Google Ads can bring parents to your clinic at the moment they search for help. For a speech pathology practice, that moment often follows a worrying comment from a teacher or a GP.
Set up well, ads fill gaps in your diary and help a new clinic get started. Set up poorly, they spend your budget on students, adults and people after free worksheets.
This page covers the settings and choices that matter most. For the wider picture, see our speech therapy marketing guide or our main speech therapy marketing page.
What to target
Start with searches that show a parent is ready to make contact. These usually combine a service with a place, an age group or a specific concern.
- Service and suburb: “speech therapist Joondalup”, “speech pathology Midland”.
- Service and age: “speech therapy for toddlers”, “paediatric speech pathologist Perth”.
- Specific concerns: “stuttering therapy for kids”, “late talker assessment”.
- Funding: “NDIS speech therapy Perth”, but only if you see NDIS participants.
- School-age support: “speech pathologist for reading difficulties”.
Group keywords by service, and send each group to the matching page. A parent searching about stuttering should land on your stuttering page.
Phrase and exact match give you the most control early on. Broad match can work later, once conversion tracking is reliable and your exclusion list is solid.
What to exclude
Speech pathology attracts many searches that will never become clients. Add negative keywords from day one, and review the search terms report every week or two.
Common exclusions include:
- Study and careers: course, degree, university, jobs, salary, “how to become”.
- Free resources: free, worksheets, printable, pdf, app.
- Other meanings of “speech”: speech writing, public speaking, text to speech, singing lessons.
- Adult services, if you only see children: stroke, aphasia, adult, aged care.
- Services you don’t provide, such as feeding therapy or AAC, where that applies.
Take care not to cut out real parents. “Free” is usually safe to exclude, but a search with “cost” in it often comes from a family close to booking.
Location and schedule settings
Most families will not travel far for weekly sessions. Set a radius around each clinic that matches the drive parents will actually make.
Use a separate campaign for each clinic, so you can control spending by location and capacity. Set location targeting to people in or regularly in your area, which cuts clicks from people elsewhere who are only researching.
If you offer telehealth for regional WA families, run it as its own campaign with its own wording.
Keep ads running in the evening, since many parents search once the kids are in bed. Schedule call ads and call assets for reception hours, and let your forms carry enquiries after hours.
Ad wording
Good speech therapy ads are calm and specific. Mention the suburb, the age group and the next step.
Lines such as “Paediatric speech pathology in Wanneroo” or “NDIS participants welcome” work well where they are accurate. Real details like after-school sessions, telehealth or a short wait for new clients help too, as long as they are true right now.
Avoid promised outcomes, such as “fix your child’s stutter”, and leave out testimonials. Don’t call a clinician a specialist unless that title is accurate and permitted.
The landing page
Each ad group should lead to a page that matches the search. The first lines should confirm the service, the age group and the location.
Include a short enquiry or waitlist form, a tap-to-call number and an honest note on current wait times. Explain the first assessment briefly, and list funding options with links to official sources.
Speed matters on a phone. A slow page loses parents who are searching between other tasks. Our web design team can build fast landing pages for each service.
Call and form tracking
Without tracking, you cannot tell which keywords bring families in. Set up conversions for calls from ads, calls from your website, form submissions and online bookings.
Count only real enquiries. A very short call, or a tap on a phone number, is different from a parent asking about an assessment.
If your online booking runs on another domain, check that the conversion still records. This often needs cross-domain tracking or a confirmation page that fires the conversion.
Where you can, feed back which enquiries became new clients. That lets you judge keywords on clients gained, rather than on clicks.
Budget thinking
Work out what a new client is worth to your practice over a typical block of therapy. Then decide what you can sensibly spend to gain one, and judge results against that figure.
Spread the budget by clinic capacity. A clinic with an open diary deserves more spend than one with a long waitlist.
Give a new campaign a few months of steady data before judging it. Small budgets spread across many keywords rarely give a clear answer.
Common mistakes
- Running ads while every clinic is fully booked.
- Sending all traffic to the home page.
- Skipping negative keywords, so clicks go to students and adult searches.
- Using one campaign for several clinics with different capacity.
- Counting every tap on a phone number as a new client.
- Describing the practice as a registered NDIS provider when it isn’t.
Ad policies and health rules
Google has healthcare policies, and it restricts personalised advertising based on health conditions. That limits how you can use remarketing lists and audiences for a health service, so check Google’s current policies before you build them.
We write ad copy within Ahpra’s advertising rules, the same as for every health client. Consumer law and Speech Pathology Australia’s Code of Ethics apply too. Any NDIS claims should match your status with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.
If you’d like help setting up or reviewing your campaigns, our Google Ads management team works directly with practice owners. Get in touch for a chat about your clinics.
