing, cme, lecture, syllabus, quizlet
- “how to become”, “orthopedic surgeon salary”, “years of school”, “anatomy of”
A teaching hospital may want “residency” out of this list for a separate program campaign, so check before applying it.
Patient advice and research
- home remedy, remedies, stretches, exercises, reddit, forum, quora, youtube, wikipedia, pdf
- icd, icd-10, cpt, “billing code”, “medical code”, “treatment guidelines”
- “what is”, “is it normal”, “how to treat”, “how long does”
This group needs the most judgment. Someone reading about their options may become a patient later, and I respect that. My default is to leave them to your organic content, because a paid click at the research stage rarely books in the short run, in my view. Check “what is” and “how long does” carefully against your report before using them. If those searches show up alongside booked consults in your data, keep paying for them.
Products and retail
- brace, braces, sleeve, sleeves, insole, insoles, pillow, pillows, mattress, shoes, sandals, slippers, chair, cushion
- crutches, walker, wheelchair, cane, scooter, tape, supplement, supplements
- amazon, walmart, walgreens, cvs, ebay, buy, wholesale, coupon, “for sale”
If your practice sells bracing or runs a durable medical equipment line, take these out for that campaign.
Wrong specialty and wrong species
- orthodontist, orthodontics, orthodontic, dentist, dental, invisalign
- vet, veterinary, veterinarian, dog, dogs, cat, cats, canine, feline, horse, equine
- chiropractor, chiropractic, massage (only if you do not want these comparison searches)
Legal and news
- lawsuit, lawsuits, attorney, lawyer, malpractice, settlement, recall, recalls
- “license lookup”, “board complaint”
Please do not block these words until you check what your practice offers:
| Tempting negative | Why I would hold back |
|---|---|
| free | Could block “free second opinion” if you offer it |
| cost, price | Can signal a patient close to deciding, and my cost guide covers the budget side |
| insurance, medicare | Often a person checking whether they can come to you |
| pediatric, kids | Only a negative if you do not treat children |
| near me | Usually the strongest local intent you can buy |
| reviews | Often a person comparing surgeons |
How to build it in about an hour
- Open the search terms report under Insights and reports and set a date range of 30 to 90 days.
- Sort by cost. Read the top 100 terms yourself, because the pattern tells you more than any list.
- Save your negatives as a shared list by theme, which Google lets you do when adding them. Named lists are easier to review than a thousand loose terms.
- Apply the lists to campaigns one at a time. A hiring campaign and a surgeon campaign need different ones.
- Scan your active keywords for conflicts, so a negative does not cancel something you are paying for.
- Check again in a week, then monthly. My default is to read the report on a fixed day and add terms in small batches.
If your procedure pages are the landing pages, tighten each campaign around one service line as well. Fewer stray searches reach a page built for one job, which is cleaner than patching everything with negatives afterward.
A note on audiences and privacy
Filtering by search term is one of the safer tools in a health account, because it uses what someone typed and not a list of your patients. Google’s personalized advertising policy lists health as a sensitive category and says customer lists cannot be used when promoting in those categories. So do not assume your patient list can stand in for the work above. I am a marketer and not a lawyer, so run any audience or tracking change past your compliance contact, and the same goes for what you put in ad copy. My note on social media privacy rules covers related ground.
How to tell whether it worked
Clicks will probably fall, and that alone proves nothing. Judge it on the number that pays the bills.
- Baseline: 30 days of spend on terms you would now exclude, total spend and booked consults by campaign.
- Change: apply the lists, then touch nothing else in the account for 30 days if you can.
- Measure: the same figures, plus cost per booked consult, tracked as I lay out in my guides to orthopedic patient acquisition cost and marketing KPIs.
My default stop rule: if booked consults from a campaign drop by more than a fifth over those 30 days, with similar spend, review the newest negatives first and remove any that look like real patient searches. Small accounts swing on small numbers, so read one bad month carefully before you act on it.
Frequently asked questions
How many negative keywords should an orthopedic account have? I do not have a verified number, and Google’s help page gives no target for Search. Add what your search terms report justifies, because Google warns that too many can shrink your reach.
Why are my ads still showing for “orthopedic jobs” after I added “job”? Google says negatives do not match close variants, so “job” does not block “jobs”. Add both forms.
Should negatives go at the campaign level or in a shared list? My default is shared lists for the themes above, since most campaigns need them, and campaign-level negatives for anything specific to one service line.
Can I just use this list as it is? Please do not. Read each line against your own services first. A practice selling braces or running a residency would block itself with parts of it.
See what your competitors are doing
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