Orthopedic Practice Marketing
The Orthopedic Marketing Agency
Built Around Your Case Mix.
Sports medicine, spine, joint replacement, hand, foot and ankle. Each one is searched differently, paid differently, and won on a different page of Google. We build the search program that brings in the cases your surgeons actually want.
27,100
Monthly searches for “orthopedic doctor near me”
5,400
Monthly searches for “spine surgeon near me”
4,400
Monthly searches for “hand surgeon near me”
Source: Semrush US database, monthly searches and keyword difficulty, October 2026
Where Orthopedic Marketing Breaks
Most Orthopedic Groups Are Marketed Like One Big General Practice.
An orthopedic group is really five or six businesses under one roof, each with its own patients, payers and competitors. Marketing that treats it as one brand with one message spends money in the wrong places.
Your website says “comprehensive orthopedic care.” Patients search for a knee surgeon.
Nobody types “comprehensive care” into Google. They type the body part, the injury or the procedure, often with a city. When the site leads with the group instead of the surgeon and the procedure, both Google and AI tools file you as a generalist.
You are chasing the health system for “acl tear.”
Condition searches are dominated by hospitals and reference sites. In our pull of 27 orthopedic results pages, private practices held 2 of 30 results on the condition searches we checked. Money spent there rarely books a visit.
Twelve surgeons, three Google Business Profiles.
Google allows a profile for each public-facing practitioner. Groups that only list their offices spread every review across a few listings, and the spine surgeon and the hand surgeon never show up for their own specialty in the map pack.
Every new patient is reported as one number.
A total joint case, a workers’ comp shoulder and an urgent care sprain are worth very different amounts. If reporting cannot split leads by service line and payer, nobody can tell which campaigns are paying for themselves.
Referrals and search are run as separate worlds.
Many patients arrive with a referral from a primary care doctor or physical therapist, and then they search the surgeon’s name before they call. A thin surgeon page loses that patient at the last step, even when the referral was yours.
Your ads and your privacy rules are in conflict.
Google treats health as a sensitive category for personalized ads, so remarketing to your own site visitors is off the table for treatment ads. Campaigns built on a generic remarketing playbook either break policy or quietly stop serving.
What We Do
Orthopedic Marketing, Service Line by Service Line
Six disciplines, each planned around the procedures and payers your practice wants more of.
How Orthopedic Search Works
What Makes Orthopedic Marketing Different
The rules that shape a plastic surgery or dental campaign only half apply here. These are the orthopedic specifics we plan around.
Sub-Specialty
Spine Is Wide Open. Sports Medicine Is Not.
In the 27 orthopedic results pages we pulled in October 2026, private practices held 80% of local spine results, while a health system held the #1 spot for sports medicine in all six metros we checked. A spine group can aim for the top three. A sports medicine group should compete with body part and procedure pages instead of the head term.
Surgeons
Patients Search for a Person
A single surgeon’s own website appeared in 20 of the 22 local orthopedic searches in our pull. Board certification, fellowship training and subspecialty certificates in sports medicine or hand surgery are exactly the trust signals a surgeon page should lead with.
Payers
Insurance Decides Which Searches Pay
Joint replacement patients are often on Medicare, sports injuries more often involve younger patients on commercial plans, and many groups also see workers’ compensation and personal injury patients. Each payer brings different margins and paperwork, so we weight keywords and budget by the payer mix you want, not by raw volume.
Site of Care
Outpatient Joints Changed the Pitch
Medicare added total knee replacement to the ambulatory surgery center list in 2020 and total hip replacement in 2021. Practices with a surgery center can now market same-day joint replacement at their own center, a different pitch than a hospital stay, and one that needs its own pages and campaigns.
Cost
Cost Searches Have No Practice on Top
Financing and price lookup sites led the cost searches we pulled, and no practice page reached the top three. Under the No Surprises Act, uninsured and self-pay patients can already get a written good faith estimate when they schedule ahead or ask, so a clear cost page mostly publishes what your billing team already prepares.
YMYL
Google Holds Surgical Pages to a Higher Bar
Health pages fall under what Google calls Your Money or Your Life, where its quality raters weigh experience, expertise, authority and trust, with trust counting most. On an orthopedic site that means a named surgeon behind every clinical claim and outcomes language your compliance team would sign.
Patient Search Demand
The Searches Orthopedic Patients Run
National monthly searches and keyword difficulty for the queries an orthopedic group can build pages around. Lower difficulty means a practice page can realistically break in.
General Orthopedics
- orthopedic doctor near me27,100/mo · KD 60
- orthopedic surgeon near me18,100/mo · KD 70
- best orthopedic surgeon near me1,000/mo · KD 50
Sports Medicine & Urgent Care
- sports medicine doctor near me5,400/mo · KD 48
- orthopedic urgent care near me5,400/mo · KD 38
- shoulder surgeon near me1,000/mo · KD 56
Spine, Hand & Foot
- spine surgeon near me5,400/mo · KD 44
- hand surgeon near me4,400/mo · KD 10
- foot and ankle surgeon near me1,900/mo · KD 12
Joint Replacement
- knee replacement cost1,300/mo · KD 24
- hip replacement surgeon near me390/mo · KD 55
- knee replacement surgeon near me140/mo · KD 27
Source: Semrush US database, monthly searches and keyword difficulty, October 2026
How We Work
How an Orthopedic Engagement Runs
- 01
Map your case mix to search
We start with the procedures, payers and locations you want more of, then check who holds page one and the map pack for each of them in your market. Some searches are worth a year of work. Some belong to the health system and are not worth chasing.
