Key facts
- Google Ads management costs 10% of whatever you spend on ads, with a $600 CAD or $450 USD floor each month, and every dollar spent with Google passes through with no markup.
- SEO pricing works out to $50 CAD, or $38 USD, a page, and every ongoing program has to start at a minimum of 10 pages a month.
- A physical therapy clinic website, built for online scheduling and condition pages, is priced once, typically $1,500 up to $20,000 or more.
- Most US states allow direct access, meaning a patient can start physical therapy without seeing a physician first, and Canadian patients generally don't need a referral either, though some insurers require one before they'll reimburse a claim.
- Many clinics still lean on physician referrals as their main source of new evaluations, so a single referring doctor retiring or moving practices can shrink incoming volume fast.
What to Budget by Clinic Size
A clinic leaning heavily on physician referrals can start near the $600 Google Ads floor, aimed at direct-access searches like "physical therapy near me" so the eval calendar isn't tied to one referral source. SEO can wait until there's proof the ads are converting.
A clinic with a few therapists trying to reduce referral dependence and fill more evaluations on its own tends to land in the $2,000 to $4,000 range, pairing ad spend above the floor with SEO past ten pages built around the specific conditions treated: back pain, post-op rehab, sports injuries.
A larger practice, or one building out a cash-pay or performance track, usually needs a bigger media budget rather than a bigger management fee, since competing for direct-access searches across a wider area takes real spend to hold a strong position.
What Each Part of the Budget Buys a Clinic
Google Ads wins the moment someone is in pain and searching right now. A campaign built around a specific condition, sciatica or a post-surgical knee, reaches that patient before they've decided who to call, and every booked eval traces back to the search that started it.
SEO at $50 a page, from a ten-page floor, is where direct access pays off longest. Condition pages answer the questions a self-referred patient has before booking, and once they rank, they keep producing evals without a per-click cost attached.
A website's price depends mostly on whether online scheduling needs to connect to the clinic's existing EMR or booking software, and whether it needs a real library of condition pages, versus a simpler site meant to support phone-based intake.
What to Cut First When Cash Is Tight
New SEO pages beyond the ten-page floor are the safest thing to pause first, since existing condition pages keep working without fresh ones being added that month.
Cutting ad spend is riskier, since a patient in pain today rarely waits until next month to search again, and a gap in visibility just hands that eval to whichever clinic stayed visible. If spend must shrink, keep the highest-intent condition campaigns running and pause the ones targeting general wellness or maintenance searches first.
Reminder and re-engagement messages to patients already mid-plan are usually worth protecting even on a tight budget, since a patient who drops off before finishing their plan of care is far more expensive to replace than to simply keep on schedule.
The One Number to Watch
Track cost per booked evaluation first, since that's the number every ad and SEO dollar is trying to move, and it tells you plainly whether a campaign is worth its spend.
Then watch how many booked evals actually finish their plan of care instead of dropping off after a session or two. A clinic can spend well on new evaluations and still stall if patients quietly stop showing up partway through treatment, since the real financial and clinical value sits in a completed plan, not a single visit.
Related questions
Both have a place, but leaning only on referrals leaves a clinic exposed if one doctor's habits change. Building a direct-access channel through ads and SEO gives the clinic a second, self-controlled source of evaluations that doesn't depend on any single referring practice staying loyal.
Campaign setup for the conditions you treat most, call and form tracking so you can see which search produced each booked evaluation, ongoing bid management, and a monthly report. The media spend itself is billed directly by Google, with nothing added by the agency.
If a clinic offers it, yes, since the patient searching for performance training or a cash-pay option is often looking for something specific insurance-based care doesn't emphasize. A dedicated page or campaign for that service tends to convert better than folding it into general PT messaging.
Once evaluation slots have real open capacity and existing campaigns are already converting at a rate worth repeating. Raising spend while the schedule is already full, or while plan-of-care drop-off is high, usually just raises cost per eval without adding finished treatment plans.
Not necessarily. If the current site supports intake well enough, adding SEO pages for the conditions treated may add more value than a rebuild. A new site earns its cost once online scheduling tied to the clinic's software, or a much larger library of condition pages, becomes the priority.
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