My Clients
Talking of Design
Do You Need Google Ads While You Wait for SEO to Work?
Can’t be doing with reading the lot? Fair enough. Here’s the teeny-weeny version:
- SEO usually takes time, particularly on a new website.
- Google Ads can give you visibility almost immediately while organic rankings are still building. Ooof!
- Ads can also give us useful data about which searches actually produce enquiries.
- You don’t necessarily need to run them forever.
- The best approach is often to let paid and organic search support each other rather than treating them as rivals.
Still here? Well that’s just excellent. Let’s do this playa!
SEO is working, it just might not look like it yet
One slightly frustrating thing about SEO is that you can be doing all the right things and still not immediately see lots of lovely enquiries arriving through Google.
A new website needs time to be discovered, indexed, understood and compared with websites that may already have years of authority, backlinks, reviews and search history behind them.
As I’ve covered in How Long Does SEO Take for a New Website in North Wales? — meaningful organic visibility tends to build over months rather than days.
Which is all very sensible and reasonable unless, of course, you actually need customers now. Which you do don’t you, you impatient swine you! OK…
This is where Google Ads can help
Google Ads allows us to pay for visibility against specific searches rather than waiting for the website to earn those positions organically.
If somebody searches for a service you provide in North Wales, we can potentially place your business in front of them straight away.
That doesn’t mean Google Ads magically replaces SEO. It does something slightly different.
SEO is about gradually building long-term organic visibility. Google Ads allows us to buy targeted visibility while that process is happening.
Used properly, the two can work rather nicely together. Like a flashbang grenade and a stealthy ninja. Or something.
Paid search can also tell us what people actually want
This is one of the bits I find particularly useful.
When a website first launches, a lot of the SEO work is based on research, competitor analysis and sensible assumptions about what people might search for.
Google Ads can start giving us real-world information much sooner.
We can see which search terms trigger the ads, which ones people click, which ones produce enquiries and which ones turn out to be a complete waste of everyone’s time.
That information can then feed back into the organic SEO work. Clever right? They don’t call me Kev for nothing you know.
If a particular search consistently generates good enquiries through Google Ads, that may be something we want to strengthen organically with better service pages, FAQs, articles or location content.
So the ads aren’t just bringing traffic. They can help us learn.
It can be particularly useful for new websites
A brand-new website often has very little search history behind it.
We might have done all the right things at launch – useful content, sensible headings, good internal links, strong technical foundations, Google Search Console, ate all your vegetables and all that jazz – but Google still needs time to decide where the site belongs.
Google Ads can bridge that gap.
Rather than launching the website and then sitting around staring at Search Console every seventeen minutes, we can start generating targeted traffic while the organic side develops.
Do I need to spend loads?
Nope.
There isn’t much sense in chucking a huge amount of money at Google on day one just because the website is new.
I’d rather start with a sensible budget, tightly control the searches we appear for, collect some useful data and then decide whether increasing the spend is justified.
The right budget varies enormously depending on the business, the location and how competitive the searches are.
A specialist service targeting North Wales may require a very different budget to a national ecommerce business selling highly competitive products.
The important thing is that the spend has a reason behind it.
Don’t pay for clicks you don’t actually want
This sounds obvious, but badly configured Google Ads campaigns can become remarkably efficient ways of giving Google money.
Broad targeting, irrelevant search terms and weak location settings can all result in clicks from people who were never realistic customers in the first place.
That’s why I prefer to keep campaigns fairly focused, particularly at the beginning.
We can look at the actual search terms regularly, exclude irrelevant searches and gradually refine the campaign around the traffic that appears useful.
If we’re advertising a North Wales business, I’d also want to make sure we’re actually targeting the North Wales customers we’re interested in rather than accidentally paying for somebody in Newcastle to admire the advert. Wey aye man.
Google Ads shouldn’t be an excuse to ignore SEO
This is probably the main point.
Paid search works while you’re paying for it. Stop the ads and the paid visibility stops with them.
Organic SEO is different. The work we do on the website, content, backlinks, reviews and authority can continue contributing to visibility over time.
So I generally wouldn’t recommend using Google Ads as an excuse to forget about the organic side.
If anything, the early months are a good opportunity to use both.
The ads can generate quicker visibility and useful search data, while we continue working on the longer-term SEO foundations underneath them.
Can we reduce Google Ads later?
Potentially, yes.
If organic rankings improve and the website begins generating enough enquiries naturally, we can reassess what the ads are doing for us.
That might mean reducing the budget, concentrating only on particularly valuable searches, promoting a new service or pausing them completely.
Or we may discover that paid search is profitable enough that it makes sense to keep running alongside organic SEO.
I’m not particularly interested in keeping a campaign running simply because we’ve always had one.
If the numbers say it’s useful, great. If they don’t, we change it. “Simples”, as that rat or whatever says on that advert.
What should happen after launch?
I tend to treat the first four to six months after launching a website as an active growth period rather than just waiting to see what happens.
That can involve Search Console, content, local SEO, reviews, backlinks and – where it makes commercial sense – Google Ads.
I’ve put the wider process together in Oh What To Do in the First Six Months After Launching Your Shiny New Website?.
The important bit is that we’re gathering information and gradually getting better at understanding what actually brings useful visitors to the website.
So, do you need Google Ads while SEO builds?
Not necessarily.
If you already have plenty of enquiries coming from referrals, repeat customers or other marketing, there may be no urgency at all.
But if a new website needs visibility quickly, Google Ads can be a very useful way of getting in front of people while organic SEO is still building.
And because the campaign gives us real search and conversion data, it can also help us make better SEO decisions later.
For me, that’s the useful way to think about it. Not Google Ads versus SEO in a TikTok viral slap fight, but whether paid search can help us while we build the organic side properly.
Want some help after launch?
If your new website is live and you’re wondering whether Google Ads, SEO or a combo of the two makes sense, give me a shout.
We can look at what you’re trying to achieve, what Google is currently doing with the site and whether paying for traffic is actually worth it.
No compulsory enormous monthly marketing package required.
Also in the After Launch SEO series:
