What is PPC, and when does it fit a local business?
PPC is advertising where you pay each time someone clicks. With Google Ads, your advert appears above the ordinary results for searches you choose, and you pay a price set by auction for every click. It fits when the need is immediate, when you are testing whether a search is worth having before you build for it, when the results page is already full of adverts, or when a new service has no history for Google to rank. It stops working the moment the budget stops, and it only pays if the page the click lands on turns visitors into enquiries.
What does SEO give you that adverts cannot?
Durability. A page that has earned its place keeps bringing enquiries long after the work that built it is paid for. RB Electrical in Halifax has averaged around two organic leads a week for five years, delivering roughly a five to one return, and none of those clicks were bought. SEO also builds the thing adverts borrow: the evidence, the pages and the reviews that make a business credible when someone checks, which they do whichever route brought them.
How do you read your own results page to decide?
Search your most valuable service with Bradford after it, from a phone, and look at the top of the page. Count the adverts, note whether there is a map pack, and see where the first ordinary result sits. If the first organic result is below the fold, adverts and the map pack are taking the early clicks and PPC will get you seen fastest. If the page is mostly organic results from local firms, a good page can win its share without paying per click.
Then open Keyword Planner, which is free with a Google Ads account, and check the suggested bid for the search. A high cost per click on a search worth a lot per job is one you eventually want to own without paying for it.
What does an enquiry need to be worth?
Work it out before you spend on either. Take the average value of a job from that search, the share of enquiries you win, and the cost per click, and you have the arithmetic for adverts: how many clicks buy one enquiry, and what that enquiry costs. Do the same sum with a monthly SEO budget spread over a year and the enquiries you expect once the pages rank. Neither number is a promise. Both tell you which channel can afford the search at all.
How do the two work together?
Adverts tell you within weeks which searches produce enquiries, which is information SEO would take months to gather. Build the organic pages for the searches that convert, and as they climb, ease the spend off them and move it to the next search you want to test. A business run this way ends up paying for clicks only where it has to. The mistake is running both without looking at the numbers, so the advert and the organic page compete for the same click and nobody knows which one earned it.
What would Halizona suggest for your business?
It depends on how urgent the work is and what the results page shows, and we would want to look before we answer. We do both, so there is no reason for us to steer you towards one. What you would get is the sums above done with your real figures, a straight recommendation on the order, and tracking on the enquiries so you can see which channel paid.
