NightshiftDirect

Guide

SEO or paid search: which should a local business pay for first?

Paid search and organic search both put you in front of people nearby who are looking for what you do. They differ in how fast they bring calls and in what is left when you stop paying. This guide helps you decide which comes first for your business.

By NightshiftDirect Research. Published . Updated .

How does paid search charge you?

Mostly by the click. You pay each time someone clicks your ad, and you set the most you are willing to pay for one. Google often charges less than that maximum, and this way of pricing is why paid search is also called pay-per-click, or PPC (Google Ads Help).

Which ads show, and in what order, is settled by an auction that runs again for every single search. Your bid is one input. Google also weighs the quality of your ad, the context of the search and other factors, so your position and price can change from one search to the next (Google Ads Help on the auction).

What do a click and a lead cost in your field?

LocaliQ publishes average costs built from its own customers' campaigns on Google and Microsoft, with no date range given for them. Treat them as a starting point: your town, your service and who else bids in your area set what you actually pay.

A lead is an inquiry, and only some inquiries become customers. To see what a customer costs, divide the cost per lead by the share of leads you win. Here are three of LocaliQ's categories that cover many local businesses:

Average cost per click and per lead in three local categories
CategoryCost per clickCost per lead
Dentists & Dental Services$8.00 (LocaliQ)$72.97 (LocaliQ)
Home & Home Improvement$8.33 (LocaliQ)$90.92 (LocaliQ)
Attorneys & Legal Services$9.87 (LocaliQ)$131.63 (LocaliQ)

Does paying for ads help your organic results?

No. Google says advertising with it has no effect on a site's presence in its search results, and that it never accepts money to include or rank sites there (Google Search Central). The two are separate systems, so treat them as separate decisions with separate budgets, each judged by its own numbers.

What are Local Services Ads?

They are a second kind of Google ad, open only to listed kinds of business, and they charge for each lead instead of each click. The US list includes plumbers, roofers, electricians, HVAC, dentists, chiropractors and many kinds of lawyer (Google Local Services Help). Google screens each business for its Verified badge, and even ads that run before the badge need a license, or a business registration where no license is required.

If your category is on the list, these ads are worth pricing alongside ordinary search ads, because paying per lead removes the risk of paying for clicks that never call.

When should ads come first?

Start with ads when one or more of these is true:

When should organic work come first?

Start with the organic side when you can wait months for it to show, when clicks in your field cost a large share of what a job earns you, or when customers mostly choose from the map results and the reviews beside them. It also comes first when your profile or site has basic gaps, because those gaps waste ad money too: an ad that lands on a slow page with no tappable number pays for the visit and loses the caller.

Our Local plan is $1,250 a month, month to month: GBP Care and Review Engine, citation cleanup, two data-backed local pages a month, map-pack tracking and a monthly report against your day-one baseline.

Can you run both at once?

Yes. Ads can bring in calls during the months before you know whether the organic work pays off, with a hard monthly cap so the ad spend never runs away. Judge each by its own count of customers, and move money between them when the numbers tell you to.

We do not manage ads yet. PPC management has a waitlist and no opening date, so if you want ads now, run them yourself or with someone else, and keep the account in your own name.

A worked example: one month of each

Round, made-up numbers for one month, standing in for your own. The ad rows are what you would read from your own ad account, not an average from the table. The last row is our published price for the Local plan.

Ads: budget for the month
$1,500
Ads: cost per lead in your own account
$60
Ads: leads that month
25
Ads: leads that become customers
1 in 4
Ads: new customers that month
6
Organic: the Local plan for the same month
$1,250

The ad rows are easy to read: 25 leads, about 6 customers, and nothing more once the budget is spent. The organic row is harder to judge in month one, because what it pays for (reviews, pages, a complete profile) shows over months. If you need customers this month, count what the ad rows bring in; if you can wait months, add up what the organic work has left in place.

Round numbers for the arithmetic, not a benchmark and not a forecast. Put in your own.

Questions

Can I switch the ads off once the organic side is working?

Yes, if your own call counts say the organic side now brings enough work without them. Cut the ad budget in steps and watch your calls for a few weeks after each cut, instead of switching everything off at once.

Does Google rank advertisers higher in the regular results?

No. Buying ads buys ad space and nothing else, and Google says it never takes money to rank a site (Google Search Central). If someone selling you ads says the budget will also lift your regular listing, doubt the rest of their pitch too.

How much should I spend on ads to test demand?

Work it out rather than guess. Decide how many leads you need to see before you judge, multiply by the cost per lead for a field like yours, and set that as a hard cap for a fixed number of weeks. When the weeks are up, judge the test by the customers it brought in.

Do you run ads for clients?

Not yet, and there is no opening date. Until then, a Fix Sprint can get the pages your ads send people to ready for them.

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