Google Ads · Occupational Therapy

Google Ads foroccupational therapists

Google Ads for occupational therapists, one campaign per group you serve. Paediatric, NDIS, hand therapy or home modifications, each with its own words and its own budget.

Most OT clinics that try Google Ads end up with the wrong type of enquiry. The campaign generates leads, but they're for services your clinic doesn't offer. Paediatric enquiries that go to an adult only clinic. NDIS enquiries that go to a private only practice. School services enquiries that go to a workplace injury clinic. The reason is almost always the same. OT is one of the broadest scope of practice professions in healthcare. The campaign needs to be just as narrow as the niche you work in. Otherwise the budget burns and the team gets frustrated.

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google.com

paediatric occupational therapy near me

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Sponsoredyourotclinic.com.au

Sydney OT · Paediatric Specialists

Sensory, fine motor, school readiness. Paediatric and adult OT. NDIS-friendly.

4.9 · 312 reviews

another-ot.com.au

Another OT Practice

Welcome to our practice. Comprehensive occupational therapy.

kids-therapy-clinic.com.au

Kids Therapy Clinic

When patients search, you win the click.

What OT patients search

OT patients don't search 'occupational therapy'. They search for what's wrong, who it's for, and how it's funded.

OT is too broad to be a single keyword. Patients break the search down themselves. They specify what's happening. They specify who it's for. They often specify how it's being paid for. Your campaign needs to break down the same way.

paediatric OT [suburb]

OT NDIS [city]

child OT for autism

Occupational therapy for adults

sensory OT for kids

OT home assessment [city]

Three things define an OT search. The age group of the patient. The presenting problem. The funding pathway. Your clinic doesn't serve every combination. Your campaign shouldn't either. We build separate keyword groups around the niches you work in, and skip the ones you don't, so the enquiries your team gets are enquiries they can serve.

See the thinking behind one ad

Pick your specialty and the search a patient runs

You will get one real ad, written the way I write them, and the method I used to get there. No campaign structure, no keyword list, no budgets. That part is the work I do with you.

Where agencies go wrong

OT is a dozen services. A campaign has to pick one at a time.

After years of auditing Google Ads accounts run by occupational therapists inside the Clinic Mastery community, one root cause is doing most of the damage.

The campaign casts wide. Occupational therapy. OT near me. OT for adults. OT for kids. NDIS OT. The thinking is more is more. The reality is the enquiries come in for services the clinic doesn't offer. The front desk wastes time triaging them. Your team gets frustrated chasing leads that go nowhere.

OT is one of the broadest scope of practice professions in healthcare. An OT can work with kids on sensory processing. They can work with adults after a stroke. They can do workplace ergonomic assessments. They can build home modifications for NDIS participants. They can run school readiness programs. Most clinics specialise in two or three of those. The clients you serve are very specific. Your campaign needs to be just as specific.

There's also a buyer pattern that gets missed. Paediatric searches are almost always made by a parent, not a patient. Adult NDIS searches are often made by a support coordinator or a carer, not the participant. Workplace assessment searches are usually made by an HR manager or a return to work coordinator. The ad copy that converts a parent isn't the ad copy that converts a support coordinator. The HR manager wants something different again. A generalist agency doesn't know that, so the same generic copy goes to all three audiences and converts on none of them.

And there's a market shift most clinics are still reckoning with. The NDIS pricing review and rate changes are tightening the budget per participant year on year. Plan manager driven volume that carried OT clinics for the past five years is contracting in real terms. The OT clinics that win the next decade are the ones with a working private and Medicare pipeline alongside their NDIS work, and most don't have one yet. Google Ads is the lever that builds the private pipeline, if it's pointed at the right segment.

OT is too broad. Your campaign needs to be narrow. Built around the niches you serve, in the language each buyer uses.

How we run it

How we run Google Ads for OT clinics.

Same four steps every clinic gets, sharpened for occupational therapy.

Audit your ideal client list against Google reality.

We start with the OT services your clinic delivers, broken down by age group and funding type. Paediatric NDIS. Paediatric private. Adult NDIS. Workplace assessments. School services. Then we sort which of those niches sit on Google, and which arrive through other channels: NDIS plan managers, GP referrals, school requests. The Google reachable niches get the campaign. The others get a different strategy.

Build keyword groups by age, problem, and funding pathway.

A search for 'OT for autism toddler' is a different person to 'NDIS OT for adults' or 'workplace ergonomic assessment'. Each gets its own ad group, its own ad copy, and its own landing page section that speaks specifically to that buyer. The parent sees ad copy that talks about their child's milestones and the worry behind the search. The support coordinator sees copy that names the participant's plan type, capacity, and goals. The HR manager sees copy that names return to work, ergonomic risk, and reporting. Three different conversations. The conversion rate of each campaign goes up because the buyer feels seen.