- 02
Fix listings and surgeon pages first
A Business Profile for each office and each public-facing surgeon, consistent name, address and phone everywhere, and surgeon pages with training, focus, affiliations and reviews. This is the fastest work to show up in maps and in AI answers.
- 03
Build the procedure and cost pages
One page per procedure your surgeons want to grow, reviewed by the surgeon who performs it, with recovery, insurance and self-pay answers on the page. Paid search covers those procedures while the pages earn their rankings.
- 04
Report on appointments by service line
Calls and forms tracked by body part, location and payer, without sending patient health details to ad platforms. You see which service lines are growing and what each one costs to acquire.
Working with Bryan Passanisi
“Bryan makes things happen and has an incredible attention to detail on all of the small SEO tweaks that add up to big results.”
Jean Kim Hahn, Senior Director Global Marketing, MiniMed
“Bryan takes the time to educate other business partners on SEO. Because of that, more integrated branded ideas were able to be executed.”
David Nielsen, Lead SEO, Genentech
“Bryan has an unbelievable drive to excel at everything he does. He thinks through all the approaches, identifies those most likely to yield the most impressive results, executes quickly, analyzes the results, communicates the insights and builds upon them.”
Mike Berry, Ex Adobe, eBay, PayPal
The Expert
Bryan Passanisi
Founder, Brown Bear Digital
Bryan Passanisi is establishing himself as one of the sharpest emerging voices at the intersection of SEO and AI search. With 15 years of hands-on experience building and scaling search programs, he brings a depth of knowledge most agencies simply can't match — and a relentless focus on what's actually moving results right now.
As search evolves around AI Overviews, generative engines, and large language models, Bryan is at the front of it — testing, building, and translating what's changing into strategy that compounds. He understands the full search landscape, from technical SEO and entity optimization to GEO and LLM visibility, and he founded Brown Bear to give businesses direct access to that expertise without the agency overhead.
- 15 years across SEO, AI search, and paid strategy
- Deep expertise in GEO, entity SEO, and AI Overviews
- Direct access — no account managers, no hand-offs
Awards
- 2025Semrush AI/GEO Award Winner
- 2022Digiday Awards, Best Search Campaign Winner
Common Questions
Orthopedic Surgeons, Answered
An orthopedic marketing agency gets a practice found and chosen by patients searching for a surgeon, a procedure or help with an injury. At Brown Bear that means SEO for procedure and surgeon pages, Google Business Profiles for every office and surgeon, paid search split by service line, and AI search work so ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews describe your surgeons by their actual specialties.
No. In our October 2026 pull of orthopedic results pages, private practices held 80% of local spine results, while a health system ranked #1 for sports medicine in every metro we checked. A spine practice can compete for the head term in its city. A sports medicine practice usually does better with pages for specific procedures like ACL reconstruction or rotator cuff repair, each tied to a named surgeon.
For most multi-surgeon groups, yes. Google’s guidelines allow each public-facing practitioner to have a profile of their own, separate from the practice location. That gives each surgeon a chance to appear in the map pack for their specialty and collect reviews from their own patients. A solo surgeon at a branded location shares one profile with the practice instead.
Generally not. Google’s personalized advertising policy treats health conditions and treatments as a sensitive category and does not allow advertiser-curated audiences, such as lists of your site visitors, for ads in that category. We build orthopedic campaigns on search intent and location instead, which keeps them inside policy and keeps patient health information away from ad platforms.
For common self-pay and shoppable procedures, a cost page is one of the most open opportunities in orthopedic search. In our pull, financing and price lookup sites led searches like knee replacement cost, and no practice reached the top three. The page does not need a single fixed price. Ranges, what insurance usually covers, and how to request a written estimate are enough.
The orthopedic SEO guide on our blog is the research: the full Page-One Map of 27 results pages, the subspecialty breakdown and a payback calculator you can use without hiring anyone. This page explains how Brown Bear runs that work as an agency engagement, across SEO, AI search and paid search.
Our medical client work has centered on plastic surgery practices, where we run SEO, AI search and paid search programs. Orthopedics shares the same foundations, surgeon-led trust signals, procedure pages and local search, and we have published our own research on orthopedic search results. We will show you that research applied to your market before you sign anything.
Further Reading
Orthopedic and Medical Search Research
- Orthopedic SEO: What 27 Google Results Pages Show→Our Page-One Map of local, sports medicine, spine, condition and cost searches across 10 US metros.
- Multi-Location SEO for Medical Practices→How to structure listings and location pages for groups with several offices.
- What AI Actually Reads Before It Recommends Your Practice→The third-party sites that shape what ChatGPT and AI Overviews say about a practice.
- What Your SEO Agency Won’t Tell You Before You Sign→The questions and contract terms to check before you sign with anyone, us included.
See Where Your Practice Stands
Tell us which procedures and locations matter most. We will show you who holds page one for them in your market and what it would take to move up.