"Physical therapy near me" and "sports injury clinic" clicks run cheap compared to legal or dental, but cheap clicks lull clinics into vanity metrics. What matters is the funnel: click to form or call, form to booked evaluation, booked eval to completed episode. A clinic paying $4 a click but converting only 6% of clicks into booked evals is paying ~$67 per booked patient before no-shows. A clinic paying $6 a click but converting 14% (better landing page, click-to-call above the fold, real-time scheduling) is paying ~$43. Same market, same keywords, wildly different economics — and cost per click told you nothing. Judge every campaign on cost per booked evaluation, then on cost per completed episode once the plan-of-care data comes back.

Not all PT search intent is equal. The keywords that book evaluations cluster in three buckets: 1. Post-op and referral-adjacent: "ACL rehab," "rotator cuff physical therapy," "post surgery physical therapy near me." These patients have a diagnosis, a surgeon, and urgency — the highest-value, highest-converting terms you can buy. 2. Acute sports and pain: "sports injury clinic," "runner's knee physical therapy," "lower back pain physical therapy." High volume, strong intent, and direct access means they can start without a physician referral. 3. Specialized cash-pay lines: "dry needling near me," "pelvic floor physical therapy," "vestibular therapy." Lower volume but often out-of-network and premium-priced, so the cost per booked patient can be higher and still profit. What quietly wastes budget: broad match on "physical therapy" (catches job seekers, PT school searches, and equipment shoppers) and "free" or "exercises" modifiers that attract people who will never book. Tight match types and a hard negative-keyword list are where most PT clinics recover 20–30% of spend.

Four leaks, almost universally: - Sending ad clicks to the homepage instead of a condition-specific landing page. A "rotator cuff rehab" ad should land on a rotator cuff page with the surgeon-referral workflow and this-week availability, not a generic "Welcome to our clinic" hero. - No click-to-call on mobile. Most high-intent PT searches happen on a phone, often in pain; if the patient has to fill a five-field form, you lose them to Athletico or the aggregator directory ranking above you. - Running ads during hours no one answers. If calls go to voicemail after 5pm or over lunch, you paid for a click and handed the patient to a competitor. Ad scheduling should match front-desk coverage. - No conversion tracking tied to actual booked evals. Without it you're optimizing toward form-fills and butt-dial calls, not patients on the schedule — so Google's algorithm learns the wrong goal.

Drop your clinic's URL into the Surge Report™ generator and within about a minute you'll see — specific to your physical therapy practice — your estimated cost per booked evaluation, which keyword themes your landing pages are equipped to convert (and which ones dump traffic onto a dead-end homepage), the mobile click-to-call and scheduling gaps costing you calls, and the projected revenue lift from fixing them, calibrated to PT episode value rather than a single visit. No sales pitch, no cost. Review it, then book a strategy call if the numbers make the case for you.