What each one actually is
PPC is renting a position on the results page. You bid on a search phrase, your advert shows above the organic results, and you pay each time someone clicks. SEO is earning a position in the organic results by having the page Google judges best for the search, and you pay in work rather than per click.
| PPC (Google Ads) | SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first visitor | Hours | 2–6 months |
| Cost model | Per click, set by auction | Work: your time or a block of hours |
| When you stop | Traffic stops the same day | Traffic continues; decays slowly without upkeep |
| Control | Precise: phrase, area, hours, budget | Indirect: you influence, Google decides |
| Trust from the searcher | Lower: it is marked as an advert | Higher: it is a result |
| Best for | Urgent demand, testing phrases, competitive head terms | Durable demand, local searches, buyer questions |
| How it goes wrong | Paying for clicks a leaking site cannot convert; percentage-of-spend management | Chasing head terms with no proof; buying links; waiting without measuring |
Source: Cybrial; the time ranges are what we have observed on client sites and are not guarantees.
What clicks actually cost, on real searches
The cost side of the comparison is knowable. Google publishes average click prices for every phrase in its Keyword Planner. In our own market they run from single figures on early cost questions to over seventy pounds on agency-service phrases, and the table shows the shape.
| Kind of phrase | Typical click price |
|---|---|
| An early cost question a buyer types (“what does X cost”) | Under £10 |
| A local service search (“your trade + your town”) | £15–£40 |
| Agency-service and lead-generation phrases | £70 and up |
Source: Google Ads click prices in Cybrial’s own market, read September 2026, given as ranges because the exact phrases and figures are our own research.
At around thirty pounds a click, which is what a competitive local agency search costs, a site converting one visitor in a hundred pays about £3,000 in clicks per enquiry. At four in a hundred, about £750. That single arithmetic is why the website has to convert before either channel is worth funding, and why the fee for managing the adverts must never be a percentage of what you spend on them.
Do PPC first when…
- You need enquiries this month. SEO cannot do that; adverts can.
- The search is competitive and valuable and you are nowhere organically. A year of SEO to reach page one for a head term may be right, but PPC gets you the enquiries in the meantime.
- You want to find out which phrases convert before committing pages to them. A fortnight of adverts across twenty phrases tells you more about buyer intent than any keyword tool.
- Demand is seasonal or time-limited. Nobody does SEO for a two-week sale.
Do SEO first when…
- The budget is small and the business can wait. A few evenings a month or a £250 block goes further in SEO than in an auction against agencies paying £30 a click.
- The market is local. The map pack and the “near me” searches are won by a Google Business Profile and reviews, which is SEO in its cheapest form and which adverts cannot buy.
- The searches are questions. Nobody bids on “how long does a driveway take”, so the organic result is the only result, and a plain answer owns it.
- You have a catalogue. On a 17,000-product store, structure and product data took organic clicks from 672 to 7,781 a month in five months. Buying that traffic would have cost more every month than the work cost once.
How they help each other
PPC data is the best keyword research there is: it shows which phrases produce enquiries, not just visitors, within weeks. SEO pages then earn those phrases so the adverts can be switched off, and the ad budget moves to the next set. A site that ranks organically for a phrase and also advertises on it takes two of the positions above the fold, which is sometimes worth it on the most valuable searches and rarely on the rest.
Measured together, on one dashboard, by enquiries rather than clicks, they stop being rivals. That is how the growth block treats them: hours spent on whichever is producing the next enquiry, with the numbers side by side in the monthly summary.
