How would you respond to this doctor who demands to see his ads?

[Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine]

I work work for a health care system in the Midwest.

We have a doctor in our transplant division who whenever we're in a meeting pulls out his phone and types in "kidney transplant" and ridicules me when our hospital is not on the page.

I've long since given up trying to explain search intent to him (all the SERP results are showing information about kidney transplants, not information on where to get a transplant) along with trying to explain all the reasons why our ads don't necessarily show up on his phone despite us having a daily budget for that keyword.

Without trying to explain how SEO or advertising online works, what would you do? I've toyed with eliminating advertising from the hospital zipcode so that I can just say we don't advertise in this zipcode at all, so of course our ads wouldn't pop up. I've also toyed with creating more informational content just so perhaps we can show up on the page, even though it's largely irrelevant (but I doubt we'd ever outrank the national brands that have written extensively on this). If someone types in "kidney hospital" or "transplant center" or anything relevant, we're instantly at the top of SERPs. But none of that matters to him. He only cares about showing up for "kidney transplant."

[HayleyBowyer]

@patrick_at_nebraska_medicine of course! Let me know how things shake out, or if you have any other questions you want me to run by the team!

[Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine]

@hayleybowyer Thanks for your feedback Hayley. It's nice to hear I'm probably on the right track with how I'm thinking about the situation.

[HayleyBowyer]

Hey @patrick_at_nebraska_medicine,

Definitely sounds like a challenging situation, especially since Google can run things on their own terms sometimes. I would definitely recommend checking out @HeatherPhysioc's Moz article on SEO Maturity: https://moz.com/blog/seo-client-maturity

I connected with @zac_heinrichs from our team at Moz and he agreed that you are likely on the right track with search intent. If Google believed that they could make money by showing ads for "kidney transplant", they would -- but since that is such a top of funnel keyword, they are likely displaying more informative resources, rather than a "book your appointment" type of search result. This is where your idea on more general content could come into play. Articles that answer questions like "what is a kidney transplant?", or "how does a kidney transplant work?" could work well here.

When I worked closely with agencies here at Moz, and I found that the best way to get buy in from customers is to show how the efforts are impacting the bottom line - telling the story about how more conversion oriented ads are leading to more bookings and ultimately more revenue for the client. It's likely that an ad for something top of funnel like "kidney transplant" is not converting as well and its not because the ad isn't appearing, it's because those people are not looking to book an appointment at that time.

Definitely looking forward to hearing more about what happens with your client and wishing you all the best!