Every few months we sit down with a business owner who has decided they need more leads. Then comes the question we hear more than any other: should we do SEO or Google Ads? Underneath it is usually a quieter one. Where does the money go first?
The honest answer is that it depends. Anyone who hands you a split without asking about your cashflow, timetable and market is guessing. We have run these budgets for UK service businesses long enough that the same patterns repeat. These are the patterns, not promises.
What each channel actually costs
SEO is an ongoing investment. For a small UK business, a sensible retainer sits between £500 and £1,500 a month, and meaningful movement is rare before three to six months of consistent work. The pages need writing and the site needs to be technically sound, and Google needs time to trust you. When it clicks, though, it keeps paying. A page that ranks brings enquiries every month with no per-click bill, and that compounds quietly.
Paid ads are the opposite. You pay for attention now, and it goes to work the day the campaign goes live. A typical local campaign runs on £500 to £2,000 a month in clicks, and exactly what you are buying depends on how the Google Ads auction works. The crucial difference is what happens when you stop. Organic rankings linger, sometimes for months. Paid traffic usually dries up within days of the budget ending, sometimes within hours.
Neither is better. They are different tools for different problems.
What should decide the split
Three questions settle most of these conversations.
How much cashflow can you commit before you know what you get back? If committing £1,000 a month for six months makes you uneasy, do not sign up for SEO and hope. The channel that suits a tight month is the one you can switch off.
How fast do you need leads? A leaking roof does not wait for page one. If your phone needs to ring this quarter, that is a paid ads problem. If you are building for next year, it is an organic one.
How competitive is your local market? Search for your own service in your town and see who comes back. If the results are two or three local firms you could outwork, organic is realistic. If you are up against national brands with big budgets, expect a long climb and pricey ads, because you are bidding against them. We have seen both, and the strategy that works in one looks wrong in the other.
A sensible starting split
Our honest advice for most small service businesses is this: start with one channel done properly rather than two done badly. A £1,000 budget split into £500 on ads and £500 on SEO often means neither gets enough time to prove itself. The ads buy half the clicks they need for data, and the SEO is too thin to move rankings.
If you need leads this month, start with ads. Run them for sixty to ninety days at a level you can afford, and measure cost per enquiry, not clicks. If you can wait, SEO alone is a legitimate start, provided you fund it properly and treat the first six months as groundwork rather than failure.
There is one split we do see work from day one. If you have steady cashflow and each lead is worth a lot, a modest ad campaign alongside a properly funded SEO programme gives you something to live on while the organic work matures. That tends to mean a £2,000-plus combined budget, and even then we would rather see the SEO fully funded than both channels starved.
When to shift budget between them
Treat the split as a dial you turn as you learn what converts. Track calls, form submissions and quoted jobs, not clicks. It takes a month or two of clean data, but it is the only honest basis for the next decision.
The pattern we see most often is this. Ads start generating enquiries, and the cost per lead settles somewhere you can live with. That is the time to scale them, and to build the organic asset behind them so you are not paying for every enquiry forever. Then, six to twelve months in, organic enquiries start arriving. At that point you can pull ad budget back on the keywords you now rank for, and spend it on the ones you do not. We have watched clients cut ad spend by a third once their own site took over page one for their core terms.
If the ads never get efficient, that is information too. A cost per lead above your margin means the website or the offer needs fixing before you spend more. We have run enough campaigns to recognise that moment, and the braver call is usually to pause and rebuild rather than keep funding a leak. A monthly Google Search Console check shows whether the organic side is actually building while you decide.
Most businesses we work with end up running both, but they rarely start with both. Start with the one that matches your cashflow and your timetable, measure it properly, and let the numbers tell you when to add the other. If you would like to talk this through with someone who has run these numbers before, talk to us about where your budget should go. We will tell you what we would do with your money, and when we would not spend it.
