SEO vs. Google Ads: The Wrong Question for Service Businesses

If you've got $5,000 a month to spend, should it go to SEO or Google Ads? I think that's usually the wrong question. What's more useful is knowing what your business needs now, what you can afford to pay for a qualified lead, and what you're trying to learn. Here's how I'd think it through.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the video, cleaned up for reading. I've corrected a spoken slip in the arithmetic: the $2,000 figure applies to a qualified lead, not a raw lead.

Let's say you have a service business and you have $5,000 a month to spend on marketing. It's very natural at that point to ask, "Should I spend it on SEO or on Google Ads?" My answer, based on my experience, is that that's usually the wrong question.

My name's Brandon Rollins. I run a marketing agency called Pangea Marketing. I've been doing it for closer to eight years than seven. I'm just getting some thoughts out there on the internet, a little raw and rough, edited after the fact.

The reason I say it's the wrong question isn't because SEO and Google Ads are secretly the same thing. They're not. They're definitely not. Google Ads is fast, it's expensive, you can measure it better, and it stops working when you stop paying. And SEO is really slow, it's hard to measure, but it compounds over time and it can keep doing a lot for your business long after the work that created it has ceased.

Those differences matter a lot. But asking which one is better is a little like asking whether you should buy groceries or plant a garden. It's a strange frame for the question. If you need dinner tonight, I have bad news for you about the tomatoes you've got in the ground right now. But if you need to eat for the next five years, let's say DoorDash is going to get really expensive over time.

So the useful questions are: What does my business need right now? What can I afford to learn? And how do these channels fit together over time? That's a better way of asking the question, and I think it gets you closer to a good answer. Bear with me; I've just got a light outline here.

Google Ads buys you speed. It's one of the most useful marketing channels that has ever been made for service businesses, because somebody can type in exactly what they want in Google, and you can pay to appear in front of them immediately.

Somebody can look for "emergency plumber near me," "commercial warehouse fulfillment," or "landscape design Chattanooga." Those are not subtle expressions of intent. That person is actively looking to do business with somebody at that moment, right then and there. And if you've got the economics to compete for that click, Google Ads can put you in a conversation right now, today.

Big advantage. You make a campaign, you get clicks, and you start learning what you want to learn within days: Which keywords are making the phone ring? Which services are people paying for? What kind of copywriting gets people to take action? What geographic areas are people finding me from? Eventually, you can figure out what a qualified lead costs. That's a fast feedback loop.

That kind of speed is useful because if your business needs customers this quarter, and what business doesn't, being able to rank organically in 12 to 18 months isn't exactly the most comforting thing in the world, even though an SEO person who tells you that is correct to tell you that.

Of course, the speed comes with a couple of catches. One is that you pay for all of it. Perhaps worse, it's basically rent. You turn off those ads, and the flow stops. If your competitors outbid you, same basic issue. Google can change its interface whenever it likes, and it doesn't announce it before it happens. It just does.

I've seen companies start with a cost per click at a certain rate, and then it goes up. It's not even the fault of what they're advertising. The industry just changed around them. If 80% of your leads are coming from one campaign when any of these things happens, that's trouble.

That's where SEO is a little more useful. SEO is the opposite. It's incredibly slow. It's irritatingly slow. I do SEO for a living, and I'd love to tell you that if you put somebody on the task on Monday and they're good at the job, you'll have qualified leads on Friday. But that's not how it works.

No matter how good you are at SEO, you cannot make those pages rank immediately unless you are very, very lucky. You can fix technical problems quickly, build out service pages quickly, and publish good content quickly. Google generally likes it when you do those things. It definitely helps to get those out of the way. But they don't owe you quick results because you worked hard. It takes months, for the most part, to see what's actually going to happen with SEO.

You really need to be thinking more like six or twelve months. It's not a good emergency lever. You're not going to break glass and pull the SEO handle, right? It just doesn't work that way.

But once you get it to work, it usually works for a long time. You get a service page ranking, and it could stay up there for a couple of years. I've got articles I wrote in the late 2010s that are still ranking for keywords and haven't otherwise been changed. Those articles are the same.

