Every few weeks a Perth business owner asks me some version of the same question: “Should I be running Google Ads, or doing SEO?” It’s usually asked with a slightly pained expression, because they’ve often already tried one of them and it didn’t go well.

The honest answer is that it depends on what your website looks like right now, and for most small businesses I meet, the answer is neither. Not yet. There’s a step before both that almost everyone skips, and skipping it is why so much marketing budget quietly evaporates.

The black hole problem

Google Ads has a reputation among small business owners as a black hole, and the reputation is earned, but usually not for the reason people think.

Ads themselves work fine. Google is exceptionally good at putting your offer in front of someone searching “emergency plumber Joondalup” at 11pm. The click happens. The money leaves your account. And then the visitor lands on a slow, confusing website or one with a contact form that may or may not work, and they leave.

You didn’t buy a customer. You rented a visitor for three seconds.

I had a client who came to me via contact form. He wanted me to take over his Google Ad campaign. I asked him how much he was spending and he told me $42,000 per month. “Yeah, right,” I thought. So he gave me access to his Google Adwords account and I went in. Sure enough. $40K+ per month was leaving his account every month. I couldn’t believe it. So I went in and checked. This guy was bidding on words like “Queensland”. And everything and anything to do with Queensland. He sold Solar Systems, but his ads were showing when someone typed in “Queensland umbrellas”. I actually stopped his campaign and said to him. Have you ever tried SEO? Every cent you spend on SEO appears on yoru website – on your bottom line. His ads weren’t working, so I figured he could stop them and try SEO. It tuns out he wanted so much SEO that I literally hired ex-WA-newspapre staff to write articles. Professional writers and journalists. I hired them and we wrote articles about Solar Power. Luckily there’s alot of research in Solar Power, so we wrote at least 3 articles every week for a while. It was our main income for a bit. His turnover jumped from $300K to $10m over then ext 2 years.

This is why “we tried Google Ads and it didn’t work” is one of the most common things I hear. The ads worked, but they were scattershot. And because ads charge you per click regardless of what happens next, a weak Ad campaign turns ad spend into a subscription for disappointment.

If your site isn’t getting enquiries from the traffic it already receives, paying for more traffic just scales the silence.

I’ve written a whole piece on diagnosing that: Why Isn’t My Website Getting Any Enquiries? 7 Fixes for Perth Small Businesses.

How the ROI actually compares

Here’s the simplest way I can frame the economics.

Google Ads is renting.

The moment you stop paying, the traffic stops. Completely. Your cost per enquiry stays roughly flat forever (in competitive Perth service niches, often $30–$100+ per click, and multiple clicks per enquiry). The upside: it’s fast. You can have visitors this afternoon. The downside? A lot of missed opportunity, and if you don’t do it right – you stand to lose a lot of money.

SEO is buying.

It’s slow to start. Realistically three to six months before you see meaningful movement, but the asset compounds and you can usually see the changes on your site. A page that ranks well for a valuable local search can deliver enquiries for years at no marginal cost. The work you do this month is still paying you in 2028.

So the textbook answer is: Ads for speed, SEO for durability, and mature businesses run both. But the textbook answer assumes your website deserves the traffic. Most don’t yet.

The step before both: make the site worth sending people to

Before you spend a dollar on ads or a month on SEO, your website needs to convert the visitors it already gets and give search engines a reason to trust it. The good news is that the highest-impact fixes are neither expensive nor mysterious:

Fix the basics that kill trust.

Broken links, typos, stale copyright dates, placeholder text. Visitors notice, and so do search engines. Trust is built from dozens of small signals — I’ve broken these down in Is Your Website Trustworthy?, and they matter more now than ever because AI search systems weigh them too.

Make sure every contact path works.

Test your form. Test your mailto link. Test the phone number on a mobile. This sounds insultingly obvious, and yet it’s the single most common fault I find on Perth small business sites.

Write for humans, then structure for machines.

Keyword-stuffed pages stopped working years ago; useful, clearly structured content is what ranks now. That shift is the subject of Old SEO vs. New SEO and SEO for Humans.

Keep the machinery maintained.

An out-of-date WordPress site gets slower, less secure, and eventually less visible. If you’re not sure what maintenance actually involves, start here: WordPress Maintenance: What Happens If You Ignore It?

In one case, a site wasn’t ranking at all. Adding H1 tags to the home page gave the most sudden improvement I have seen. I don’t think I even charged the client.

These fixes typically cost a fraction of one month’s sensible ad budget, and they improve the return on everything that comes after — paid or organic.

So which first?

My rule of thumb for Perth small businesses:

Fix the website first.

Always. Ads and SEO both multiply what’s already there; multiplying a broken site gives you an expensive broken site.

Then, if you need enquiries this month

Say you need new business, seasonal window, quiet pipeline . . . run a small, tightly targeted Google Ads campaign. Local keywords only, sensible daily cap, and watch what people actually do when they land.

If you can afford patience, start SEO now

Because the clock only starts when you do. Six months from now you’ll either have compounding organic traffic, or you’ll wish you’d started six months ago.

Do both once the site converts reliably; ads for the keywords you don’t rank for yet, SEO to gradually make those ads unnecessary.

The businesses that feel burned by digital marketing almost never got the channel wrong. They got the order wrong. Website first. Then traffic. In that order, neither Google Ads nor SEO is a black hole – they’re just two different speeds of the same engine.

Not sure which state your website is in? I offer a straightforward review with a prioritised fix list — no jargon, no lock-in. Get in touch.