SEO vs PPC: which to choose, search by search (and how many clicks an ad brings if you already rank first)

SEO or PPC? SEO brings clicks you don't pay for but takes months; Google Ads brings clicks from day one, each at auction price, and stops when the budget runs out. But the choice isn't made for the whole website, it's made search by search: across the 12 UK searches we measured, a commercial click costs on average 5.2 times an informational question, and when you already rank first in the organic results about half the clicks on your ads would have reached you anyway, according to a Google meta-analysis of 390 studies.

Before writing this article we read the eight articles Google UK shows on page one for "seo vs ppc" (the ninth result is a video).

Every one of them says the same thing: it depends on your goals, and it's best to use both.

Fair enough. But only two bring a number with a source (Mailchimp quotes RankPay, Improvado quotes FirstPage Sage and Backlinko), and none measures how many paid clicks are actually extra. (The figure that keeps coming back is how long SEO takes: "3-6 months" at SEO.com and One Day Agency, "4 to 12 months" at Semrush, "6-12 months" at Improvado, never backed by a study.)

And without numbers, "it depends" doesn't help you decide. The mistakes we see most often in the accounts we take over start right there:

• choosing one channel for the whole website, instead of one per type of search;
• paying for ads on searches where you already rank first organically, without ever measuring how many of those clicks are really extra;
• believing that ads help your rankings, when Google says the opposite in its own help pages.

We run both channels together for several clients, and their numbers say precise things.

Macropix, an Italian LED wall manufacturer, got 328 quote requests from Google Ads in 2025 at €39.44 each. Meanwhile it gets 1,495 organic clicks a year on the word "ledwall" alone, without paying for them.

Sunscape, which looks for land for solar farms in Italy, started from zero on both fronts in 2026: 144 enquiries from Google Ads from January to August, while SEO went from 46 to 195 organic clicks a month.

So why not just do everything?

Because there's only one budget. Every pound spent on a click you'd have got for nothing is a pound taken away from the searches where you don't appear at all.

Below you'll find:

• our test on 12 UK searches in four sectors, with competition and cost per click;
• how many clicks an ad really brings when you already rank first, according to experiments by Google, eBay and Edmunds;
• what affects what between Google Ads and SEO;
• the Google Ads report that measures the overlap on your account, at no cost;
• three real projects and which channel each one started with.

Let's start.

SEO and Google Ads in one table (the short version)

SEO is the work on your website that gets it into the organic results; Google Ads is the auction that gets it into the sponsored slots. They're the two ways to be found on a search engine that handles 91.39% of searches in the UK, according to StatCounter (September 2026).

Criterion	SEO	Google Ads
What you pay for	The work: content, technical fixes, links	Every click, at auction price
When the clicks arrive	After months: Sunscape reached 38 keywords on page one six months after its pages went live	From the first day of the campaign
What's left if you stop	Rankings drop slowly	The ads disappear at once
What you control	The content, not the position	Keywords, copy, budget and area
Which searches you appear on	All of them, informational questions included	Only where someone takes part in the auction

We've already compared the costs, dividing an SEO retainer by the price of a click, in our article on SEO and SEM: differences and costs, and the basics of the paid model are in our pay-per-click guide. Here we focus on the question that remains open: which searches to use one for, and which the other.

Which searches suit one and which the other (our test on 12 UK searches)

Commercial searches are where the auction is crowded and clicks are expensive; informational questions have fewer advertisers, cheaper clicks, and are SEO's natural ground. We checked this on 12 UK searches in four sectors where our clients work.

Method: average monthly volume over the last twelve months, competition index (0 to 100, how crowded the auction is compared with other keywords) and indicative cost per click from Google's Keyword Planner, read via DataForSEO on 10 October 2026, United Kingdom. CPCs are converted from US dollars at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026 ($1.3226 to the pound).

Sector	Search	Type	Searches a month	Competition (0-100)	Indicative CPC
Solar panels	solar panel quote	Commercial	1,000	78	£23.14
Solar panels	how do solar panels work	Informational	4,400	23	£2.15
Solar panels	how much electricity does a solar panel produce	Informational	880	57	£2.46
Land for solar	solar farm on my land	Commercial	10	43	£4.28
Land for solar	solar farm lease	Commercial	10	30	£2.64
Land for solar	agrivoltaics	Informational	880	12	£2.14
LED walls	led wall hire	Commercial	140	75	£10.00
LED walls	led wall	Category (mixed)	1,000	99	£3.03
LED walls	how do led screens work	Informational	10	28	£1.75
Energy	gas and electricity deals	Commercial	9,900	82	£8.37
Energy	how to read a smart meter	Informational	2,400	25	£1.38
Energy	what is the energy price cap	Informational	880	63	£1.35

Put side by side, the averages say this.

