Google Ads or SEO: Which Should a Trade Business Do First?

This is the question I get asked more than any other, and the honest answer starts with a question back: how soon do you need the work?

That is genuinely most of the decision. Everything else is detail.

What is the actual difference?

Google Ads put you above the free results, usually within a day or two of going live. You bid on searches, you are charged when somebody clicks, and you set the daily budget. The moment you stop paying, you disappear.

SEO is the work of earning your way into the results underneath the ads, and into the map listings. It is slower, it compounds, and it keeps working after you stop actively paying for it.

One rents visibility. The other builds it.

What do the two actually cost?

Vague answers here are how people end up committing to something they cannot sustain, so here are real figures. These are my New Zealand prices; the UK, Australian, US and Canadian ones sit on the pricing page.

	Google Ads	SEO
Setup	NZ$300, about two hours	Included in the monthly
Monthly fee	NZ$600	From NZ$750, which is five hours
Paid to Google	NZ$30 to NZ$50 a day, so NZ$900 to NZ$1,500 a month	Nothing
First month, all in	NZ$1,800 to NZ$2,400	NZ$750
What you own at the end	Nothing	The pages, the rankings, the reviews

Two things fall out of that table.

The first is that ads are not the cheap option. The management fee looks small next to the SEO fee, and then the ad budget doubles or trebles the bill. People routinely sign up for ads thinking they have bought the smaller commitment.

The second is that the SEO figure is the whole figure. There is nothing paid to Google underneath it, which is why a quiet month costs the same as a busy one.

When should you start with ads?

Google Ads are usually the right first move if:

• You are starting out, or working a patch where your name means nothing yet
• You need the phone busier this month, not in six months
• You do emergency work people search for and book the same day
• There is a dead patch in your year you would rather not have
• You want to find out which jobs are worth chasing before committing to months of work

That last one is underrated and it is the reason I sometimes recommend ads to businesses who do not really want them. A month of ads is a paid survey of your own market. It tells you which searches bring real jobs, which bring tyre kickers, and what a lead actually costs you. That is worth knowing before you spend six months building pages for the wrong searches.

There is a caveat I would rather say now than later. Ads buy you visibility on day one. They do not buy you enquiries on day one. The first two weeks of any new campaign are mostly spent discovering which searches are wasting money and turning them off, and the clicks you buy in that fortnight are the worst ones you will ever buy. Budget for a month before you judge it.

When should you start with SEO?

Getting found on Google is usually the right first move if:

• You have enough work to keep going for the next few months
• Your trade is one people plan for rather than panic about, like renovations or landscaping
• You would rather own the result than rent it
• You already have some history, reviews and a site worth sending people to

The thing nobody mentions about SEO is that the first two months look like nothing is happening, because nothing visible is. The work in that period is structural: pages that did not exist, a listing that was half filled in, a site that could not be read properly. It shows up later, all at once, and that gap is where most people lose their nerve and cancel.

What does it look like when it works?

An earthmoving contractor I built for in Taranaki ran the full set: new site, search work and ads together. The published figures from that are 9,000 site visitors and 220 new leads. A Waikato arborist and fencing business came out at 180 per cent more visitors and 610 per cent more conversions.

Those are real numbers off real accounts and I am not going to pretend they are typical, because they are not. Both businesses were starting from almost nothing, which is where the big percentages come from. A business already ranking well does not double again. What those cases do show is the shape of it: the ads carried the first few months while the search work was still invisible, and the free results took over later.

So which one is it?

1. Need work in the next fortnight? Ads. Nothing else moves fast enough, and a monthly SEO fee that cannot work in time is just an expense.
2. Ticking along and thinking about next year? SEO. Start now and it is producing by the time you need it.
3. Seasonal trade with a known quiet patch? Ads, timed. Switch them on six weeks before the dip and off when the diary fills. This is the one case where renting beats owning.
4. Neither, if your website is the weak link. Both send people to your site. If it gives them no reason to ring, you are paying to lose customers more efficiently.

That fourth point catches more businesses than the first three combined. I spent 15 years in plumbing, ten of them running my own business in the UK, and I have watched good tradespeople pour money into ads that landed on a site nobody would ring. Fix the website first, then decide how you are going to fill it.

If you are not sure which of those four you are, the quickest way to find out is to look at whether anybody is reaching you at all. Why your website is not getting any calls walks through separating a visibility problem from a conversion problem, and it takes about ten minutes.

What do most businesses end up doing?

Both, eventually, but rarely at the same time and rarely in the same proportion. The usual pattern is ads to get moving, SEO building quietly underneath, and then ads easing back as the free results start doing the work.

What I would avoid is splitting a small budget across both at once. NZ$1,000 a month across both buys you three hours of search work and an ad budget too small to gather useful data, and at the end of it you cannot tell which half failed. Doing one of them properly beats doing two of them badly, every time.

Before you commit to either, it is worth knowing how many jobs a month you actually need. Toolbox Tribe's break-even calculator turns a vague feeling about the diary into a figure, and that figure is what tells you whether a NZ$2,000 month of ads is reckless or obvious.