What is the difference between SEO and Google Ads?
SEO earns a place in the unpaid results and Google Ads buys a place in the paid ones, and to the person searching they sit on the same page. SEO is done by making your website the best answer to the searches that matter: the right pages, the right words, real evidence, sound technical foundations and mentions from other sites. Google Ads is an auction. You choose the searches, set a budget and pay every time someone clicks through to the page you send them to.
One is an asset you build and keep. The other is a tap you turn on and off.
How quickly does each one bring in enquiries?
Google Ads can bring enquiries in the first week, and SEO usually takes months before the trend is clear. That gap is the whole reason the question gets asked. A well-built ads campaign with conversion tracking shows you within a month what an enquiry costs for your searches in Leeds. SEO on a site that has never had any takes longer, because Google has to find the new pages, learn to trust them and move them past sites that have been there for years.
Once SEO is working it carries on working when the spending pauses. The RB Electrical site in Halifax has produced an average of around two organic leads a week for five years from the service pages we built, at roughly a five to one return on the investment.
What does each channel cost a Leeds business?
Ads cost the click budget plus the management, and SEO costs the time it takes to build the pages, the content and the authority. The click budget is the part people underestimate. Competitive Leeds service searches can cost several pounds a click, and that money goes to Google whether the visitor enquires or not. Management is the smaller part. SEO has no click cost, and the spend goes into things you keep, the pages, the photography, the written case studies and the reviews, all of which also feed the AI assistants and the social channels.
The comparison worth making is cost per enquiry over a year. We will put both estimates in front of you for your own searches before recommending either.
When is Google Ads the right first move?
In four situations. A new business or a new service with no search history and bills to pay now. A search so competitive that ranking is a year away and the enquiries are worth buying in the meantime. A test, where you want to know whether a service or an area produces enquiries before you build pages, photography and content for it. And a seasonal or short-term push, where the work is needed inside a window and there is no time for the slow channel.
In each of those we set the campaign up around conversion tracking, so every pound can be traced to a form or a call, and we say plainly when the cost per enquiry suggests the budget should move somewhere else.
When is SEO the right first move?
When you plan to be trading in Leeds for years and the searches you want are ones people type every week. Established businesses with a track record, a body of jobs to show and a website that can be built on get the most from search, because the evidence already exists and only needs putting where Google and the assistants can read it. Bond Brickwork has had search as its lead channel since 2018, sits at the top of Google for the commercial brickwork searches that matter, and is recommended by AI search.
The same work carries into AI search. The assistants name businesses off the same pages and reviews, so an SEO investment now is also the groundwork for being recommended by ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews later.
Why do most businesses end up running both?
Because they answer different questions. Ads tell you quickly which searches convert, which is exactly the research SEO needs, and SEO steadily reduces the amount of paid traffic you have to buy for searches you now rank for. Run together, with one set of conversion tracking behind both, the ads budget can shrink over time as the organic enquiries grow, and you can watch the handover happen in the monthly report.
That is the pattern we work towards with Leeds clients: paid to start where it is needed, organic to take over, and the figures for both in the same place.