Commercial searches: average competition 62, average click £9.69.

Informational questions: average competition 35, average click £1.87.

A commercial click costs 5.2 times an informational one. (The two land searches are tiny in the UK, about 10 a month each: where demand is that thin, neither channel fills a pipeline on its own.)

So informational clicks come cheap: why not run ads on them?

Because someone searching "how do solar panels work" isn't asking for a quote. A £2.15 click that brings no enquiries is still a cost, and on these questions Google increasingly shows an AI answer that keeps the click (the numbers are in our article on zero-click searches). These are searches to cover with a page that stays, not with an auction.

By contrast, "solar panel quote" at £23.14 a click with competition 78 is the search where an installer wants to be today, not in six months. In Italy, where the equivalent search ("preventivo fotovoltaico") cost €7.36 a click on 8 October 2026, Valore Solare, which we manage on Google Ads only, pays on average €70.78 per enquiry, across 1,506 enquiries. At UK click prices the sum is different, so check the cost per enquiry on your own account before scaling up.

The "gas and electricity deals" row has a practical reading too: 9,900 searches, clicks at £8.37 on the national average. In Italy, Contesini Consulenze, which sells gas and electricity contracts from two branches in the province of Mantua, pays €7.20 per enquiry with local campaigns, little more than one average national click there (€6.17). Narrowing the area is what keeps the cost down.

The interesting case is the middle row: "led wall", 1,000 searches a month, competition 99 but clicks at £3.03. It's a category word, searched both by people buying and people finding out. There it pays to be present both ways, which is what Macropix does in Italy on "ledwall" (the numbers are further down).

One clarification: high competition doesn't mean "forget SEO". It means that's where the organic click is worth more, because at auction it would be expensive.

If you already rank first on Google, how many clicks does the ad bring? (the answer from 390 studies)

An incremental click is one that wouldn't have arrived without the ad: it's the only click the ad really earns you. When you appear both in the ads and in the organic results, you'd have got some of the paid clicks anyway, for nothing.

In 2011 Google's researchers analysed more than 400 cases of accounts that had paused their ads. The result: on average 89% of paid clicks were not recovered by the organic results.

Nearly nine in ten. Case closed?

No, because that average mixes advertisers who rank first organically with those who aren't on page one at all. The following year the same group split 390 studies by the advertiser's organic position:

Advertiser's organic position	Ad clicks that are genuinely extra
1	about 50%
2 to 4	82%
5 and below	96%

In the same study 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks came on searches where the advertiser had no organic result on page one. Put simply: most of the spend goes where SEO isn't present, and there the ad is almost all extra clicks.

The extreme case is your own name.

In 2014 Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko and Steven Tadelis published eBay's experiments on paid search ads: on ads bought for searches containing the brand name they found no measurable short-term benefit. On generic terms the ads worked with new or infrequent users, while regular users, who would have bought anyway, absorbed most of the spend.

Edmunds, a US car website, repeated the test in 2015 across 210 local markets and found something different: switching off ads on its own name lost more than half of the paid traffic, up to 72% in the markets where those ads mattered most. The authors (Lorenzo Coviello, Uri Gneezy and Lorenz Goette, summary on VoxEU) suggest that half went to the pages of competitors who were buying the word "Edmunds".

Who's right?

Both, in different markets. If someone is buying your name, a brand ad defends real clicks; if nobody is, you're often paying for what would arrive for nothing. Before deciding, search your brand and look at who sits above you.

At Macropix the brand name brings 452 organic clicks in twelve months, the word "ledwall" alone 1,495: the value of SEO there lies in the searches that don't contain the name.

Does Google Ads help SEO? (not for rankings, yes in three indirect ways)

Ads don't move organic rankings. Google Ads Help puts it plainly: "Running online ads has no impact on where your website appears in organic search results."

The reverse does happen, indirectly. Italian consultant Gianpaolo Antonante explains it well in his guide to Google Ads and SEO (in Italian). There are three routes.

1. The page counts towards Quality Score. Google Ads' Quality Score has three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. A useful, relevant page, which is also what SEO asks for, raises the third.
2. Dynamic ads read your website. Dynamic Search Ads take their landing page and headline from your site's content, and according to Google "the most important signal" for the headline "is the HTML title of your page". Well-written titles, better ads.
3. Search terms become keyword research. The search terms report tells you which queries convert and at what cost, data Search Console doesn't give you. In Antonante's example, for a law firm "diffamazione su facebook" (Facebook defamation) converted at 4.69% (3 enquiries from 64 clicks) and "diffamazione sui social" (defamation on social media) at zero from 51. Same topic, two pages of very different value: that's the starting point for keyword research.

