Google Ads or SEO first? A straight answer

You have a few hundred pounds a month to put into getting found. One person tells you to run Google Ads. Another says Ads is money down the drain and you should do SEO. Both sound sure of themselves, and both are selling something.

Here is a straight answer. It comes down to three questions about your business, and none of them is about Google.

What the two things are

Google Ads puts your business at the top of the results for a search, marked as an advert, and you pay Google each time somebody clicks. It starts working when the campaign goes live, usually within a few days of setup. It stops working the day you stop paying.

SEO is the work of getting your site to appear in the ordinary results below the adverts, and in the map listings. Nobody pays per click. You pay for the work, and the work builds up: pages, a tidy Business Profile, reviews, a site that loads quickly. It takes months before it moves anything, and it keeps working after you stop paying for it, though it fades if nobody looks after it.

So one is rented and quick. The other is owned and slow. The decision is which of those you can live with first.

Question one: how long can you wait?

If your diary is empty next month, SEO will not rescue it. A new page or a corrected Business Profile can take three to six months to show up in a way you notice, and longer in a crowded trade. That is a realistic range, not a worst case.

If you are busy enough to wait that long, or you have another source of work that is carrying you, SEO is open to you. If you need the phone ringing in weeks, start with Ads.

Question two: what is one new customer worth?

Work this out in profit, not turnover. A boiler install that brings in £3,000 but leaves £600 after parts and labour is a £600 customer.

Now the arithmetic, using made-up round numbers so you can swap in your own. Say a click on your kind of search costs £3, and one click in twenty turns into an enquiry, and one enquiry in three turns into a job. That is sixty clicks to win one job, or £180 in clicks per customer. Against a £600 profit, that works. Against a £40 profit, it does not.

Your real numbers will differ, and the second figure matters most: the share of clicks that become enquiries depends on your website at least as much as on the advert. A slow or confusing site wastes the click you paid for a moment ago. That is worth fixing before you spend a penny with Google.

The rule that falls out of this: if a customer is worth a few hundred pounds or more to you, Ads can pay for itself quickly. If a customer is worth £30 or £40, clicks at £2 or £3 each will eat the profit, and SEO is the better home for the money because the visits do not cost you per click.

Question three: can you carry the cost while it settles?

Google Ads costs you twice. There is the budget you hand to Google, which you set, and there is our fee for building and running the campaign, which is £350 a month. A modest budget of £500 means about £850 a month in total. The first few weeks are for learning which searches bring buyers, so expect some of that money to go on clicks you later block.

SEO from us is £495 a month, with nothing extra to Google. The cost is lower in a month and higher over a year in one respect: you will pay for several months before you see enquiries move. If three months of paying with little to show would put you under strain, you want Ads, or you want to wait.

The answer, as a rule

• Start with Google Ads if you need work within weeks and a customer is worth several hundred pounds to you.
• Start with SEO if you can wait six months, your customers are worth less each, or you cannot afford to pay Google on top of a monthly fee.
• Start with neither if your website loads slowly or does not make the phone number obvious. Paying to send people to a site that loses them is the most expensive way to find that out.

If you do both, which most businesses do eventually, Ads covers the months while SEO builds, and the search terms report from the Ads account tells you the exact words customers use. That feeds straight into what the SEO should target. Read how to do that in the Google Ads report that shows where your money went.

Where this answer is wrong

Some trades have clicks so expensive that Ads cannot work at a small budget. Solicitors and some emergency services are examples, where a single click can cost the price of a meal. If that is your market, SEO and a strong Business Profile come first, and Ads waits until you know what a lead costs you.

At the other end, a business with no competition nearby and a handful of searches a month does not need either. A good Business Profile and a site that works will cover it.

What to do next

Work out your profit per customer and how many weeks you can wait. Those two numbers decide it. If you would like a second opinion before you commit money to either, a free website review looks at your site, your listing and what the businesses above you are doing, and tells you which one we would start with, even when the answer is that your site needs sorting first.