"Should we be doing SEO or Google Ads?" is one of the most common questions we get asked, usually from a business owner who's got a limited budget and wants to know where it'll work hardest. It's a completely reasonable question to ask. It's just built on a slightly wrong assumption — that SEO and Google Ads are two competing options for the same job, when in practice they solve different problems and, done properly, make each other more effective.
Having managed both for small and medium-sized businesses across Gloucester, Cheltenham, Bristol and the wider South West for over twenty years, the accounts that perform best are almost never the ones treating SEO and Google Ads as separate projects run by separate people who never compare notes. They're the ones where someone is actually looking at both together.
SEO and Google Ads aren't rivals — they solve different timing problems
Google Ads gets you in front of people searching right now. Switch a campaign on and, budget allowing, you can appear near the top of the results within hours. The catch is equally immediate: stop paying and that visibility disappears the same day.
SEO works on a completely different clock. It typically takes months of consistent work — decent content, technical fixes, a website Google trusts — before you see meaningful movement. But once you're ranking well for a term, you're not paying per click for that spot, and rankings built properly tend to hold up over time rather than switching off the moment you stop spending.
Neither of those is a better strategy than the other. They're solving different problems: one gets you visibility while the other is still being built, and the other reduces how dependent you are on ad spend once it starts working. Used together, Google Ads fills the gap while SEO catches up.
Your Google Ads account is already doing some of your SEO research for you
This is the bit that gets overlooked most often. If you've been running Google Ads for a while, your search terms report contains something genuinely useful for SEO — not just which phrases people search, but which of those phrases actually lead to a phone call or a form submission, not merely a click.
That's a level of insight most keyword research tools can't give you, because they're working from estimated search volumes rather than proof that a phrase converts. Take a landscaping and fencing business running ads around "garden fencing" — it's not unusual to find that a more specific phrase like "close board fencing installer" converts at a noticeably higher rate, even with lower search volume. That's exactly the kind of phrase worth building a proper service page around organically, rather than guessing from a keyword tool alone.
If nobody's looking at that report with SEO in mind, that insight just sits there unused. It's one of the reasons our SEO consultancy work always starts by asking what's already being paid for and what it's telling us, rather than starting from a blank page.
Ranking organically can make your ad budget go further
When a business appears in both the organic results and the ads for the same search, two things tend to happen. Searchers who see a business in both places tend to trust it more, since seeing a business twice on the page reads as a stronger signal than either one on its own. And once you're ranking well organically for a term that already converts, there's often room to ease off ad spend on that specific term and put the budget towards phrases you don't yet rank for.
That second point matters more than it sounds. A lot of Google Ads accounts we look at are still spending steadily on terms the business has quietly started ranking for organically, simply because nobody's checked. It's not wasted money exactly — you're still getting clicks — but it's rarely the best use of that budget once organic visibility is doing some of the work for free. This kind of review is a standing part of proper Google Ads management, not a one-off task.
The technical basics help both at the same time
Page speed, mobile usability, clean page structure — these aren't SEO-only or Ads-only concerns. A slow, cluttered page hurts your Quality Score in Google Ads, which pushes up what you pay per click, and it hurts your organic rankings at the same time. Fix it once and you get the benefit twice, which is one of the better arguments for treating technical SEO as foundational work rather than something to get to eventually.
We see this most clearly with businesses running ads to a homepage that's trying to speak to every service they offer at once. It might load fine and look fine, but it isn't built around any one search term specifically — so it under-performs in Ads, and there's no dedicated page for Google to rank organically for that service either. The fix is usually the same in both cases: a proper page for that specific service, built around what people are actually searching for.
A simple place to start if you're only doing one right now
You don't need both running at full scale to start joining them up. If you're currently only doing Google Ads, pull the search terms report for the last three months and look at what's actually converting — that list is a genuinely useful starting point for whoever writes or manages your website content, even if that's you.
If you're only doing SEO, look at it the other way round. A new service page that's just gone live, or one that's ranking on page two rather than page one, can often benefit from a short, tightly targeted burst of Google Ads while it climbs — rather than waiting months with no visibility at all in the meantime.
Neither of those takes a big budget or a big team. It mostly takes someone looking at both accounts together, rather than treating them as two separate jobs that happen not to talk to each other.
Worth a proper look, not just a guess
If you're currently running one of the two and wondering whether the other is worth adding — or you suspect your SEO and Google Ads are already working against each other rather than together — it's worth getting an outside, honest opinion rather than guessing. Our free Google Ads audit is a good place to start if paid search is the priority, and you're welcome to get in touch for a chat either way. It's also worth a look at some of the results we've achieved for other South West businesses if it helps to see how this plays out in practice.
← Back to Blog