SEO vai Google Ads? Five questions is all it takes.
This question comes up in almost every consultation, and the answer depends on five things: deal value, timing, search demand, budget and what the site already has. Answer below and you get a budget split with the reasoning.
How the recommendation is calculated
The tool is not guessing. It weighs the same things we weigh with a client, and every question moves the recommendation in some direction.
Timing carries the most weight
Search advertising brings the first enquiries within days. SEO moves in months, typically three to six before rankings start to carry. If results are needed this quarter, advertising is the only channel fast enough.
Deal value decides whether the click price is bearable
When a single deal is worth tens of thousands, the price of a click hardly matters and advertising pays even if one click in a hundred converts. With a small average order the same click price eats the margin, and organic traffic is in practice the only profitable route.
Search demand is a condition for both
Both channels wait for someone to type into a search box. If you sell something the customer does not yet know to look for, demand has to be created elsewhere first. In that case the right first channel is Meta or LinkedIn, and Google harvests later.
A small budget argues for SEO
Advertising needs data to learn from. On a monthly budget under a thousand euros a campaign never gathers enough conversions for optimisation to work, and the money burns in the learning phase. The same sum spent on content and technical work produces more.
Existing content is the cheapest place to grow
If the site already gets visitors from search, improving the existing pages produces faster than building new ones. From a standing start SEO is slow, and advertising is worth keeping on while the foundation is built.
Most of the time the answer is both
The channels compete far less than the debate suggests. Advertising tells you within a few weeks which search terms produce sales, and that is the most valuable starting information SEO can have: you know which content to invest in before writing a line. In the other direction, organic visibility reduces the need for advertising on exactly the terms that cost the most.
In practice the split also changes over time. At the start the weight is on advertising, because it produces immediately. As organic visibility accumulates, budget shifts to wherever the cost per lead is lowest.