Google Ads For Orthodontists: Get More Calls And Consultations

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated August 17, 2026

Google Ads for orthodontists is more straightforward than most medical practices, because you have one main service. People want straight teeth. The variations are braces, clear braces, kids braces, adult braces, and Invisalign, and every one of those is easy to target. What separates the practices that get patients from the ones that burn budget is not the campaign settings. It is whether you track booked consultations instead of clicks, and whether your landing pages actually answer what a parent or an adult wants to know before they call. This guide walks through the account structure I use, the page audit I run first, and when to add Performance Max and Demand Gen.

1Track booked consultations, not clicks

The most important thing in any orthodontics account is tracking the right thing. Not clicks. Not cost per click. Those are worth watching, but they are not what you optimize toward.

What you want to know is which clicks turned into people who walked in the door and became paying patients. Here is what to set up:

• Phone calls of 60 seconds or longer. A three-second call is somebody selling you medical devices or marketing services. Set a call duration threshold so those do not count as conversions and train your bidding on nothing.
• Consultation request form submissions. One per submission, counted as a primary conversion.
• Booked consultations. This is the one that matters most. When your practice management system records a completed consultation, import it back into Google Ads as an offline conversion.
• Conversion values. If you can tie a booked consultation back to actual revenue, set values on your conversions. That is what lets you tell a $200 lead from a $2,000 patient.

What you do not want is a monthly report that says "we think we got four text messages and maybe a couple of phone calls." Track it as accurately as you can, because every optimization decision after this depends on that data being real.

On HIPAA. Everything has to be compliant, and that does constrain you. You can still use enhanced conversions and most of the tracking features Google provides, but there are limits on what data you send. Use hashed identifiers, scrub URLs of anything identifying, and get a Business Associate Agreement in place with any vendor touching patient data.

Question to Answer:

Can you tell me how many booked consultations Google Ads produced last month, not just how many calls?

2Watch the full tutorial

In this video I walk through live searches in the Raleigh market, audit real orthodontist websites and ad copy, and lay out the campaign roadmap from search to Performance Max to Demand Gen.

Google Ads For Orthodontists: How To Get More Calls And Booked Consultations

Question to Answer:

How many reviews does your Google Business Profile have compared to the two or three practices that dominate your market?

3Start with one Search campaign, then split it out

A lot of guides tell you to launch braces, Invisalign, and "orthodontist near me" as three separate campaigns on day one. I would not do that.

Start with one Search campaign and put everything in it. Then split things out over time as the data comes in. The reason is simple: splitting your budget across three campaigns from the start means each one gets a third of the data, and none of them accumulate enough conversions to optimize on. You end up with three underperforming campaigns instead of one campaign you actually understand.

Once you have volume and you can see which themes convert, then separate them. Braces and Invisalign genuinely do need different budgets and different messaging, because they are different buyers. A parent searching for kids braces and an adult weighing Invisalign are not the same person and should not see the same ad. But earn that split with data.

If your practice is specifically focused on one segment, target that from the start instead. If you want kids braces, run kids braces near me, braces for children, teenage braces, and skip the adult terms entirely. That is a focus decision, not a campaign structure decision.

A note on who should be running ads at all. When I searched orthodontist Raleigh North Carolina, one of the practices paying for the top spot had 37 reviews on their Business Profile. In every market there are two or three established practices that dominate organically with hundreds of reviews and years of history. If you are the newer practice, ads are exactly how you get onto an even playing field while you build reviews. That is the right use of the channel.

Question to Answer:

Do you have enough conversion volume to justify splitting campaigns, or are you splitting a budget that is already small?

4The keywords that matter for orthodontics

The advantage of orthodontics is that the keyword space is narrow and the intent is clear. Someone searching "Invisalign near me" is not casually browsing.

Be honest that the right keywords change constantly in Google Ads. What converts in your market this quarter may not next quarter. Some terms that look great, like "orthodontist free consultation," attract people shopping on price rather than fit. Watch the data rather than assuming.

The critical part is that whatever you target, you need a page for it. If you are bidding on Invisalign, you need an Invisalign page. If you are bidding on kids braces, you need a page that speaks to parents. This is the single most common gap I see, and it is the subject of section 6.

Question to Answer:

Does every treatment you are bidding on have a page that speaks to the person actually searching for it?

5Negative keywords and match type discipline

Google's match types will consistently bring in searches that are not relevant. That comes with the territory. Your job is to build the negative list as you go, and it becomes far more important the moment you expand into broader match types.

