This guide is for owners and managers of TMS clinics who want more patients to start, and finish, treatment. It covers the searches patients make, the channels that reach them, the ad rules that trip clinics up, and the intake work that decides whether any of it pays off. Where we have real search data, we’ve used it.
Start with the number that matters
Leads are easy to count and easy to inflate. A treatment start is much harder to fake. Before you change anything else, set up a way to follow each new patient through five steps: inquiry, consult, benefits and authorization, first session, and completed course.
Track those steps by source every week. A spreadsheet works. So does a CRM. What matters is that every inquiry is tied to where it came from, so you can see which channels produce patients and which only produce phone calls.
The numbers worth watching are simple:
- the share of new-patient calls answered live during business hours
- how long web and social leads wait for a first call back
- how many booked consults actually show up
- how long authorizations take, and how many are approved
- how many consults become starts, and how many starts finish the course
Once these are visible, most clinics find their biggest opportunity somewhere they weren’t looking.
Know the demand in your market
Across the United States, “tms therapy” is searched about 66,000 times a month, according to Ahrefs. “tms therapy near me” gets about 4,800, and “tms therapy cost” about 2,000. Searches for “tms therapy” over the last 12 months ran 12% higher than the 12 months before.
Two patterns are worth building around. First, people use the short name: “tms therapy” is searched almost three times as often as “transcranial magnetic stimulation”. Use the short name in your headlines and explain the long one once. Second, a lot of the volume is questions: cost, coverage, side effects, whether it works. Those people aren’t ready to book yet, but the clinic that answers them well is the one they remember.
National numbers only tell you the shape of demand. For your own market, check local volumes in a keyword tool and look at the search terms in your Google Business Profile performance report. Our TMS search demand data lists all 42 searches we track, with trends and click prices.
Your Google Business Profile is the front door
For local searches, the map pack usually sits above every organic result, so your Google Business Profile often gets seen before your website does. Treat it like a page of your site.
- Pick the primary category that best describes the practice, and add TMS and your other treatments as services.
- Use real photos of your treatment room, entrance and parking. People want to know what they’re walking into.
- Keep hours, phone number and address identical to your website.
- Have one profile per location, each linked to its own location page.
- Ask for reviews consistently, and never offer anything in return for one.
When you reply to reviews, don’t confirm that the reviewer is a patient or mention their care, even if they did. Thank them, keep it general, and take anything specific offline.
Build a page for every question
Most TMS clinic websites have a homepage, an about page and one page about TMS. Patients ask far more than that. Each question below deserves its own page, written in plain English and reviewed by one of your physicians.
| Page | Searches it answers | US / month |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | tms therapy cost, how much does tms therapy cost | 2,250 |
| Side effects | tms side effects, tms therapy side effects | 2,300 |
| TMS for OCD | tms for ocd | 1,900 |
| TMS for anxiety | tms for anxiety | 900 |
| Does it work | tms success rate, does tms work | 900 |
| TMS vs ECT | tms vs ect | 600 |
| Insurance and Medicare | does insurance cover tms, is tms covered by medicare, tms therapy covered by insurance | 400 |
| Accelerated protocols | accelerated tms, saint tms | 1,500 |
Only build condition pages for what your device is cleared to treat and what your physicians actually offer. Search interest in a condition isn’t the same as FDA clearance, and the gap matters.
Paid search: buy intent, not curiosity
Google Ads puts you in front of people searching right now, which makes it the fastest channel to fill a new clinic or a quiet month. It also wastes money faster than any other channel when it’s set up loosely.
Split campaigns by intent: near-me searches, cost and insurance searches, condition searches and your brand. Give each its own landing page. Build a negative keyword list on day one, because “TMS” also means transportation management software, training courses and job titles, and those searches will happily eat your budget.
Clicks are reasonably priced. Ahrefs estimates an average of $3.00 for “tms therapy near me” and $4.50 for “tms clinic near me”, though your local auction will differ. Spravato and ketamine terms cost noticeably more.
