SEO vs. Google Ads (SEM): Which One Should Your Business Invest In First?

Written by Ravi Patil

Director, Digital Impact Gurus | Digital Marketing Strategist | 17+ Years in Digital Marketing

If you need your phone to ring this month, start with Google Ads.

If you’re building something that still brings in customers in three years, start with SEO. That way, you’re not paying for every single click.

Most businesses we work with at DIG in Sydney end up running both eventually. Both offer real benefits depending on where you are in your business journey. But the order you start in depends on how much runway you have right now.

Read more about which option is the best for you.

What SEO Actually Does for Your Sydney Business

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is how you earn your spot in Google’s organic search results. Google tracks the following:

• Your site speed
• Your content
• How well it matches what people are typing 
• It also tracks how many other credible sites point back to you.
• Then it decides where you sit in Google’s search results.

In short, when you’re paying for SEO, you’re not paying for the placement directly. Instead, you’re paying for the work that earns that placement.

What Does the Payoff Look Like?

The top organic result gets an average click-through rate of 27.6%. That’s according to Backlinko’s analysis of 4 million Google search results, which is owned and published by SEMrush.

Positions further down the page drop off fast. Moving up just one spot can lift your click-through rate by an average of 2.8%. That effect gets stronger the closer you get to the top.

But There’s a Catch

SEO doesn’t hand you the best position on day one, or even after a week. It actually takes months of consistent work for Google to trust a page enough to rank it near the top. That’s especially true for anything competitive.

Most SEO campaigns need four to six months of consistent publishing before results show up; that timeline stretches out even further in busy categories like trades or legal services.

Ahrefs analysed over 1 million new pages and found only 1.74% reached the top 10 within a year. The average page sitting at position #1 today is five years old.

Once you’re there, though, the traffic keeps coming without a daily or per-click bill. For instance, a blog post or service page you built eight months ago can still bring in calls next year. It costs you nothing extra to keep that traffic coming.

What Google Ads Actually Do for You

Google Ads flips the timeline, replacing time with money. But one wrong move or a DIY effort can send your money down the drain.

While SEO plays the long game, ads play the short game with money. The more you spend, the better the results, but only with the right strategy behind it.

With Google Ads, your business can sit at the very top of the page, ahead of every organic result. That includes the ones that took a competitor two years to earn.

In short, you’re not waiting on an algorithm to trust you. You’re bidding for your own spot, and the higher your bid, the better your position.

Google Ads Cost per Click in Australia

Across industries, the average cost per click on Google Search in Australia sits somewhere between $2 and $4.

The average Google Ads cost-per-click (CPC) for a plumber ranges from $15 to $50 AUD, and for an electrician, keywords commonly run $8 to $22 a click. The exact price depends on the suburb and the number of competitors bidding on the same term.

You can check the live cost of any keyword with SEMrush’s Keyword Overview tool, which pulls data straight from Google Ads.

Plumbing, Electrical, Roofing and other emergency-driven trades often land at the higher end of that range. That’s because someone searching for “emergency plumber Parramatta” needs help right now and is ready to get it. This intent is exactly why the click costs more. Emergency work or after-hours repairs command top-tier bids, often exceeding $50 per click for plumbing.

The Catch with Google Ads

The part that surprises people unfamiliar with Google Ads is simple. As soon as you stop paying, the campaign pauses. Your traffic and leads stop the same afternoon.

There’s no residual value sitting there, as there is with a well-ranking page. It’s a direct trade of dollars for clicks, and nothing carries over once the budget runs dry.

Why the Smartest Businesses Eventually Run Both

We’ve had a Sydney home improvement business come to us to get three or four jobs a month off an old, template-style website.

We built a custom website and ran SEO and Google Ads together. Within about three months, that business was booking twenty to twenty-five better-paying jobs a month. That was enough for the owner to upgrade the van he’d been driving for years.

What actually happened is that we fixed errors in their pipeline. Then we applied strategies that changed the entire trajectory of their business.

The Final Takeaway

Ads filled the gap immediately while SEO work was still building in the background. As the site earned its own rankings, a growing share of those jobs started arriving on their own. No one had to pay for a click to get them. That freed the ad budget to get redirected toward the highest-value work instead of just keeping the lights on.

If you run only ads, you’re renting every single customer forever. That price keeps going up as more competitors emerge.

If you run only SEO, you’re leaving months of empty pipeline on the table. You’re waiting for rankings that build with consistent effort over time.

Run both, in the right order and with the right strategy for your Sydney business. That’s how you actually build something that works.

If you’re not sure which side of the spectrum you should land on, book a call with Digital Impact Gurus. We’ll guide you toward the best possible path for your business.