Plastic Surgery Keywords for SEO & PPC

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Choosing the right plastic surgery keywords to target is the foundation of both PPC and SEO for plastic surgeons.

We’re a plastic surgery marketing agency that focuses primarily on digital marketing. Our plastic surgery SEO team spends each and every day working to get out clients to rank for plastic surgery keywords on Google, Bing, and even Yahoo. This experience has helped us to learn a thing or two about plastic surgery keyword planning, and I’m going to give you a primer on some of it.

If you’re looking for a company to help with your plastic surgery marketing, click here and reach out.

At any rate, targeting the right keywords patients search for when researching plastic surgery procedures, and finally, when choosing a plastic surgeon, can make or break an internet marketing campaign for your plastic surgery practice.

This post will outline the types of plastic surgery-related keywords you should be targeting—as well as keywords you should be avoiding.

Plastic Surgery Keywords for SEO

There are obvious plastic surgery keywords that you should be targeting when trying to rank in organic search. According to the Google Keyword Planner, these are the top 20 plastic surgery keywords:

Keywords such as these are obvious targets that you should try to rank highly for in the search engines, but it is important not to overlook long-tail keywords on the buyers journey.

Plastic Surgery-Related Long-Tail Keywords Are Highly Valuable

Long-tail keyword phrases are typically the common questions patients have about different procedures. It is important to target these plastic surgery long tail keywords for a number of reasons.

To start, these queries typically precede a search for an surgeon to perform the procedure. This is your first chance to get front of a potential rhinoplasty, breast augmentation, neck lift, or other plastic surgery consult.

Additionally, they tend to be much easier to rank for then head terms such as “plastic surgeon near me.” In my experience, many lower quality SEO providers overlook them and focus entirely on head terms that demonstrate immediate transactional intent (like “facelift surgeon near me”)

This is a mistake, because in addition to being a great opportunity to get in front of a prospect early in their research process, it also presents an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise to both the visitor and Google (more about this in a bit). As the prospective patient is visiting your website to get an answer to their question, you’ll have an opportunity to earn their trust by demonstrating that you are an expert in the type of procedure they are interested in.

Additionally, getting these visitors to your website could potentially get them into your sales funnel by getting them to fill out a contact form, or even simply allow you to cookie their browser and retarget them with ads on Facebook and YouTube. This is one of many reasons why plastic surgery website design must be done with a focus on SEO.

Examples of Plastic Surgery Long-tail Keywords

Plastic surgery longtail keywords are usually related to one of the following:

• The cost of a specific plastic surgery procedure
• The recovery time for a plastic surgery procedure
• The differences between various types of plastic surgery procedures
• Researching the types of plastic surgery celebrities have undergone

Some more specific examples of plastic surgery long tail keywords would be:

• Cost of rhinoplasty in Florida
• How long does a face lift take to heal?
• Surgical versus non-surgical rhinoplasty
• What plastic surgery has Kylie Jenner had?

The key to ranking highly for these keywords, leveraging them to bring in new consults, and increasing your overall search rank is to cover the topics thoroughly.

I get into the details of how to ensure you cover a topic thoroughly in a video; click on that link to check it out.

Google has invested massive resources in developing its natural language processing machine learning. One of the primary goals of this investment is to better understand the level of expertise of an author and a website as a whole. A website that establishes a long track record of providing expert, well-written content related to plastic surgery is much more likely to be trusted by Google as being a reliable resource to show highly in the search engine results.

In addition to backlinks, Google is now determining the quality of your overall website by the quality and expertise of the writing it contains. This is particularly pronounced in “your money or your life” (YMYL) niches or any health-related websites.

Target long tail keywords related to plastic surgery and you’ll be better positioned to rank highly for the more competitive head term plastic surgery keywords.

Plastic Surgery Keywords for PPC

The plastic surgery keywords we typically bid on in pay-per-click ads (PPC) differ from those we typically target through SEO in a number of ways.

If you’re interested in reading more about PPC for your clinic, I highly recommend our colleague Thomas Vecchio’s “PPC for Plastic Surgeons Playbook.”

To start, the long-tail keywords you will be able to target will be fewer. It can be difficult and unprofitable to target plastic surgery keywords with lower monthly search volume (which is often the case with keywords such as “how much is a tummy tuck in NYC?” Google often does not allow us to bid on keywords with very low search volume (<10 monthly searches).

Second, it typically makes more sense to bid on keywords that have transactional intent. A few examples of these plastic surgery keywords would be:

• Plastic surgeon near me
• Rhinoplasty in LA
• Plastic surgeons that offer financing

A Thorough Negative Keyword List is Invaluable

Your negative keyword list is just as important as the keywords you are bidding on.

It is very easy to blow through money in PPC advertising. Bidding on the right keyword with the wrong match type can mean that you can end up wasting money on clicks you do not want.

For example, let’s say you are bidding on the keyword “plastic surgeon.” A person that performs the search “what is the name of Dolly Parton‘s plastic surgeon?” could potentially see your ad and click on it, although this is clearly not a click you would want to pay for.

You can prevent please sorts of queries from triggering your ads by including negative keywords. Questions like who, what, where, when, etc. seldom have purchase intent when combined with plastic surgery. These are all keywords that should be added as negative keywords to a plastic surgery PPC campaign.

We’ve spent lots of money and hours finding all of the negative keywords that need to be added to plastic surgeon PPC campaigns. I’m not going to share all of the secret sauce here, but here are a few of them:

• Make (as in, “how much does a plastic surgeon make”). You might ask “why not put ‘how much’ as a negative keyword?” Answer – we still want to bid on “how much is a nose job”
• Jobs/hiring/employment
• Schools/colleges as in “best plastic surgery schools”

Our negative keyword list is one of the reasons our PPC for plastic surgeons is so effective. While competitors are blowing money on clicks that clearly have no intent to request a consult, we’re focused on the valuable plastic surgery keywords that have clear purchase intent.

Hiring a Professional is Probably Cheaper than Trying to Figure It Out Yourself

When effective, SEO and PPC can both be enormously profitable ways to find new plastic surgery patients. Odds are your competitors are working with pros.

You can try to do your own keyword research, handle your own SEO, and slowly build your negative keyword list, but odds are, you’ll end up spending more than you would have had you hired a professional.

If you’re interested in finding out what our plastic surgery SEO services are like, fill out the form at the bottom of this page and we can schedule a Zoom meeting.