Start with these at the account level so they protect everything:

• Employment terms. Jobs, salary, careers, hiring, residency, school, assistant, technician. Someone searching "orthodontist jobs" is never a patient.
• DIY and low-intent modifiers. DIY, at home, kit, free, cheap. Leave "free" off the list only if you actively promote a free consultation.
• General dentistry. Teeth cleaning, cavity, dentures, root canal, whitening, implants. These are a different practice and a different budget.
• Education and research. How to, what is, definition, before and after photos, Reddit, cost calculator, if those are not converting for you.

Then check the Search Terms report weekly and keep adding. This is not a one-time setup task. It is a recurring 15 minutes that directly protects your budget, and it is the thing most practices stop doing after month one.

Question to Answer:

When did you last open your Search Terms report and add negatives?

6What your landing pages are probably missing

I pulled up several real orthodontist websites in the Raleigh market to see what they were sending paid traffic to. The gaps were consistent, and they are the same gaps I see everywhere.

One practice had no main braces page at all. I searched for it, hit a 404, and went looking. They had a retainers page and an "all about braces" page, but no actual service page saying yes, we provide braces, here is what it costs, here is what it looks like. If you are bidding on braces keywords, that page has to exist.

Here is what a parent or an adult actually wants to know before they pick up the phone, and what most of these pages leave out:

• How long does the process take. Give a real range. This is the first question everybody has.
• Do you offer financing, and does insurance cover it. Cost is the main hesitation for braces. Address it on the page rather than making them call to find out.
• Before and after photos. For Invisalign especially, this is your number one selling point. Somebody searching Invisalign is bothered by something specific about their teeth. Show them the result.
• What the options look like. Metal, clear, Invisalign. What they look like on teeth when they go on and after they come off. People want to know what to expect.
• Your credentials and accreditations. Board certification, years in practice, the doctors themselves.
• A call to action higher on the page. Most of the sites I looked at had a call button in the header and an appointment form at the bottom. Put a "book your initial consultation" prompt in the middle of the page too, because that is where somebody finishes reading and decides.

There is a second benefit here beyond conversion rate. Google rewards pages that are genuinely useful and cover what searchers are looking for. Building these out helps your Quality Score on the paid side and your rankings on the organic side at the same time.

Remember what you are competing against. There are three, five, maybe ten orthodontists in your area a patient can choose from. Why you? You cannot answer that with a bare-minimum page that says "we do braces" and lists an address.

Question to Answer:

Open your main treatment page. Does it answer timeline, cost, financing, insurance, and show before and afters?

7How to structure treatment and location pages

If you have more than one office, this matters, and most practices get it wrong.

The mistake is having three offices and one Invisalign page that tries to rank for all three cities at once. You end up with a single page competing for three local keywords and doing none of them particularly well.

What I would build instead:

1. A main treatment page for each service. An Invisalign page, a braces page, a kids and teens braces page. These are your evergreen service pages that explain the treatment itself.
2. A location page for each office. One per city or market you serve, with that office's address, doctors, hours, and reviews.
3. Treatment plus location pages underneath. Invisalign in [City] for each of your markets, with genuinely local content on each.

A common worry here is duplicate content. Google is not going to penalize you for having similar content on your Raleigh page and your other location page when you have a real physical presence in both. Worst case, Google chooses not to index some of them and you fall back to your main treatment page, which you have anyway. The upside is much bigger than the downside, so I would build them out.

This is also where paid and organic work together. When I searched braces in one of these markets, a practice I was reviewing did not appear until the third page, and it was their homepage ranking rather than a dedicated braces page. A specific page for the term would help their local SEO and give their ads a better landing page. Same work, two channels.

Add informational pages once the service pages are solid. Content like "how much does Invisalign cost in [state]" or "how long does Invisalign take" captures people earlier in the process, and it also helps your service pages rank higher. When you write the cost page, give a real range, and do not lead with the lowest possible number. That is the number everybody will ask for when they call.

Question to Answer:

If you have multiple offices, does each one have its own location page, or is one page trying to rank for every city?

8Ad copy, offers, and keeping the message consistent

Lead with your offer and keep it identical everywhere. The three that work for orthodontics are free consultation, financing available, and no referral needed.

