SEO Or Google Ads First? Here Is How To Decide

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated August 17, 2026

This is the age-old question, and my answer has changed. For years I told people to build the website, get SEO working, get some clients and cash flow in the door, and then start running ads. I do not say that anymore. Google is becoming more pay-to-play every single day, AI answers sit above the organic results, and page one for most commercial searches is now ads and third-party lists rather than the companies actually selling the thing. If you are a new business that needs clients this month, paid advertising is how you get them. SEO runs in the background the whole time.

1My answer to this question changed

My old position was reasonable at the time. Build your website. Get your SEO working. Get an audience, get a few clients, get some cash flow. Then once organic is producing, layer paid advertising on top of it.

I have long said you do not necessarily need paid advertising if you are very well optimized and your business runs itself. That is still true for some businesses. It is just true for far fewer of them than it used to be.

What changed is the search results page. Google Ads take the top. AI Overviews take the next chunk. What is left of page one is increasingly Reddit threads, Quora answers, YouTube videos, and roundup articles written by people who are not you. Meanwhile competition keeps entering every market, whether you sell software, run an ecommerce store, or install HVAC systems.

So my answer today, for a brand new business, is run paid advertising. PPC first, SEO ongoing.

Question to Answer:

If you needed ten new customers in the next 30 days, which channel could realistically deliver them?

2Watch the full tutorial

This is a quick one. I go through live search results for both a competitive software category and a local service business to show what page one actually looks like before making the call.

SEO vs PPC: Which One Should You Start With?

Question to Answer:

Have you actually searched your main commercial keyword recently and looked at what occupies page one?

3What page one actually looks like now

Go search your most important commercial keyword. Not your brand name. The term somebody types when they are ready to buy what you sell.

I ran "best AI video generator" as a test, deliberately picking a brutally competitive category rather than an easy one. Here is the order of what came back:

1. Three ads at the very top.
2. An AI Overview.
3. Then, finally, organic results. About six or seven of them on page one.

Now look at what those organic results actually were. Zapier. Reddit. Quora. Facebook. YouTube. A "10 best" listicle. An app store listing. A blog post. A handful of informational pages.

Almost none of them were the product pages of companies that make AI video generators. The one exception was Google's own tool.

The AI Overview was pulling from the same places. Best AI video generator lists. YouTube channels. Roundup articles. So even the AI answer is built on top of third-party content rather than on the vendors themselves.

This is the thing to understand. For most competitive commercial keywords, ranking is no longer a matter of building a better page about your product. The page that ranks is somebody else's list. Your job is to be on it.

Question to Answer:

How many results on page one for your main keyword are actual companies selling the product, versus lists and forums?

4Why you cannot write your way onto the lists

If the pages that rank are third-party roundups, Reddit threads, and YouTube videos, then the SEO question changes completely. It is not "what content should I publish." It is "how do I get mentioned in content other people publish."

And you cannot write your way there. If I launched an AI video generator tomorrow, I could publish every article in the world and produce every video in the world, and I would not be on a single one of those lists. Nobody knows I exist yet.

The realistic way onto those lists is promotion. Being visible enough, often enough, that the people writing the lists know your product exists and have a reason to include you. One company in that category has reached out to me directly many times, and I see their ads constantly. That is the entire reason I know their name. That awareness is what eventually turns into mentions, reviews, and inclusion in roundups.

You will also notice that plenty of companies simply publish their own list and put themselves at the top of it. I looked at one that ranked well and had ranked itself first in its own roundup, in an article that had not been updated since the previous year. I am curious how Google handles that long term. It is not a strategy I would build on.

The chicken-and-egg problem for local businesses is the same. A new service business needs jobs before it can earn the reviews that support local rankings. But it needs rankings to get jobs. Paid advertising is what breaks that loop. You buy the first jobs, those jobs produce reviews, and the reviews eventually support the organic visibility.

Question to Answer:

Which third-party lists, directories, or communities would need to mention you for you to compete organically?

5The exception: when SEO alone actually works

There is a real exception, and it is worth being honest about it. If you have a genuine moat, meaning a product with little direct competition or a clearly defined lane nobody else occupies, you may not need paid advertising at all.

If you invented a product that solves a specific problem nobody else solves, you can publish good content, collect a few reviews, and be fine. The competition is not there to fight you for the terms.

I looked at one AI tool that fits this pattern. Rather than competing for "AI video generator" against everybody, they picked a narrow lane and owned it: meme maker, meme creator, meme generator, and related terms. They spend nothing on paid search, have no paid search history at all, and rank well organically across that cluster. Their homepage alone pulls roughly 3,000 organic clicks a month on brand searches.

They do not need to run ads. If they wanted to grow faster, ads would be the way to do it, but the business works without them.

That is the test. Have you picked a lane narrow enough that you can actually own it organically? If yes, SEO-first may still work for you. If you are entering a category with ten established competitors and four ads above every result, it will not.

Question to Answer:

Is there a specific niche you could realistically dominate organically, or are you competing head-on in a crowded category?

6What it looks like when SEO is not enough

Here is the other side of that comparison. Another tool in the same AI video space, a broad all-in-one platform doing video, image, voice, and music, has organic and paid keyword profiles that look similar on the surface. But their estimated organic search traffic is only around 300 clicks a month.

