Guide · By Naveen Bansal and Raf Shaaban
SEO vs Google Ads: which should you spend on first
If you've got a few thousand dollars a month to put into marketing and you're trying to decide between SEO and Google Ads, here's the short answer.
If your customers search for you at the moment they need you, start with Google Ads and build SEO underneath it. If they don't search for you at all, neither one is right, you want Meta. And if your website can't convert the traffic, fix that before you spend a dollar on either.
That's the whole decision. The rest of this page explains how we get there, using numbers from our own clients rather than industry averages.
The short version: fuel and foundation
The easiest way to think about it is that one of these is fuel and the other is a foundation.
SEO and web development are the foundation. It's a long-term investment that doesn't need fuel. Build it right once and it keeps growing, stays consistent, and doesn't depend on how much money you pour in. You pay our fee only, and the results come with time.
Google Ads and Meta Ads are the fuel. They're entirely ad-spend based. Want more leads, we push budget and testing; want fewer, we pull back. It starts working in week one, but it stops when the spend stops, and it costs our management fee plus the ad spend.
Neither is better. They do different jobs, and most businesses eventually want both. The question is which one you fund first, and that depends less on your budget than on how your customers behave.
The question that actually decides it
Here's the question we ask before we take on any client:
When someone needs what you sell, do they search for it?
Be honest about this one. It's not about whether your service is valuable, it's about what the customer does at the moment the need appears.
If the answer is yes
A blocked drain gets Googled immediately. So does a concreter, an emergency electrician, or a supplier of library shelving. The customer has a problem right now, they type it into Google, and they call someone from the first page.
If that's your business, Google Ads puts you at the top of that search today, and SEO earns you the same position permanently over the following months.
Two of our clients are exactly this. Steve Blake Concreting and Vipa Library Supplies both run Google Ads and SEO, and neither of them runs Meta. We've never recommended it to them, because their customers aren't sitting on Instagram waiting to be reminded that they need concrete. They search when they need it.
If the answer is no
Nobody wakes up and Googles "mortgage broker" because the thought occurred to them. They might want one, they might have wanted one for a year, but they're not searching. There's no moment of need to capture.
If that's your business, Google Ads will spend your money on a trickle of searches that barely exist. Meta is the right channel, because it puts the offer in front of people who want it but were never going to go looking.
That's what we run for Logic Property Wealth Australia and My Mortgage Mentor. Both are finance businesses. Both get their leads from Meta. Neither would get the same result from Google Ads, and we'd tell them so.
If you're not sure
Try it from the customer's side. Think of your last five clients. Did they find you because they searched for the thing you do, or because someone mentioned you, or they saw something that reminded them they needed it?
That answer is usually the whole strategy.
What each one actually costs
This is the part most agencies skate over, and it's the thing that catches business owners out.
| SEO | Google Ads / Meta | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay us | A monthly fee | A monthly fee |
| What you pay the platform | Nothing | Your ad spend, on top |
| When it starts working | Months | Week one |
| What happens if you stop | Rankings hold for months, then slowly decay | Leads stop that day |
| Does more money mean more leads? | No, it's not spend-driven | Yes, almost linearly |
| Best for | Businesses people search for, with time to invest | Businesses needing leads now, or that people don't search for |
With SEO you pay our fee and nothing else. With ads you pay our fee plus whatever goes to Google or Meta, and the ad spend is usually the larger number. For Meta we recommend starting at about $50 a day, which is roughly $1,500 a month on top of management.
If you've only got budget for the fee and nothing else, that's not a problem, it just means SEO is where you start.
(All figures exclude GST.)
How fast, and how long it lasts
Here's the difference, with real client numbers.
Ads are fast
My Mortgage Mentor came to us for Meta lead generation. We generate more than 60 leads a month for them at a cost per lead of $64.49, on about $4,000 a month in ad spend, and more than half of those leads convert into clients.
It worked so well they had to switch the ads off for two weeks. They couldn't keep up with the enquiries. They hired a new salesperson and an appointment setter, then turned the ads back on.
That started in week one. That's what fuel does.
Logic Property Wealth Australia is the same story at a larger scale, 946 leads, and a team that went from four people to eight in seven months.
SEO compounds
R&S Sandwiches came to us with a website that was effectively invisible on Google. We rebuilt it and have run their SEO ever since. Organic search now brings them about 1,625 sessions a month, 34,131 across the last 21 months, and it is their largest channel.
That is years of compounding, and the traffic arrives whether or not we spend anything with Google this month.
The asymmetry that matters
Turn the ads off and the leads stop that day. That's not a criticism of ads, it's just what they are.
Stop the SEO work and the rankings hold for months, then slowly decay. You keep earning from work you already paid for.
That's the real trade-off. Ads rent you traffic. SEO buys it.
Can you do both?
Usually yes, and it's the strongest position to be in.
OL Plumbing runs both. They get roughly 15 leads a month from SEO and another 15 from Google Ads, on a deliberately modest ad budget. The ads cover the immediate work; the SEO keeps building underneath.
The sequencing we'd suggest:
- Google Ads goes live first, usually within a week or two, so enquiries start arriving while everything else is being built.
- SEO and on-site development run in parallel, service pages, location pages, and fixing whatever stops the site converting.
- Review quarterly. As organic rankings build, ad spend becomes a choice rather than a necessity. Some clients scale ads up because they're working; others scale them back because they no longer need them.
When the answer is neither
Sometimes the honest answer is that you shouldn't spend on either yet.
If your website can't convert the traffic it already gets, sending more people to it is just a more expensive way to lose them. We see this constantly: a site that looks fine, but the phone number isn't clickable on a mobile, the enquiry form asks twelve questions, and there's no clear reason to choose this business over the next one.
Fix that first. It's cheaper than the alternative, and every dollar you spend afterwards works harder.
This is also why our SEO retainers include web development. A developer works alongside the SEO specialist, because telling a client "your site needs fixing before this will work" and then not fixing it isn't much of a service.