Filter out the searches that don't pay.

Generic 'occupational therapy degree' searches. Job seeker queries. Funding related questions that lead to government sites, not clinics. Free service searches. Anything that doesn't lead to a paying client. We negative keyword them out before launch and keep stripping them out every week.

We report on bookings. Not clicks.

The dashboard tells you what each new OT enquiry costs you, broken down by niche. Paediatric NDIS bookings are tracked separately from adult private bookings. That's how you see which niche to scale, which to pause, and where the real return is. Click through rate doesn't pay your rent. Bookings do.

Field notes

What we see in occupational therapy accounts

OT is the profession where the funding pathway sets the price. A privately funded client costs $80 to $120 to acquire. An NDIS participant costs $120 to $180, because the search is longer, the decision involves a plan manager or a family, and far fewer of those people search at all. Most arrive with a referral already written, so we size the NDIS campaign to the people who do search and refuse to pay for the ones who were coming anyway.

The structural mistake is one campaign for everything OT does. Paediatric, adult, driving assessments, home modifications and NDIS each need their own ad group and their own page, because a parent searching for a paediatric OT bounces off a page about wheelchair prescriptions. Capacity matters more here than anywhere: an OT campaign that fills a waitlist nobody can see is a cost, not a result.

OT isn't one audience on Google. It's four.

Occupational therapy has the broadest scope of practice in allied health, and the broadest spread of buyers. Each one searches differently, decides differently, and responds to different ad copy. The clinics that segment the campaign book at half the cost. The ones that don't, burn budget.

Parent

Buyer 01

Searches: OT for autism toddler, sensory OT, late talker OT
Ad copy tone: Plain English. Reassuring. Outcome focused for the child.
Funding pathway: Paediatric private or NDIS

Support coordinator

Buyer 02

Searches: NDIS OT [city], plan managed OT, OT for SIL participant
Ad copy tone: Specific. Knows their plan type and their goal. Led by capacity.
Funding pathway: Adult or paediatric NDIS

Adult, self funded

Buyer 03

Searches: OT for adults [suburb], private OT assessment
Ad copy tone: Direct. Fees disclosed. Clinical reassurance.
Funding pathway: Private fee for service

Carer or family member

Buyer 04

Searches: OT for elderly parent, home assessment OT, OT after stroke
Ad copy tone: Empathic. Practical. Thinks about logistics.
Funding pathway: Private, DVA, or NDIS for older participants

One ad cannot serve four buyers. Each gets its own keyword set, its own copy, and its own landing page. Same clinic, four different conversations.

The economics

Private OT and NDIS OT are two different businesses.

Most occupational therapists we talk to have one acquisition number in their head. There should be two, because the funding pathway changes what a client costs to win and how long they stay.

Cost to acquire, private

$80 to $120

Self funded paediatric and adult private clients, in a tight local catchment.

Cost to acquire, NDIS

$120 to $180

Higher, because the NDIS auction is crowded and the research cycle is longer.

Typical session fee

$194

The default we use in our calculators, before assessment and report work is counted.

The NDIS number looks worse and often isn't. An NDIS client who books an assessment, a report, and a block of therapy across a plan year is worth multiples of a one off private session, so $150 to acquire them is cheap. A private paediatric client at $90 who books six sessions is also cheap. The two just pay back on completely different timelines, and if you report them together you can't see either.

What's changed is the ground underneath the NDIS number. Successive pricing reviews have pushed the hourly ceiling down in real terms, plan managed volume that carried a lot of OT clinics for five years is contracting, and every teletherapy provider in the country is bidding on the same broad NDIS keywords with more budget than you. Paying $180 to acquire an NDIS client made sense when rates were rising. It needs checking now, every quarter.

So the advice to most occupational therapists in 2026 is to build the private pipeline while the NDIS one still works. Self funded paediatric, DVA, Medicare pathways, carers researching for an older family member. None of those are exposed to the next rate review. We report acquisition cost segment by segment, so you can watch the two lines move independently rather than averaging them into one number that tells you nothing.

The numbers nobody publishes

What a new patient enquiry costs an occupational therapy clinic.

We do not publish tracked figures for occupational therapy clinics yet, so this is the band we hold those accounts to. It is a standard we set, and every row on the benchmarks page names which of the two it is.

$100

middle of the band we hold those accounts to

$80 to $120

bottom to top of the band

$1,552

what one new patient is typically worth, at $194 across 8 visits

See where occupational therapy sits against every other discipline

What good looks like

What a healthy OT Google Ads account looks like.