If you're getting reviews, those accumulate. If you're getting backlinks, those accumulate. If you're getting branded search, that accumulates because people have got your name in their heads. Over time, SEO is really economical. It's quite good about that. But you've got to do the work.

That old shorthand of "ads are rentals and SEO is an asset" is pretty close to true. But it's not the whole truth, so I'm going to have to complicate that a little bit. Which is annoying, but it's true. It's going to happen. I have to make it more complicated.

Okay, SEO or ads. What do you need to think about first? I would say economics. Before you put a dollar into either channel, because whether you pay for ads or you pay for labor to do SEO, you're paying one way or the other, you want to ask, "What can I afford to pay for a qualified lead?"

When you're trying to determine whether SEO or ads is better for your business, think first about your economics. Say you make $8,000 in contribution margin for each new customer you win, and you close one out of every four qualified leads.

If we ignore a bunch of accounting complexity and just do some napkin math, that means a qualified lead is worth about $2,000 before you hit break-even on acquisition. But of course, you probably don't want to spend anywhere near that $2,000. Again, very rough math. So you've got a ceiling, and now you can reason from that. If Google Ads can give you leads for $400, and they're at least average in quality, you can work with that.

If the clicks cost $80 and one in a hundred turns into a qualified lead, that's a very different situation. If your SEO proposal comes back at $4,000 a month for a year, you can ask how many good customers you would need from organic search to justify spending $48,000 in a year.

I'm saying a lot of numbers here, but the point is to figure out what a qualified lead is worth to you. That's a much better conversation than "My competitor is doing SEO, so I think we need SEO," or "The Google Ads seem expensive." Expensive compared to what?

A $500 lead can be really expensive if your average customer only gives you $300 in profit. But a $2,000 lead, and this is the way it is in some industries, can be dirt cheap if a customer is worth a hundred grand. Industry benchmarks can help you sanity-check your numbers, but your own unit economics should decide what you do.

It then helps to ask how quickly you need an answer. Let's say your economics are plausible for both channels. Now you need to figure out timing. If you need revenue in the next 30 to 60 days, I'd be super reluctant to make SEO your only major bet for acquiring customers. You just might not have enough time for it to mature. In fact, in 30 to 60 days, I would venture to say you probably wouldn't.

That's where paid search would help you, because that's about the amount of time it takes to get paid search to at least show some results. You can use paid search to answer questions like: Is anybody looking for this service? Are they going to click on our offer? Will the page convert? Are the leads any good?

You're not just buying traffic. What you're doing is a kind of market research that can also generate leads in its own right. And that can help you make SEO better. You can use ads to inform your SEO, and you can use SEO to inform your ads.

I'm actually going to skip this point in my original notes and go a little further. Sometimes you should start with SEO. I don't want to turn "do Google Ads, do exploratory stuff, and then do SEO" into another law of nature. Not my speed. Marketing is too complicated for laws of nature, truthfully.

There are plenty of businesses where starting with SEO makes sense. If demand is obvious and well established, go for it. If your competitors' websites are just awful, go for it. Maybe you get meaningful search traffic but have technical problems suppressing it, and you make the technical SEO fixes and you're good to go.

Or you might have a Google Business Profile that's got 12 reviews and your competitors have 200, and you need to solve that problem immediately. Maybe paid search in your category is so incredibly expensive that you don't have the funds to do it, but you do have patience and cash flow and can wait for organic growth.

Or you might have another dependable source of immediate business. If you've got good referrals or partnerships or repeat customers, maybe you can just let SEO cook for a little while. These are situations where SEO makes sense.

That's why I say good strategy is situational. I get nervous in the chest when I see people giving advice that every business should do X before Y. It's complicated. Test it, test it, test it, test it.

Neither channel is obviously the right answer. SEO agencies and Google Ads agencies are going to be more inclined to tell you to do the thing they do. Not even because they're lying to you. Sometimes it's just tempting to be biased toward what you do for a living.

But sometimes you don't need to spend on either. If your offer's bad, SEO isn't going to fix it and your ads aren't going to convert. If your sales team doesn't answer the phone, that's a problem no matter what you invest in. If customers hate the service and leave bad reviews, you don't want to put yourself in front of more people. That can make your problem worse faster.