The problem I ran into reviewing live ads was consistency. One practice's ad promoted free consultations, and the contact page said "send us a message" and "request an appointment." Neither is wrong, but they do not match. Somebody clicks expecting one thing and lands on another, and that friction costs you the conversion. Pick your offer and use the same words in the ad, the headline, and the button.

"Request an appointment" is perfectly fine for a medical practice. You do not have to lead with "free" on everything. Nobody approaches an orthodontist looking for something free. If a free consultation is genuinely part of your model, use it. If it is not, a direct "request an appointment" or "book a consultation" works just as well and attracts fewer price shoppers.

For your responsive search ads, fill every headline and description field and make them match the campaign theme. Treatment plus city in the headlines. Financing and timing in the descriptions. Then add your assets:

Stay inside Google's healthcare policies. Build ad copy around what your practice offers, not around symptoms or conditions. "Invisalign Treatment in [City]" is compliant and it converts just as well as anything you would write about the condition itself.

Question to Answer:

Does your ad promise the same thing your landing page headline and button say, word for word?

9Adding Performance Max and Demand Gen later

Search comes first and it stays the foundation. But once your search campaign has data coming in, there are two channels worth layering on.

Performance Max. This works well alongside your Google Business Profile once you have search conversion data to feed it. It runs on Search plus YouTube and Google's other channels, so it reaches a parent scrolling YouTube with the right message at the right time rather than only at the moment of search.

The caveat matters though. Performance Max can waste budget, especially on small daily budgets. If your budget is tight, you are usually better off putting everything into Search. Add PMax when you have room to fund both properly.

Demand Gen, and specifically for Invisalign. This is the distinction most people miss. Braces demand already exists. A parent whose child needs braces, or who just got a referral from their dentist, is not someone you need to convince the treatment is worthwhile. They are searching.

Invisalign is different. Plenty of adults are on the fence. Do I really want to do this? Will it change how I talk? Will it look strange? How long does it take? Is it painful? Is it worth the money? Those hesitations are exactly what video and image content can address, and that is what Demand Gen is for.

How I actually run it:

• Small budgets. $5 to $10 per day. Roughly $150 a month keeps you present across YouTube and Google's channels.
• Desktop only. I would recommend this for most local practices running Demand Gen.
• Age and interest targeting. For kids braces messaging, 35 and up with parenting-related interests. Youth sports interests like little league baseball or kids soccer work well for reaching parents.
• Before and after content. Show a real patient's teeth before treatment and 6 to 12 months later. That is the whole pitch for Invisalign.
• Expect messy attribution. This will not report cleanly as "this campaign produced 500 calls." It will not. The impressions and clicks are cheap, and the point is being top of mind when they do search.

Performance Max and Meta Ads play a similar role. They are how you reach your local market using the data behind the pixels that are on nearly every website, and they keep your pipeline full rather than driving direct response. Run them alongside Search, not instead of it.

Question to Answer:

Is your Search campaign consistently producing conversions, which is the signal that you are ready to add another channel?

10Optimizing for a long sales cycle

Orthodontics is not an emergency dentist or an urgent care. Nobody calls at 9 a.m. and has braces on by 11.

The real path looks like this. Somebody calls, asks for the soonest appointment, and you are booked out two weeks. They come in two weeks later for the consultation. Then some of them say yes on the spot and some say "let me think about it." Then a few weeks pass. That lag is normal and you have to account for it in how you read your data.

What that means practically:

• Do not judge a campaign at two weeks. The consultations from your first week of spend have not happened yet, let alone converted to treatment.
• Optimize for the information calls too. Some people call just to ask questions. Those still count, because your goal is talking to more potential patients, and a share of them come back.
• Use offline conversion import. This is what closes the loop. Without it, Google is optimizing toward phone calls with no idea which ones became patients.
• Answer after hours. People research this in the evening. If nobody answers and there is no way to request an appointment on the site at 9 p.m., you lose leads you already paid for.

On Smart Bidding. Google's own benchmark for evaluating Target CPA performance is at least 30 conversions over the last 30 days. You can technically start Target CPA with no conversion history, but you will not be able to judge whether it is working until you hit that volume. Until then, Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks with a bid cap keeps you in control. And whatever you do, do not change your bidding target every few days. Too many changes too fast makes the data unreadable.

Then review by service, location, device, and time of day. If Invisalign keywords produce a lower cost per booked patient than general orthodontist terms, move budget there. If a ZIP code sends clicks and no appointments, cut it.

Question to Answer:

Are you measuring cost per booked consultation, or still reporting on cost per lead?