Dental Google Ads negative keywords: NHS, job-seeker and out-of-area searches

How to read your search terms

Your keywords are what you told Google to target. Your search terms are what people actually typed before your ad appeared. The gap between the two is where the money goes.

The search terms report shows the searches, used by a significant number of people, that led to your ad being shown.¹ Open it for one campaign at a time. Set the date range to the last 30 days, add the Cost and Conversions columns, and sort by cost, highest first. Then read down the list and ask one question of each row: could this person become a private patient at this practice for this treatment?

Three things to know before you start:

• You won't see every search. Searches without enough query activity are left out to protect privacy. Google groups them into themes in search terms insights instead.¹
• Broad match widens the gap. Broad match can show your ad on searches related to your keyword, including ones without its direct meaning.² An account on broad match with no negatives will show you the most waste.
• Performance Max has its own report. If you run Performance Max, its search terms report is separate, and you can add negatives from it at account or campaign level.³

Don't judge a term on one click. Judge it on what it is. "Dental nurse jobs" is waste on the first click and on the hundredth.

The categories of waste

These are the categories I check in every UK private practice account. NHS intent comes first because it's specific to the UK, and generic Google Ads guides written for other markets don't mention it.

A few judgement calls sit inside that table.

NHS in a mixed practice. If you do offer NHS care, NHS searches still don't belong on a private implant campaign. Negate them there. Whether you advertise NHS care at all is a separate decision.

Cost is not the same as cheap. "Dental implants cost" is one of the most commercial searches a patient makes. "Cheapest dental implants" usually isn't. Negate the words "cheap" and "cheapest", never "cost" or "price", on implant and full-arch campaigns.

Emergency is its own decision. On treatment campaigns I negate emergency terms. Whether to run a separate emergency campaign, and how to judge it, is covered under emergency dentist campaigns.

Out of area has a setting, too. Negatives catch named towns. The location option catches the rest. Google's default, "presence or interest", includes people who have only shown interest in your area; "presence" limits ads to people likely to be in or regularly in it.⁴ Change the setting and add the negatives.

Building dental Google Ads negative keyword lists

Negative keywords have their own match types, and they behave differently from normal keywords.²

Negative keywords don't match close variants or other expansions,⁵ which is the opposite of how normal keywords behave. "Job" won't block "jobs". "Nurse" won't block "nurses". Add plurals and common misspellings yourself.

I organise negatives into shared lists, one per category, and attach them to every treatment campaign:

1. NHS intent: nhs, band 1, band one, free, exemption, find a dentist.
2. Jobs and training: job, jobs, vacancy, vacancies, salary, career, course, courses, training, apprenticeship, nurse, nurses, receptionist.
3. Out of area: named towns outside the catchment, plus abroad, turkey, hungary, overseas.
4. DIY and products: kit, glue, at home, snap on, clip on, amazon.
5. Information: wikipedia, pictures, images, meaning, definition.

Then there are campaign-level negatives, which only make sense in one place. Emergency terms go on every treatment campaign but obviously not an emergency one. "Denture" goes on the implant campaign only if dentures have their own campaign.

Build the first version before launch. Search your main keywords on Google yourself and note what comes up. If the results are full of NHS pages or job boards, the words that brought them up go onto a list before a penny is spent. The wider method, including how negatives fit with match types and bidding, is in the Google Ads guide for dental practices.

Keeping it clean

Negatives are never finished. New searches appear every week, and anything on broad match will find them first.

That fourth row matters. Over-negating is a real failure. If a negative is blocking a search that books consultations, it costs you patients quietly, because blocked searches never appear anywhere. When impressions on a campaign drop without an obvious reason, the negative lists are one of the first places I look.

Keep a simple change log: the date, the negative, the list and why. When someone asks in six months why "denture" is blocked on the implant campaign, the answer is written down.

If your search terms report is full of the categories above and you'd like someone to own the account, see dental Google Ads for how I run them, or email [email protected] with the treatment you want more of.