And the article on this very results page saying you can "use SEO's authority to improve PPC Quality Scores"?

Half true. Google Ads doesn't read any "SEO authority": it reads the landing page. If the SEO work has made it more useful for people arriving from the ad, the score goes up; if it has only added keywords or links, it doesn't.

How to measure the overlap on your account (the report almost nobody opens)

The Google Ads paid and organic report shows, search by search, when you appear with the ad only, organically only, or both. It costs nothing: you just need to link Search Console to the account.

1. Link Search Console to Google Ads today. Organic data starts from the day you link them and the report doesn't recover history: doing it now takes two minutes, putting it off costs months of data.
2. Open the report from Insights and reports, then Report editor. It counts text ads only, not Shopping.
3. Filter for searches with both ads and organic results. These are the candidates for overlap.
4. On the ones where you rank first organically, run a test. Google's researchers recommend randomised experiments, for example by geographic area: you lower or pause the ads in half the areas and compare total clicks, organic plus paid, with the other half.
5. Decide on enquiries, not clicks. Google's studies measure clicks, eBay's measured sales. What counts for you is leads.

For a small business, an area-based test often doesn't have enough volume. In that case a before-and-after comparison over four weeks is better than nothing, bearing in mind that seasonality and competitors muddy the data. It's the same kind of test you need to prove the value of SEO to whoever signs off the budget.

Where to start: three projects, three different answers (with the numbers)

Macropix: both, on the same word

Macropix designs and manufactures LED walls in Italy. On Google Ads it has an unbroken history since 2018 with 2,906 enquiries, and 2025 closed at 328 enquiries at €39.44 each, the lowest cost in the series. Organically, in the twelve months to August 2026, it collected 16,712 clicks, 1,495 of them on the word "ledwall" with an average position of 5.5.

At the indicative Keyword Planner CPC for Italy (€1.69), those 1,495 clicks would be worth about €2,500 in ads. SEO brings them without an auction; the ads hold the top of the page on the same search.

The less obvious lesson is about budget. In spring 2026 spend rose to €2,000 a month and the cost per enquiry rose with it, so we brought it back to €1,200. Ads don't create demand: past a certain point they only buy worse clicks. The full case is on the Macropix project page, and the method for making the two channels work together is in SEO and PPC together.

Sunscape: from zero, with both at once

Sunscape develops solar and agrivoltaic plants in Italy and looks for land to buy or lease. In March 2026 the site was getting 46 organic clicks a month, almost all on its name. From January to August Google Ads brought 144 enquiries for €15,451 of spend, €107 each. Over the same period SEO reached 195 clicks a month and 38 keywords on page one out of 143 tracked.

The ads covered the months when organic traffic wasn't there yet. Without them, enquiries in the first six months would have depended on 46 organic clicks a month, almost all from people who already knew the name. How long to wait for SEO, with data from other projects, is in how long SEO takes to show results.

Valore Solare: Google Ads only, for now

Valore Solare installs solar panels in northern and central Italy and works with us on Google Ads only: 1,506 enquiries at €70.78 each, with the cost per enquiry down 40% on the first quarter. On searches like "preventivo fotovoltaico" (solar panel quote), at €7.36 a click in Italy, every enquiry has immediate commercial value and the auction pays for itself. The full sum, from click to management fee, is in how much Google Ads costs.

For a business like this, SEO would make sense on the informational questions in the table above, which are cheap at auction but come before the choice of installer. How to split the budget between the two is explained in how to invest in SEO.

Frequently asked questions about SEO and Google Ads

What to take away (and one thing the industry rarely says)

Commercial searches: crowded auction, clicks at £9.69 on average. That's where Google Ads gets going straight away.

Informational questions: clicks at £1.87, little buying intent. That's where you need an SEO page.

Already first organically: about half the paid clicks aren't extra.

Ads on your own name: it depends on who's buying your name.

Google Ads doesn't move rankings. Your website, on the other hand, moves Quality Score.

Now the thing that's rarely said. The study most often quoted in favour of ads, Google's 89%, and the one most often quoted against, eBay's, measure two different things: the first counts clicks, the second sales. A report that only shows the clicks of the channel its sender manages is the convenient half of the sum. The useful question isn't "SEO or PPC", it's how many extra enquiries each pound brings compared with not spending it, and in the accounts we take over we rarely find it measured, even though the report to do it costs nothing.

If you want to work it out on your own data, it's where both our SEO work and our Google Ads management start. See you next time!