Three hundred clicks a month is ten clicks a day. That is not enough to drive a business. I can say that with confidence because my own site gets only slightly more than that, and I would never rely on it alone for client acquisition.

So what are they doing? Spending roughly $20,000 a month on paid advertising. For a product that needs a constant flow of new people trying it, that is the only way to get the volume. Unless you have a social following or an influencer face attached to the product, it is very difficult to get a lot of new people seeing your tool every day through organic alone.

The local version of this is even clearer. I looked at pest control companies in my area. The two you see running ads are also the ones with trucks everywhere and strong local presence. Scroll further down and you find established companies with twenty years in business, no paid keywords, and very limited organic search traffic. They are running on their Google Business Profile, word of mouth, and long-term contracts. That works for them because they built it over two decades.

Then there is the newer company with fifteen years of experience and a thin website. If that owner told me he needed more clients, SEO is not the answer. Not because SEO does not work, but because it does not work in the timeframe he needs. The answer is paid advertising, pointed at a landing page with a call button and a contact form, so somebody can reach him today.

Question to Answer:

How many organic clicks does your site get per day right now, and is that enough to run your business on?

7PPC is how you test whether your offer works

Speed is the obvious argument for PPC. A search campaign can produce calls and form fills within days. SEO on a new or low-authority site typically takes three to six months to show early movement and six to twelve months for anything steady.

But the more valuable argument is that paid advertising tells you whether your offer is any good, and it tells you fast.

Once you are ready to take on customers, running ads answers a question you cannot answer any other way: do we actually have a good offer for the people we are trying to serve? You put real money in front of real demand and you find out. If nobody converts, the problem is your offer, your price, your page, or your market, and you have learned that in two weeks instead of eight months.

The control matters too:

• Budget. You decide what you spend daily. Pause it the moment you need to, push harder during your busy season.
• Geography. Set location targeting to presence, meaning people actually in your service area, rather than people merely showing interest in it.
• Measurement. Count only qualified calls, like those lasting more than 60 seconds, so junk calls and wrong numbers do not pollute your data.
• Timing. A tree service can react to a storm within hours. SEO cannot respond to a demand spike that is happening right now.

One caveat worth stating: do not run ads before you can service the work. Paid advertising is for when you are ready to take on customers, not before.

Question to Answer:

Can your business handle ten new customers next week if the ads work?

8The PPC-first framework, step by step

1. Build the landing page first. Before you spend anything, make sure the page you are sending traffic to is ready to convert. Call button visible, short contact form, clear statement of what you do and where you do it.
2. Launch search campaigns for your most profitable services. Start with search, because that is where intent is highest and demand shows up fastest. Separate campaigns by service and service area so you can see which ones earn budget.
3. Set location targeting to presence only. You want people physically in the area you serve.
4. Start with exact match. Tight control while you learn which queries convert, then expand once you see the pattern.
5. Track calls and forms as primary conversions. With a call duration threshold so you are counting leads, not rings.
6. Review the search terms report weekly. Add negatives, promote converters, shift budget toward what books jobs.
7. Optimize on cost per lead, not clicks. A keyword that brings fewer clicks and more calls beats a keyword with the opposite profile every time.

On bidding. Start with Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks with a bid cap while conversion history builds. Google's benchmark for evaluating Smart Bidding performance is at least 30 conversions over the last 30 days. You can technically start Target CPA with no history, but you will not be able to judge whether it is working below that volume.

On budget planning. Before you spend a dollar, open Google Keyword Planner, enter your target keywords, and look at the top of page bid high range. That gives you a realistic ceiling for what clicks cost in your market. Then use the Forecasts tab to see what different daily budgets would produce.

Use Google Ads Experiments to test headlines, offers, and calls to action side by side. Ignore the first week while the system learns, then judge each variation on cost per lead.

Question to Answer:

Is your landing page ready to convert traffic before you turn ads on?

9Turning PPC data into your SEO roadmap

This is the payoff of doing paid first. After 60 to 90 days of running ads, you know things about your market that an SEO-first business is still guessing at.

Think of your PPC account as the first draft of your SEO plan. You spend months on organic content either way. The difference is whether you spend those months on keywords you hope will convert or on keywords you have watched convert with your own money.

Question to Answer:

Which three search terms have produced the most leads in your ads account, and do you have a dedicated page for each?

10PPC for clients today, SEO for the long game

A fair objection to everything above: if you are building out landing pages and location pages for your ads, are you not just doing SEO anyway?

Yes, and that is the point. This is not PPC instead of SEO. It is paid advertising for lead flow now, with SEO running constantly in the background. The local service pages you build for your campaigns are the same pages that will rank organically in a year. You are doing both, just in an order that pays the bills while the slower channel matures.

I will use my own business as the example. I have gone back to doing more SEO for Surfside PPC, and the reason is specifically that I want to be a company that gets recommended in AI results. That is a long-term play and it is worth investing in now.

But if I am looking for clients today, it is paid advertising. That is how you get clients.

Both things are true at the same time. The mistake is treating them as an either-or decision, or worse, sequencing them so that the slow one has to work before the fast one starts.

Question to Answer:

Are you running both channels, or waiting on one before starting the other?