SEO or Google Ads depends on how soon you need enquiries. Google Ads can be showing within a working day, and you pay for every click until you stop. SEO takes months to rank, then costs nothing per visit. Bigfoot Web Solutions, an SEO agency in Melbourne, advises businesses needing work next week to run ads first.
Both put your business on the same Google results page, often for the same search. What differs is how you pay, how long each takes to work, and what’s left the day the spending stops. Google keeps the two apart: buying ads doesn’t lift your unpaid ranking, and stopping them doesn’t lower it.
How Google Ads charges you
Google Ads is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You pick the searches your ads should show for, write the ads, and pay each time someone clicks one. Google reviews most new ads within one working day, so a campaign can be running this week. The price of each click is set in an auction against the other businesses bidding on the same search, and the more of them there are, the more a click tends to cost.
You control the spend with an average daily budget. Google spends it unevenly, more on busy days, and its rules on average daily budgets cap that at twice the daily figure on any one day and 30.4 times it in a month, the average number of days in a month. A $10 daily budget is a ceiling of $304 a month.
Google’s Keyword Planner, inside a Google Ads account, shows what clicks have cost before you spend anything. Its top of page bid range runs from about the 20th to the 80th percentile of what advertisers in your location have paid to show at the top of the first page. Divide a monthly budget by the high end of that range and you have a rough count of clicks. The real question is how many of them would become a booked job.
You pay for a click whether the person rings to book or leaves after reading your prices, so the searches you bid on matter as much as the budget. The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, and adding the wasteful ones as negative keywords, such as “cheap” or “DIY”, keeps your ads off them. And the day the budget stops, the ads stop with it.
What you pay for with SEO, and how long it takes
SEO has no cost per click. Google’s guide to hiring an SEO says advertising with Google won’t have any effect on where a site appears in its search results, and that it costs nothing to appear in the unpaid results. What you pay for is the work that earns the position.
That work is either your own time or a monthly fee. Hiring someone buys time and experience, so choose someone who avoids the shortcuts the guide warns can damage a site.
Expect three to six months before rankings move in a meaningful way, and longer for a new domain with no history. A ranking isn’t owned, either. It holds while your page stays more useful than the ones competing with it, which is why SEO is planned as ongoing work rather than bought once.
Is SEO better than Google Ads?
Neither is better for every business. The answer sits mostly in your own numbers and in how your customers choose.
How soon you need the phone to ring. If a quiet month would hurt, ads are the only one of the two that can start this week. If you need enquiries next week, run Google Ads and come back to SEO when you want to reduce what you spend on them.
What a job is worth against what a click costs. Where a single job pays for hundreds of clicks, ads are easy to justify. Where it barely covers a dozen, every month of ad spend needs a hard look.
How people choose in your line of work. Someone with a burst pipe at 10pm is likely to ring one of the first businesses they see, and an ad can be that business. Someone planning a home extension or choosing an accountant compares several businesses, reads reviews and comes back, so your unpaid pages and Business Profile get seen more than once.
How long you’ll serve the same area. Ad spend repeats every month at whatever the auction charges. The work behind a ranking comes first, and a page that ranks keeps bringing visits while it holds. A business that plans to be working in Craigieburn or Hawthorn in five years gets more from the pages it builds now.
Where the Google Maps results fit
For a search with local intent, such as “electrician Footscray” or “physio near me”, Google shows a map and a short list of businesses above the ordinary results. Those listings are Google Business Profiles, which cost nothing to create. Google’s Business Profile help is blunt about how that list is ranked: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Local results rest mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence takes in how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.
Ads can appear in Google Maps too, marked as ads. The paid slot goes to whoever bids for it, and the unpaid list is decided by the three factors above. Distance is the one you can’t change, because it’s measured from the person searching. A plumber based in Dandenong is unlikely to appear in the map for a search made in Brunswick, however good the profile.
Ads can be set to show in whichever suburbs you choose, which makes them a practical way to reach areas the map won’t. For the unpaid list, local SEO for tradies looks at why a competitor can sit above you.
Where AI answers sit between the two
Google’s AI Overviews now carry ads as well. In Australia, ads can appear above, below or inside an overview, matched to both the question and the overview’s content, and Google’s Ads help says advertisers can’t choose that placement or opt out of it.
The links an overview cites as sources are a different matter. Google’s Search documentation says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet to appear as one, with no additional technical requirements. That’s the same work SEO already does, and no ad budget buys it. Assistants such as ChatGPT also name the web pages their answers draw on.
Running SEO and Google Ads together
Running both is common. Ads carry the enquiries while SEO takes hold, then the ad spend comes down, search by search, as pages start to rank.
Without call and form tracking on the website, neither the ads nor the rankings can tell you what they earned. If the traffic arrives and the phone stays quiet, why a good-looking website can bring in no leads covers the usual causes.
We don’t run Google Ads campaigns ourselves. Our SEO services in Melbourne are planned in six-month sprints at a monthly fee quoted before work starts, and reporting comes from your own Search Console account.
SEO or Google Ads comes down to your searches, what a job is worth and how soon you need work. Book a 30-minute call and Bigfoot Web Solutions will tell you which of the two your market rewards before you commit to either.