From today, 12 November, Naver starts matching clinics and hospitals to a far wider set of searches. Until now, Naver’s medical Place results were built mainly around disease names as defined by HIRA, Korea’s Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service. From today they also respond to symptoms, procedures and check-ups, and Place search ads follow along. Naver says the change will roll out gradually.
What Naver announced
There are two notices behind this: a Smart Place notice from 29 October and a Naver Ads notice from 5 November. Today Marketing and an i-boss breakdown that reads both side by side give the details:
- The old “treated disease names” field in Smart Place (up to ten) becomes “Our hospital search keywords”, split into four types (symptom, disease, procedure and check-up) with up to 30 keywords in total.
- Naver’s own ENT example: dizziness (symptom), BPPV (disease), myringotomy (procedure), hearing test (check-up).
- Each department gets a list of recommended keywords, and anything typed in by hand is normalised to a standard name. Existing disease names move automatically into the “disease” type.
- The new fields have been editable since 29 October but aren’t used in search until 12 November. Anything filled in before today counts from the start of the rollout.
- Naver says matching will widen “for searches such as 이석증 (BPPV), 족저근막염 (plantar fasciitis) and 도수치료 (manual therapy)”.
Ads: more auctions, same rules
The Naver Ads notice says Place search ads may now appear on some queries that previously showed no ads. Because more businesses will match the same query, ad rankings may change. Not every newly matched query will show ads. Rank is still decided by bid plus business quality, and registration and billing rules haven’t changed.
The trap is in the exclusion settings, and i-boss’s COMPL spells it out. A keyword added to Smart Place > Business info > Services > search exclusion keywords removes the clinic from both organic Place results and ads. To keep the organic listing but stop paying for a query, add it instead as a negative keyword in the Naver Ads ad group. In many clinics, Smart Place and paid search are run by different people or agencies, so it’s easy for someone to delete their own organic visibility while trying to save on ad spend.
Will rankings change?
Naver has officially announced wider matching. It hasn’t announced a change to the Place ranking algorithm. A Place agency writing on i-boss expects the set of clinics shown for queries like “Gangnam liposuction” or “Daegu laser hair removal” to change, but warns against filling all 30 slots with high-volume procedures a clinic doesn’t really offer. I agree. The keyword list is a declaration of what you treat, and Naver normalises it to standard terms. Stuffing it is the sort of thing a reviewer or a patient complaint will catch.
Why this matters beyond clinics
This is the same direction Naver has been moving all autumn. Place is becoming the structured source for local intent, and the AI layer leans on it. On 31 October an i-boss tester who put 13 hospital questions into Naver’s AI Tab reported that all seven recommendation-style answers drew their sources from Place, while the six informational answers never cited Place at all. That fits Naver’s own AI Tab brief showing Place click-through above 40%. Symptom-level matching makes structured Smart Place data even more important for the “where should I go for X” queries that AI Tab is built to answer. It also follows Naver’s test of up to nine Place ads in mobile search, so the paid side of Place is getting crowded quickly.
What to do this week
- Audit the new keyword field. Lead with your main treatments, and use the standard names Naver suggests.
- Get whoever runs Smart Place and whoever runs Naver Ads to agree on exclusions in one place.
- Take a snapshot of Place positions and ad-group impressions for your sub-keywords now, so you can compare once the rollout finishes. Naver hasn’t said how big the ranking shifts will be.
- Medical advertising law hasn’t changed, so keep claims in reviews and blog posts within the rules.
