You have some budget to spend on getting found, and everyone selling you something has a different answer. Here is the plain version, worked through with numbers you can copy.
Both are trying to do the same job
Someone types "custom booking system Sydney" into Google. You want to be on that page. There are exactly two ways to get there, and they work nothing alike.
Google Ads: you pay to be at the top
You bid on the words people type. Your listing appears above the normal results with a small "Sponsored" label on it. Someone clicks, Google charges you. Nobody clicks, you pay nothing.
- You spend
- $1,500
- A click costs about
- $3
- So you buy
- 500 visitors
- Roughly 1 in 12 enquires
- 40 enquiries
- Cost per enquiry
- about $37
Switch the ads off on a Tuesday and Wednesday brings you nobody. You are renting the position, and the rent is due every day.
SEO: you earn the spot instead
Rather than paying, you make your site the one Google wants to show. Pages that genuinely answer the question, a site that loads fast and is built cleanly, and other websites linking to you. You then sit in the normal results and every click is free.
What it costs you instead is time.
- Month 1Nothing visible happens. You are writing pages and fixing the site.
- Month 3You start showing up for small, very specific searches.
- Month 6Steady traffic, and the first enquiries you did not pay for.
- Month 12The pages you wrote in month one are still bringing people in.
Ahrefs checked two million new pages and found 95% never reach Google’s first page within a year. Slow is normal, and four blog posts is not a plan.
The sum that actually decides it
Ignore which one sounds better. Work out whether a paid click can pay for itself in your business. You need three numbers: what a click costs, how many enquiries become customers, and what a customer is worth to you.
- Both businesses spend
- $1,500
- Both get
- 40 enquiries
- Plumber: closes 1 in 4, job worth $600
- $6,000 back
- Online course: closes 1 in 10, course costs $90
- $360 back
Nothing about Google changed between those two. What a customer is worth did. That single difference decides whether ads are a machine or a leak.
If a customer is worth several hundred dollars to you, ads can work and you should start there. If a customer is worth $50, no amount of clever campaign management will save it, and SEO becomes your only sensible route.
In Australia a search click usually runs $2 to $4, more in competitive trades and a great deal more in law and finance. Google publishes nothing by country, so treat that as a starting guess and your own account as the only real evidence.
The bit that changed recently
Google now answers a lot of questions itself, at the top of the page, before you scroll. Around 68% of searches now end without a click to any website at all. When one of those AI answers appears, the site sitting in first place loses more than half its clicks.
That sounds like the end of SEO. What actually happened is the prize moved. Your pages are now what the AI reads and quotes, and the people who do arrive through those answers buy far more often. Semrush measured them as worth around four times an average Google visitor. Fewer people, better people.
So the writing still matters. You are now doing it to be the answer rather than to be the tenth blue link, which is the work we call GEO.
So which do you start with?
- You need enquiries this month, not next quarter.
- You do not know yet which offer or price people say yes to.
- A customer is worth a few hundred dollars or more to you.
- You have a date attached: a launch, a season, a new location.
- A click costs more than a customer is worth to you.
- Your buyers research for weeks before they choose anyone.
- You can wait two or three quarters without panicking.
- You already get referrals and simply need more people to find you.
Two ways this money gets wasted
Paying for your own name
eBay ran a proper experiment on this: they switched off their ads for people searching "eBay". Almost all of that traffic came straight back through the free listing underneath. Those people were always going to find them. Bid on your own name if a competitor is bidding on it, or if your listing is buried under directories, but do not count those sales as new business.
Buying clicks for a page that cannot hold them
Ads magnify whatever your site already does. If your page takes four seconds to load, you are paying $3 to send someone to a door that opens too slowly. Fixing the page costs less than the clicks you are currently wasting, and the numbers on that are worse than most people expect.
We run SEO, GEO and Google Ads as one plan, because the split between them should come out of your margins rather than out of a preference. If you want this worked through with your own numbers, that is a short conversation.
