Google Ads for Occupational Therapists

Who searches, and why it changes your occupational therapy Google Ads

In OT, an ad written for the patient often misses the person making the enquiry. Look at who is typing:

• Parents looking for paediatric OT, often after a teacher, educator or GP has raised a concern. They want to know whether you see children their child's age, what happens at the first session and how long the wait is.
• Adult children organising support for an ageing parent: a home safety assessment, rails and ramps, a review after a fall. They may be searching from another city, for someone who lives near you.
• Support coordinators and plan managers finding an OT for an NDIS participant. They compare providers quickly and move on if the answer is not obvious.
• GPs and other clinicians checking where to send a referral.

Each group uses different words and decides at a different pace. One ad written for "the client" speaks to none of them well, so before keywords or budget, we work out who is searching for each service.

Campaigns split by service

OT services can share little beyond the profession name. In one campaign, a single budget and one landing page end up serving a parent and a coordinator at once. We separate them. An account might be split like this, though yours will differ:

• Paediatric therapy. Ads speak to parents, mention the ages you see and lead to a page about the first appointment.
• NDIS assessments. Functional capacity assessments and similar reports. Ads speak to coordinators and participants, and the page states your service area and current availability.
• Home modification assessments. Searched by families and aged care contacts. Ads mention home visits and the suburbs you cover.
• Driver assessments. A narrow service with its own referrers. It gets its own small campaign so it is not buried under paediatric terms.

One campaign per service you want more of, each with its own budget, means one can be turned up or down without disturbing the rest.

OT searches also pull in people who will never book. Students look up OT courses, graduates search for OT jobs and salaries, and plenty of people searching "OT" mean overtime. Those terms go on the negative keyword list at launch, and we keep checking the search terms report for new ones.

Writing for the referrer

A support coordinator already knows what occupational therapy does. What they need from your ad and landing page is practical:

• Availability. Are you taking new participants, and roughly when could you start?
• Service area. Which suburbs you cover, and whether you visit homes or schools.
• Registration status. Whether you are a registered NDIS provider. Say it plainly either way.
• Turnaround. How long a report takes after the assessment.

If those answers sit three clicks deep, the coordinator rings the next provider in the results. We put them at the top of the page and, where they fit, into the ad itself through headlines and sitelinks. Writing for a parent is a different job: plainer words, less jargon, more about what the first visit is like for the child.

Section 133 applies to both. Occupational therapy is a registered profession, so the ads cannot use testimonials about clinical care, create an unreasonable expectation of benefit or offer an inducement without its terms. A line like "help your child catch up at school" can drift into an outcome promise. We check the clinic's ad copy against the rules before launch, and automated headlines are reviewed or switched off. The rules are updated from time to time, so check the current version as well.

Waitlists: advertise what you can take on

Plenty of OT practices hold a waitlist for at least one service. Paying for clicks into a service that is full wastes budget and frustrates the family who rings to hear there is no place.

Splitting campaigns by service fixes most of this. If paediatric places are full but home modification assessments have room, the paediatric campaign is reduced or paused and the budget moves to the service with capacity. When places open, it comes back on. We ask about caseload when we review the account, not only the ad results.

Honesty matters here too. An ad that implies an immediate appointment when there is a wait can mislead, and section 133 restricts false or misleading advertising. If you run a waitlist, the page should say so and explain how to join it. A coordinator would rather know now.

NDIS-funded occupational therapy

If NDIS participants make up a large part of your caseload, that work usually needs more structure than one ad group can give it. Coordinator search terms, registration questions and plan management wording each need their own handling. Our page on Google Ads for NDIS providers covers it in detail.

Ads also stop the moment the budget does. SEO for NDIS providers builds the pages a coordinator can find without an ad running.

How we work with OT practices

It starts with a free audit of your current account. We look at which services are advertised, who the ads are written for, which search terms are spending money, and whether calls, forms and online bookings are tracked as conversions. Then we tell you what we would change first.

From there, campaigns are built by service and by searcher. Reporting comes down to one number: what each booking cost. Tracking is tied to calls, forms and online bookings, so the figure means something to the practice manager checking it against the diary.

A coordinator who lands on a generic services page has to dig for availability. Where your pages need work, our occupational therapy web design service builds them for parents and referrers. For the wider picture beyond paid search, see marketing for occupational therapists, and for how we run campaigns across allied health generally, see our Google Ads management overview.

Running several sites, or not sure where ads fit yet? Book a strategy call instead.

Frequently Asked Questions