A healthy OT Google Ads account in Australia costs $80 to $120 per new patient booking for private clients. NDIS clients sit higher, often $120 to $180, because the NDIS market is competitive and budgets per participant are tightening. The single number matters less than the segmentation. A campaign that books a $1,500 paediatric NDIS assessment at $150 is healthier than a campaign that books a $90 adult ergonomic check at $30. We segment the reporting so you see what each niche really delivers, then adjust the budget to follow the strongest segment.

Pricing

Management is $525 a month plus GST and 15 percent of ad spend, with a one off setup of $795 plus GST. No lock in, and the account is yours. See the full pricing breakdown.

Written by Pete Flynn, physiotherapist. One of the owners of Clinic Mastery and Physio Fit Adelaide.

About Pete

Common questions

The questions clinic owners ask us.

How much do Google Ads cost for occupational therapists?

It depends entirely on which OT you are. Private paediatric and adult clients cost $80 to $120 each to acquire. NDIS clients cost $120 to $180, because the auction is more competitive and the decision takes longer. Ad spend starts at $500 a month plus our management fee. If you run both pathways, we split the reporting so you're never looking at a blended number that hides which half is working.

Do Google Ads work for OT clinics?

They do, for the segments that search. Parents looking for paediatric OT search constantly, in plain language, usually naming the concern and the suburb. Self funded adults search. NDIS participants and carers search. What doesn't come from Google is the plan manager referral pipeline, the school request, and the GP referral, and plenty of OTs have been sold a campaign aimed squarely at those. We build for the searchable segments and tell you what share of your growth Google can own.

Should I run one campaign for paediatric and adult OT, or two?

Almost always two. Parents searching for paediatric OT are a different buyer to an adult or carer searching for adult NDIS OT. Different ad copy. Different landing pages. Different conversion conversations. Running them as one campaign makes the reporting muddy and dilutes both sides. We split them from day one. It costs nothing extra to run two segmented campaigns instead of one broad one.

Is Google Ads worth it if most of my OT pipeline comes through NDIS plan managers?

Probably yes, but with realistic expectations. NDIS plan manager driven referrals are a relationship strategy, not an ad strategy. The Google Ads role is filling the gaps with self funded private clients, NDIS participants searching directly, and carers researching for someone in their household. With NDIS rates tightening, the private pipeline is becoming more important for most OT clinics, not less. We'll tell you up front what share of your growth Google can realistically own. We'd rather give you the truth than sell you a campaign that's pointing at the wrong audience.

How are the NDIS pricing changes affecting OT advertising?

Materially. The hourly rate ceiling for OT services under NDIS has been under pressure for several review cycles, and clinics that built their model around plan managed NDIS volume are feeling the squeeze. The Google Ads opportunity is the private and Medicare pipeline alongside NDIS. Self funded paediatric private. Older Australians using DVA. Carers researching for an older family member. These segments aren't NDIS dependent and aren't subject to the rate review. The clinics that diversify into them now will have a buffer when the next pricing change lands.

Should we worry about teletherapy OT competing for the same Google Ads searches?

In some segments, yes. Teletherapy OT services are bidding on broad NDIS keywords, and they often have the budget advantage. The defence is local. Patients searching '[suburb] OT' or 'OT home visit [city]' are looking for someone they can see in person, in their own catchment. We point your campaign at the local intent and skip the broad national keywords where teletherapy has the edge. You can't outspend a national service on the bare keyword 'NDIS OT'. You can dominate '[suburb] paediatric OT'.

Do you lock me in?

No. We have a 30 day notice period and that's it. We don't believe in 12 month contracts. Clinics work with us because they see value, they get results, and they enjoy working with healthcare professionals who understand them. Not because they're trapped. If we're not earning our keep, we don't deserve to keep your business.

How fast will I see results?

Typically, most clinics start seeing results inside the first four to six weeks. We're not promising overnight miracles. Anyone who does is lying. We are promising that your campaign will be live, optimised, and bringing in genuine new patient bookings within that window.

Ready when you are

Work out which OT searchers Google can send you.

Tell us about your OT clinic. Which age groups, which problems, which funding pathways. We'll come back with a one page plan: which niches we'd target, which we'd skip, and what 90 days of Google Ads should realistically deliver for a clinic your size. No pitch deck. No one hour discovery calls that add no value whatsoever.

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We work with healthcare clinics across Australia.

Google Ads for other specialties

Other services for Occupational Therapy clinics

This page is the occupational therapy playbook. The general approach is on the Google Ads for healthcare clinics page.

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