Google Ads or search optimisation

Advertising is predictable: you set a budget, you get clicks, you measure what an enquiry costs. It is excellent for checking whether people are searching for what you sell at all, and which phrases bring customers rather than the merely curious. That test is valuable for optimisation too, because it shows outright which phrases are worth fighting for in the unpaid results.

Optimisation works the other way round. The first months give almost nothing, then traffic grows and does not vanish once you stop topping it up. The biggest mistake is treating the two as alternatives where you have to pick one. In the companies doing best, ads run on buying phrases while content builds position where the customer is only starting to look.

There is one condition common to both routes: a site that turns a visit into contact. Pouring traffic into a leaky bucket is the most expensive mistake in this business.