SEO or Google Ads: where to start promoting your website

If your business needs enquiries this month, start with a Google Ads search campaign on a handful of queries that name your service, and point each ad at the page for that service. Build basic SEO into the site on day one anyway. Then grow the organic side around the queries your ads have shown people really use. The exceptions, where SEO should come first, are below.

Ads rent a place today, SEO earns one over months

Google says it "never accepts money to include or rank sites" in organic results, and that advertising "won't have any effect on your site's presence" there (Google Search Central). Paying for ads does not lift your organic position, and a good organic position does not make your ads cheaper.

In a search campaign you normally pay for each click on your ad (Google Ads Help). Once the ads are approved, they can show for the queries you chose; the auction decides whether they appear and in which slot, above or below the organic results. When you stop paying, the ads stop showing.

SEO works on a different clock. Google's own starter guide says some changes "take effect in a few hours, others could take several months", and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether the work helped (SEO Starter Guide). Nobody can promise you first place, and Google warns against anyone who guarantees a ranking (Google Search Central).

When we start with Google Ads

• The business or the site is new, and there is no time to wait for organic traffic.
• People search for the service by name and are ready to order: "strona internetowa dla firmy" (a website for a company) or "sklep internetowy na zamówienie" (a custom online store).
• You want to see the real queries people type before you spend months writing content for them.
• You can keep a steady daily budget for at least a few weeks. With automated bidding, a new campaign starts in a learning period. We leave ours alone for the first five to seven days and do not judge it before then.

When we advise starting with SEO

• The site is not ready. We do not run ads to a site that does not turn visits into enquiries, because that is paying for traffic that goes nowhere.
• Your clients read before they buy. Questions like "how much does an online store cost" or "which platform should I choose" are answered by articles, and the people asking them are usually still comparing options.
• You cannot keep paying month after month. A page that ranks keeps bringing visitors without a charge per click. SEO still costs time and content, just not a fee for every visitor.

Clicks are not enquiries

In one week in September 2026 all our campaigns together brought 74 clicks and 2 real enquiries: a form and a phone call. We counted both ourselves, from the messages that came in.

We run campaigns in Polish, and separate ones in Ukrainian and Russian for people living in the EU. The Polish one first sent everyone to the homepage and had a click-through rate of about 3%. The Ukrainian one, with ads written for one service and a page about that service, had 13–15%. The markets differ, and CTR is measured before anyone sees the page, so we cannot say how much of the gap came from the page. We changed both anyway. Our keyword "разработка сайта цена" (website development price) was rarely shown because of a low Quality Score. Our reading was that the ad said nothing about price. Now every ad group has its own ad and its own service page.

Conversion tracking matters just as much. For a while, enquiries from WhatsApp and the contact form were not recorded in Google Ads as conversions. We saw every message ourselves, but Google did not know which clicks had produced them, so its reports and automatic bidding worked blind. Now we check that a test conversion arrives in the account before a campaign gets any budget.

Negative keywords need their own work. Among the queries that cost us clicks were "как создать сайт бесплатно" (how to make a website for free) and "html сделать сайт": people who want to build a site themselves. In September 2026 the Polish campaign had 101 negative keywords, the Ukrainian one 118 and the Russian one 76. In Polish, Ukrainian and Russian each grammatical form has to be added separately, because negatives do not match plurals or cases.

What ads teach you about SEO

The search terms report in Google Ads lists the real queries that triggered your ads. In one week, before we split it in two, our Ukrainian and Russian campaign showed 144 different ones. Some were junk. Others described the service in words we had not used on the site, such as "сайт для фирмы" (a website for a firm).

After a month of ads you have a list of phrases people actually typed and clicked, and that is a better starting point for new pages and articles than guessing. The report hides rare queries, though: in the first weeks after launch in September 2026, 30 of 80 clicks were grouped under "Other search terms". So it points you in a direction, but it will not show every query.

Basic SEO belongs in the site from the start

Some SEO costs almost nothing extra when it is done during the build. On every site we make, that means page titles and descriptions, a sitemap.xml, a robots.txt, and hreflang tags when there are several languages. This does not bring traffic by itself, but it helps Google find your pages and show people the right language version.

How we set up campaigns (keywords, negatives, conversions, and an account that stays in your name) is described on our Google Ads page. If the site itself needs work first, start with websites.