Two policy points catch clinics out. Google restricts personalized advertising based on health conditions, which limits remarketing to people who visited mental health pages. And prescription drug names in ad text are restricted, which matters if you offer Spravato. Plan around both before you launch, not after the disapprovals arrive. More on our approach to Google Ads for TMS clinics.
Meta: reach people before they search
Search only reaches people who already know about TMS. Facebook and Instagram reach the much larger group who don’t: people who’ve tried several medications and assume they’ve run out of options.
Meta’s rules shape what works. Ads can’t imply that the viewer has a condition, so questions like “Are you depressed?” get rejected. Detailed targeting by health condition was removed years ago. And Meta now limits how health businesses can use website conversion data. Good creative works within all of that: it talks about the experience of treatment, what a session is like, how long it takes, and that patients drive themselves home afterwards.
Meta leads usually cost less than search leads and need faster follow-up and more explanation. Clinics that call new leads within the hour get far more from Meta than clinics that call the next day. See Meta ads for TMS clinics.
Referrals still matter
Psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, primary care physicians and therapists all see patients whose depression hasn’t responded to medication. Many of them rarely refer to TMS, often because nobody has explained who qualifies or made referring easy.
A simple program goes a long way: a target list of nearby prescribers, a one-page clinical summary with your referral criteria, a referral form your clinic can receive, and regular visits from a liaison or your medical director. Then close the loop. Referring providers who hear how their patients did are far more likely to send the next one.
Referred patients often arrive with their medication history documented, which shortens the benefits step. Track referrals by source just like any other channel. More in referral marketing for TMS clinics.
Fix intake before you buy more leads
Every channel above ends at your phone. If calls go to voicemail at lunch, web leads wait a day, and nobody follows up on stalled authorizations, more marketing just means more lost patients.
- Answer new-patient calls live during business hours, and send an automatic text when a call is missed.
- Call web and social leads within minutes, not hours.
- Give your team a script that answers the three big questions: does it work, is it covered, what happens next.
- Verify benefits quickly and follow every authorization until it clears.
- Remind people before consults, and keep the gap between consult and first session short.
Measure the time from first call to first session. It’s one of the most revealing numbers a clinic can track. See intake and call tracking.
Insurance is the question behind every call
Most callers want to know one thing before anything else: will my insurance cover this? Medicare, TRICARE and most large commercial plans cover TMS for depression when the patient meets their criteria, but the criteria vary by plan and change over time.
Typical requirements include a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, several antidepressant trials that didn’t work or weren’t tolerated, often a course of psychotherapy, and no contraindications such as non-removable metal in or near the head. Most commercial plans require prior authorization.
Your marketing should say all of this plainly. List the plans you’re in network with, explain the usual criteria in everyday words, and say what happens if someone isn’t covered. For owners and billers, TMS is billed with three CPT codes: 90867 for the first treatment, which includes mapping and motor threshold, 90868 for each later session, and 90869 when the motor threshold is re-checked during the course.
Measure without exposing patients
Healthcare websites have to measure marketing without exposing patient information. Federal guidance on online tracking in healthcare has shifted since 2022, and several states have their own privacy and wiretap laws.
A sensible default: keep ad platform pixels off pages and forms where people share health details, use privacy-minded or server-side measurement where you do track, and set up call tracking so ad platforms learn that a call happened, not what was said. Have your compliance counsel review the setup.
A 90-day plan
Days 1 to 30: see clearly
Set up call tracking and form tracking, build the five-step pipeline, clean up your Google Business Profile, and publish or fix your cost, insurance and location pages. Add missed-call text-back and a basic intake script.
Days 31 to 60: turn on demand
Launch search campaigns for near-me, cost and insurance searches. Start asking for reviews consistently. Publish your first condition pages and build the referral target list.
Days 61 to 90: widen the net
Test Meta campaigns with fast follow-up. Start referral visits. Test landing page changes. Then hold your first monthly review of starts by channel and move budget toward what’s producing patients.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on any of this, our free TMS marketing audit covers your site, profile, ads and call handling.