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Axis Sports Medicine: Managing local search intent across multiple clinics nationwide
How small differences in search wording can change what someone is actually looking for.
Business: Axis Sports Medicine
Industry: Physiotherapy and sports medicine
Locations: Nationwide
Goal: Generate suitable enquiries and bookings for each clinic
Starting challenge: Similar-looking local searches could have very different intent depending on the wording, location and clinic involved.
Axis Sports Medicine operates clinics around New Zealand, which makes local search intent more complicated than it might first appear.
A search can look relevant because it includes a suburb name and the word “physio”, but that does not necessarily mean the person is looking for a physiotherapist in that area.
For example, “Mount Roskill physio” could be the name of a specific clinic. Someone searching that phrase may already be trying to find another provider.
By contrast, “physio Mount Roskill” is much more likely to be a generic search from someone looking for a physiotherapist in Mount Roskill.
That meant we could not simply treat every local search containing the same words in the same way.
Because Axis has clinics around the country, we needed to look at the full search rather than just the suburb name.
We paid attention to things like:
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the exact wording and word order
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whether the phrase could be another clinic’s name
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which Axis clinic or campaign triggered the search
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whether the location matched the clinic being advertised
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whether similar searches had produced useful bookings before
In practice, that could mean excluding “Mount Roskill physio” while keeping “physio Mount Roskill.”
The aim was to block searches that looked like they were for another provider without accidentally removing genuine local demand.
The main risk was being too aggressive.
If we excluded every search that looked like it might be another clinic, we could also block people who were genuinely looking for a physio in that area.
So we looked at the wording and context of each search rather than applying one broad rule.
That gave us a better balance between filtering out poor traffic and keeping useful local searches.
Another part of the challenge was that not every clinic behaved the same way.
Some locations had stronger demand, some had more competition, and some searches that worked well in one area did not necessarily make sense in another.
So we could not assume that every clinic should be managed in exactly the same way.
The account needed a more local approach, with decisions based on what people were actually searching for in each area.
Axis Sports Medicine is a good example of why local Google Ads management is not always as simple as matching a suburb name with a service.
Small differences in wording can change what someone is actually looking for, and the same approach does not always make sense across every clinic.
Over time, the account developed a more careful way of handling local searches, with decisions based on likely intent rather than broad rules.
That helped us reduce wasted traffic without cutting off the local searches Axis actually wanted.
I can review your account and give you an honest view of where the budget may be getting wasted and what I would change.
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