If your market doesn't have very much search demand, you might need to think outside search engine marketing entirely. You might need trade shows or something else. If you have no idea where your current customers come from, you might need to focus on a way to measure it rather than investing in a proper marketing channel right now.

A lot of people think marketing can make stuff up out of whole cloth. I don't believe that. Marketing amplifies what is real because it puts you in front of more people. When reality is good, that's great news for you because more people see you. But if you're pouring traffic into a broken machine, that's a different situation.

Personally, I prefer having a stack of different channels at work because individual channels sometimes fail. Not necessarily permanently, but they fail often enough that you need a plan around this. Google Ads campaigns can degrade. SEO rankings can change. This happens all the time. Algorithms, lead marketplaces, whatever. Referral partners will retire. Email lists will go stale. These things happen.

You don't want to give any channel all your attention. You want to have multiple channels that work, exploit them while they're working, and make sure you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

If you're talking about splitting the budget, let's say you decide to do both ads and SEO, and we'll ignore the other stuff for now. How do you split it? There's no universal 50/50 split, sorry.

The logic I would use is that if you need revenue fast, it makes sense to bias yourself toward the channel that gives you fast feedback, which would be a point in favor of ads. But if you've already got dependable lead flow, that gives you more freedom to invest in SEO, which compounds over time. You might want to spend a little more on SEO and a little less on ads in the short term.

If one channel is already dominating and pulling people in, don't abandon it just because you need to diversify. That can be a problem, too. If a channel is printing money, let it keep doing that. But allocate a fraction of your time and money to exploring alternatives so you don't discover you need a backup plan in the middle of a crisis.

If you don't know what works for you, start small, track leads, and know what a qualified lead is worth. Build the minimum viable test. You don't have to sign a giant retainer just because you saw a chart of national averages. Start small, and don't be afraid to do that.

If you're a service business starting from scratch, I'll make this really concrete.

First, get the foundation right. Make sure your website is crystal clear on what you do. Make sure it's easy to do business with you, whether that's calling or requesting a quote. Fix technical problems, and if you've got a local presence, make sure you've got a Google Business Profile and start getting reviews. Have a way to track leads, too. It doesn't have to be fancy. Even a Google Sheet will do the trick.

Second, consider buying information. If you can afford some paid search, use it to get the phone ringing and see which search terms and keywords people respond to, and what brings in quality leads at a good cost. Track revenue wherever you can.

Third, turn that learning into assets. Keywords and services that are already proving themselves in ads are good candidates for SEO investment. Start building pages around those and slowly strengthen your authority by answering the questions people are asking.

Fourth, keep both channels accountable. Don't get too hung up on click-through rates on Google Ads, and don't let SEO hide behind rankings. Rankings don't matter, and click-through rate doesn't really matter, not in isolation anyway. They matter as a way to get to something else. What really matters is qualified leads, revenue, profit, and things of that nature. Make sure you have a way to track that.

Fifth, diversify deliberately. Once you have something working, don't start a whole bunch of new channels just because you need to. Keep exploiting what's working and explore sensible alternatives one at a time, so you can keep growth moving along.

So, in sum, is SEO or Google Ads better? I like them both. Honestly, I've made a lot of my living doing both. I think the question is easier when you don't see it as an either-or choice. Google Ads is faster. SEO is slower, and it compounds better. With Google Ads, when you turn off the money, you don't see anything come from it anymore. Both can fail, and both can work incredibly well if you know what you're doing.

Both are a lot easier to manage when you know what a qualified customer is worth and have tracking that helps you figure out what's true and what's not. So a mature question is not, "Which channel is better?" It's, "What job does each channel do within my marketing system?" That's the question I would personally want to build a budget around.

If you want more of this kind of measurement-first marketing thinking, I write Practical Marketing on brandonrollins.com. And my company, Pangea Marketing, does this work with service businesses. Links down there.

But even if you never hire us, do yourself a favor: Before you choose between SEO and ads, pencil out the economics. Just really write it down, decide what you need to learn, and make your channel decisions compete based on what's winning leads, revenue, and profit.

For more on the broader trade-off, see SEO vs. Google Ads for Service Businesses. Read more Practical Marketing or learn about Pangea Marketing.