So, let’s say you’re a business that has a $2,000 to $5,000 a month budget for marketing and you are trying to decide whether SEO or Google Ads is better.
I get this question constantly, practically on a weekly basis.
Neither one of these channels is inherently better, but there are circumstances where one of these channels is going to be better for your business.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through what I’ve seen work for hundreds of businesses ranging from doctors to Fortune 500 companies to construction businesses.
Is Digital Marketing Right for Your Business?
Let’s start with some real talk.
Digital marketing is not for every business.
There are businesses where the internet is simply not part of your buyer’s journey.
If you own a gas station, SEO is probably not going to help you to sell a lot more gas.
The same thing applies to Google Ads.
A dental practice, on the other hand, will find that SEO will help to bring in more patients.
So will Google Ads.
Which one is going to do a better job of that in a more cost-effective manner is going to depend on a number of factors, however.
Using Google Ads to Validate Your Strategy
So, the first thing that I would start off with is that there are going to be scenarios where Google Ads will help you to validate whether digital marketing is going to be right for your business to begin with.
Maybe you have the type of service that’s brand new to the world.
Setting aside a budget of $2,000 to $4,000 on Google Ads may help you to validate whether people are searching for the thing that you sell.
Once you validate this, it will help you to decide whether you should be spending money on Google to begin with.
This can possibly help you avoid having spent six months and a ton of money on SEO to get you page-one rankings, only to learn that your customers don’t use Google to find what you sell.
Determining if People Educate Themselves First
All right, let’s say for one that you know that people are using Google to find your products and services.
Here are some things that you need to consider when trying to decide between investing in Google Ads versus SEO.
Here’s my first question: Do people try to educate themselves before they look for services like yours?
And if they do, SEO-driven content marketing—in particular, a strategy where you’re incorporating video into all these blogs as well—can be a particularly effective and inexpensive way for you to get in front of your target customers way before they’ve even explicitly looked for what you sell.
Google Ads does not do a good job of this.
Low-Involvement vs. High-Involvement Decisions
Question number two: Is this a low-involvement or a high-involvement purchase decision?
What do I mean by that?
Is the thing you sell the kind of thing where people will just kind of Google it, click on the first thing they see, call, convert, and move on with their day?
Or is it something where they’re going to want to do a lot of research?
An example of this is junk removal:
If you need somebody to come out and clear out your garage or your basement, you’re not really spending a ton of time vetting them.
It costs a few hundred bucks.
You just want to get it done and get it done fast.
I’ve worked on junk removal SEO before.
I’ve also done Google Ads for junk removal.
Google Ads is particularly effective at driving junk removal leads.
On the other hand, I’ve also done SEO and Google Ads for what we do (we’re a digital marketing agency) which is something where people deliberate and spend a lot of time researching their options.
They’re not just clicking on the first thing they see on Google and handing you $5,000 a month to handle all their marketing.
As a result, I’ve found that Google Ads has not been particularly effective for our company, but I have built the whole agency on SEO.
Assessing the Competition in Your Niche
My third question: How competitive is your niche?
You may be competing in a market where all of your competitors have driven your cost per click to the moon and you’re not going to have the margins even to be able to do Google Ads and remain profitable.
As an example, I’ve seen this in a lot of cases with Med Spas where they’ve driven the cost per click for anything related to injectables to the moon.
The only way that it’s profitable is for them to bring in patients that they’re going to keep for years.
I’ve also seen markets where SEO is a bloodbath and going to be a multi-year endeavor for anyone that ever wants to drive a return from it.
While in other markets, we were able to basically put up GLP-1 pages and rank throughout Silicon Valley in one case.
Now, the truth is that you’re going to have to work with somebody that really knows what they’re doing in order to assess how competitive your niche is when it comes to SEO.
With Google Ads, unfortunately, you’re usually going to have to just give it a go.
I for one am not going to be able to just look at a market and tell you, “Oh yeah, Google Ads is going to be really expensive there.”
I don’t think anybody can.
How Quickly Do You Need Results?
Next, how quickly do you need results?
The common wisdom is that SEO takes time and Google Ads starts working right away.
While it is true that you will usually get results faster from Google Ads than you will SEO, SEO doesn’t always take 6 to 12 months to get results.
Especially if you are an established business that has had a website for a while and you have a reputation, very often some simple technical SEO fixes can put you in the top results.
We have a case study from a home care agency in Scottsdale that illustrates this perfectly.
Again, this is something where you’re going to have to talk with someone that actually knows what they’re looking at to tell you where that’s going to be the case for you.
The Impact of AI on Search
Next consideration: how AI is going to transform all of this.
I can tell you that right now more and more people are turning to ChatGPT when they just want information about a topic.
So that first question that I asked about whether people have questions about what you do, honestly, that as a strategy is going to shrink.
It’s not going to go away, but there are certain types of searches where people are just going to get the answer from AI and that’s going to be that.
In addition, Google is moving over to an AI mode format of giving answers.
Basically, if and when that does roll out as a default Google mode, it’s going to have a significant impact on organic search and the effectiveness of SEO for your business.
For better or for worse, this is not going to be the case with Google Ads.
That is how Google makes its money and it’s not going to let AI disrupt its cash flow.
So, if Google Ads is working today, it’s going to probably continue to work in three years.
Scalability and Diminishing Returns
The next thing to consider when trying to decide between Google Ads and SEO is scalability.
If you have intentions to drive massive scale and massive leads for your business, you can 10x or 20x your ad spend on Google Ads and get 10x or 20x the number of leads in most cases.
That’s not always going to be the case with SEO.
In other words, the point of diminishing returns is a lot lower for SEO than it is for Google Ads.
There Is No Universal Correct Answer to the Google Ads vs. SEO Question
My last piece of advice: there is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether Google Ads or SEO is better.
It’s very much case by case.
It’s very much something where you should probably talk with someone that knows what they’re looking at.
It is even better if that person is someone that doesn’t have an economic interest in you picking one versus the other.
Would you like me to create a summary table comparing the pros and cons of SEO versus Google Ads based on these specific factors?
