Paid search for a clinic begins in an unusual place. Not with keywords or budget, but with a list of sentences you are not allowed to write. Get that wrong and the account is either disapproved or, worse, runs for months carrying language a medical council would take a dim view of. So: constraints first, then the campaign.
What a clinic or a doctor may not say
Indian medical council conventions have long restricted soliciting patients, directly or indirectly, while permitting factual announcements about a practice: name, qualifications, speciality, address, timings, contact details. That distinction is the whole game. Google's healthcare and medicines policy adds its own restrictions on top.
Cure and guarantee language. No permanent cure, no guaranteed relief, no pain-free promise. The commonest reason a clinic account gets pulled.
Superiority claims. Best orthopaedic surgeon in Kolkata. Number one dental clinic. Leading IVF centre. Unless you hold documentary basis a regulator would accept, write what is verifiable instead.
Patient testimonials as proof of outcome. A recovered patient describing their result is exactly the material closed to you, however genuine.
Restricted categories. Some areas carry extra gates or blocks: prescription drug promotion, addiction treatment, clinical trial recruitment, terms adjacent to pre-natal sex determination, unproven stem cell therapies. Several need Google certification before an advert serves. Check the category before writing copy, not after.
If your hospital runs under a registered charitable trust, check eligibility for Google Ad Grants, which gives qualifying non-profits up to ten thousand US dollars a month of in-kind search advertising. That is the published programme limit, under stricter rules than a paid account.
Keyword tiers, in the order they deserve money
Four tiers, routinely funded in the wrong sequence.
Booking intent. Book MRI in Salt Lake. Dentist appointment Ballygunge. ENT specialist consultation Gurgaon. Small volume, highest conversion, funded fully before anything else gets a rupee.
Cost and package intent. Root canal cost Kolkata. Whole body checkup package price. Strong intent, worth funding once the landing page answers the question honestly.
Symptom intent. Ear pain, knee pain, chest tightness. Enormous volume, mostly research rather than booking, expensive. This tier belongs to organic work, and SEO for hospitals is the cheaper route into it.
Brand. Your own clinic and consultant names. Cheap, defensive, worth holding when aggregators bid on them.
Negatives matter as much as keywords. Strip out jobs, salary, vacancy, MBBS admission, syllabus, government scheme, free treatment, and the medical-student research vocabulary. Without an aggressive negative list a clinic account spends most of its budget educating people who will never attend.
Account structure: by department, by test, by procedure
One campaign for the whole clinic is how the loudest speciality eats everyone else's budget. Split by the thing the money is chasing. A multi-speciality hospital like Poly Health splits by department, so cardiology cannot cannibalise what orthopaedics needs. A diagnostic centre splits by test group, since an MRI enquiry and a lipid profile enquiry are worth different amounts. A single-procedure practice splits by procedure. Set budgets per split rather than per account, and match ad groups tightly to pages: an ad group covering three tests needs three landing pages.
Geography and radius, where the money leaks
Clinic catchment is small and stubborn. Nobody crosses Kolkata for a blood test, so a radius set to the whole city on a Ballygunge clinic pays for clicks from Behala that will never convert.
Set the radius to the distance patients travel for that service, which differs by service inside the same building. A routine test radius might be two or three kilometres. A specialist consultation reaches across the city. A tertiary procedure reaches into the districts, so add district names as separate location targets with their own copy, because the message to a family travelling from Siliguri is about logistics, not proximity. Then set targeting to presence, not interest.
The landing page that survives review
Reviewers look at the page as much as the advert.
It must carry the clinic's registered name and full address, a working phone number, the consultant's qualifications and registration details, and a privacy policy if a form collects patient details. It must not contradict the advert: name a test in the advert and the page shows that test and its price basis. And it must not carry a claim the advert cannot, which catches out clinics whose adverts are clean while an old testimonial slider runs halfway down the page. For single-consultant practices such as Dr Ravinder Gera and Gurgaon ENT Clinic, the credibility block does more converting than any headline.
Call tracking, and the phone nobody answers
Most clinic conversions are calls, not form fills. Untracked, the account is judged on the minority of its results.
Use call reporting and a tracked number, log which campaign produced which call, and record ring duration. Then read the answer rate honestly, because this is where paid search for clinics usually dies. An advert serving at two in the afternoon, while the front desk is inside the OPD, produces clicks that ring out. Ad scheduling should follow the hours the phone is genuinely answered, not the hours printed on the board. Where reception cannot cover the day, a nominated mobile and a missed-call callback rule beat any bid adjustment.
An unanswered phone does not reduce a campaign's return. It removes it.
Where this connects
Paid search buys attention now; it does not build the library that earns it later, which is why the healthcare marketing hub treats the two as one programme. Education material published for social media for doctors often doubles as the landing page copy that passes review. Account management sits on our paid advertising service.
Digi Kydo, 17R Dover Terrace, Ballygunge, Kolkata, West Bengal 700029. Call +91 98305 45687 or email [email protected].