If your business is new, do both. If your business has history and a working website, search first and add ads where the phone needs help this quarter.
The reason comes down to how differently the two behave over time.
What does each one give you?
Ads give you the call today. You switch them on in the morning and the phone can go in the afternoon. You switch them off and it goes back to where it was that same day.
Search work gives you nothing for weeks. Then it gives you calls you do not pay for each time, and it goes on giving them after you stop working on it.
Neither one is better. They pay on different schedules, and your business has a schedule too.
Why a new business should do both
A new domain does not rank for months, however good the work is. Google has no history for it, the site has no reviews behind it, and nobody links to it yet.
That is not a failure of the search work. It is the shape of the thing.
So a business opening in March cannot wait for organic search to bring the first customer. Ads bring the phone calls while the search work builds underneath. Eleven months later the ads become a choice instead of a lifeline.
When are ads a waste of money?
Four situations, and we say so before taking anybody’s money.
The website does not convert. Paying for clicks that land on a page with no phone number above the fold burns money faster than doing nothing.
Nobody answers the phone. A missed call from a paid click costs the same as an answered one. Fix the answering before the spending.
You cannot service more work. Booked out six weeks means ads buy you annoyed callers.
The margin is too thin. Some trades have a job value that will not cover competitive click prices. Better to find that out with arithmetic than with three months of spending.
Does paying for ads help your organic ranking?
No. Google has said many times that ad spending does not affect organic position, and nothing we have watched contradicts it.
What ads do give you is information. Within two weeks you can see which words people search before they buy, and which words waste money.
That is worth having even if you switch the ads off, because it tells you which pages to build first.
How do you split the effort?
Think in months, not percentages.
A new business puts most of its early effort into ads and the website, then shifts toward search work through the first year. An established business with existing rankings does the opposite, using ads for the seasonal weeks and the services it wants more of.
The mistake is treating the split as permanent. It should look different in month twelve than in month one.
What should you measure?
Calls, not clicks. A campaign with cheap clicks and no calls is worse than an expensive one that fills the schedule.
Ask for the phone numbers, the form submissions and the dates. If your agency reports impressions and click through rate and never mentions how many people called, ask why.
Anybody quoting you a cost per lead before spending a dollar is guessing. There is no number to give until the account has data behind it.
Where to start
Answer one question first. Does your website turn visitors into calls today? If nobody knows, that is the thing to find out before adding traffic to it.
Once it does, our google ads management for local business page explains how we set the accounts up and what we report back each month.
Want us to look at the site first? Book a call and we will tell you which of the two you need.