How an orthopedic or sports medicine practice should choose an agency: case-level tracking, acute versus elective patients, sports seasons, and six questions to ask.
Why a generalist treats an orthopedic practice like a dentist's office
A general agency runs the same play for every clinic: a site, some “near me” ads, a review request. Orthopedics breaks that play in three places. First, the cases are not equal. A knee, hip, or shoulder replacement, or a sports surgery like an ACL reconstruction, rotator cuff repair, or meniscus repair, is among the highest-value work in outpatient medicine. A routine follow-up is not. Marketing that treats every booked visit as the same win will fill your schedule with the wrong visits.
Second, there are two very different patients. The acute patient has a fracture or a sudden injury and decides in hours; they need to find you today, often searching “orthopedic urgent care near me.” The elective patient has chronic joint pain and researches for months, reading about knee replacement, watching surgeon bios, comparing reviews, before booking a consult. One campaign cannot speak to both.
Third, the rules. Ads fall under Google's Healthcare and medicines policy. Patient forms and tracking touch HIPAA in the US and PIPEDA plus provincial health privacy laws like Ontario's PHIPA in Canada. And the path to a surgeon differs by country: in much of Canada, a family doctor's referral is still the usual route to an orthopedic surgeon under the provincial plan, so many searches are patients working out who to ask to be referred to, or looking for sports medicine and private clinics that see them directly. In the US, self-referral is the norm and is rising. The copy has to know which province or state it is speaking to.
The first question: can they separate cases from visits?
Ask any candidate: “How would you track cost per joint replacement case separately from cost per routine visit?” This is the make-or-break competence. The right answer describes procedure-specific landing pages, campaign structures split by procedure, call tracking with call scoring so a fracture call and a knee replacement consult are not counted the same, and reporting that shows which high-value cases came from which channel.
The wrong answer is “we track all your leads.” That number will be dominated by routine visits and will make the expensive channel look cheap and the valuable one look expensive. Then ask how they would build the elective patient's research path: procedure pages that explain what a knee replacement recovery looks like, surgeon bios with credentials and fellowship training, and clear online scheduling so the patient who has finally decided can book without a phone call. Multi-surgeon groups should also ask how the agency handles surgeon-level pages, since patients search by name after a referral.
One more test: ask whether they know the difference between your practice and a physical therapy clinic or a chiropractor. You diagnose, image, inject, and operate. PT is post-referral rehab; chiropractic is non-surgical spine care. A physical therapy clinic is usually your referral partner, not your competitor, and an agency that bids on “physical therapy near me” for you is wasting money.
The channels that produce cases, in order
Google Ads wins the acute patient and the decided elective patient. The phrases are clear: “orthopedic surgeon near me,” “knee doctor near me,” “knee replacement surgeon near me,” “rotator cuff surgeon near me,” “ACL surgery [your city],” “sports injury clinic near me.” Send each to a page for that procedure, with same-week appointment language for injuries and consult booking for elective work.
Local SEO and the Google Business Profile carry the steady volume. Most patients pick from the map pack, and a multi-provider group needs a profile for each location and often for each surgeon. Procedure pages and neighborhood pages build the ranking; reviews from recovered patients build the click. AI assistants now answer “who is the best orthopedic surgeon for knee replacement near me?” and “find an orthopedic urgent care open now,” and the same procedure pages and reviews are what get a practice cited by Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
Email and text carry the patient from consult to surgery: pre-op checklists, post-op check-ins, physical therapy timelines, and recall for the other knee. Referrals from primary care, emergency rooms, physical therapists, athletic trainers, and chiropractors remain a large source, and the right plan adds a direct-search channel beside them rather than in place of them. Sports medicine adds a channel most practices ignore: the athletic trainers, coaches, and club administrators who decide where an injured player is sent. A page for teams and a clear path to a same-day injury visit turn that relationship into a steady source that search cannot replace.
Sports seasons, deductibles, and what a case is worth
Sports medicine follows the local sports calendar. Fall contact sports bring injuries in the fall; spring track and baseball bring a different set in spring; the off-season is when athletes and parents want the “get it fixed now” surgery so the player is back for the next season. In the US, elective joint work also bunches up late in the year, once patients have met their deductible and want the surgery done before it resets. In Canada, wait times and referral flow shape the calendar more than insurance does. Ask an agency how they would move budget around those windows. Insurance networks matter as much as seasons in the US: a patient will search for a surgeon who takes their plan, so the site needs an accepted-insurance page that is kept current. In Canada, the equivalent is being clear about what the provincial plan covers and what is private-pay.
Value should be described, not guessed. One joint replacement or one sports surgery can justify a whole month of marketing spend. A routine visit cannot. So the question for any agency is “what does a booked consult cost for each procedure, and how many of those consults became surgeries?” An agency that can only tell you cost per lead is measuring the front door, not the operating room.
Insist on tracking before scaling: call tracking with scoring, form tracking, and a monthly reconciliation with your practice management system so consults are matched to procedures.
What to refuse, and what must stay in the practice's name
Own the website, the domain, the Google Ads account, every Google Business Profile, and every form submission. Some vendors hold profiles under their login or host the site on a platform you cannot leave. In a practice handling health information, you also need to know exactly where patient form data lands and who can see it, in whichever province or state you operate.
Warning signs: ranking or case-count guarantees; ad copy that promises outcomes from surgery; one campaign that mixes fracture care with joint replacement; a “healthcare package” with the same pages a dental office gets; reports that never show which procedures your budget won. Another one: no plan for your referral network, or a plan to replace it. Ask, too, who writes the medical copy; procedure pages should be reviewed by a surgeon, because an agency that guesses at recovery timelines is a liability.
Ask for month-to-month terms, your own dashboard logins, and a clear answer to what leaves with you if you end the contract.
Six questions for an orthopedic marketing agency
One: “How do you separate joint replacement and sports surgery cases from routine visits in tracking?” Two: “How would you build the research path for an elective patient who is months from deciding?” Three: “What is the plan for acute injuries, including same-week and urgent care searches?” Four: “How do you handle health privacy on forms and tracking in our province or state?” Five: “Who owns the site, ad accounts, Business Profiles, and patient data?” Six: “How do you work beside our referral partners instead of against them?”
The agency that talks about deductible season, fellowship bios, and procedure-level cost has worked with a surgeon before.
SearchPod works with orthopedic and sports medicine practices on exactly this: one system covering site, ads, search, AI visibility, email, and reviews, tracked at the procedure level. The prices are public: Google Ads management at 10% of budget, floor of $600 per month, no markup on media, SEO at $50 for every page with ten pages the monthly floor, website packages that run $1,500 to $20,000+ as a one-time cost, no setup fee, month-to-month terms, and a 30-day guarantee under which you don't pay if you're not satisfied. Request a free proposal through /get-proposal; it arrives within one business day.
