What each one is
SEO is the work of earning unpaid places in search results, and now in AI answers. You pay for the work, not for the visitor.
PPC means pay per click. On Google that is the ads beside the search results and in the Shopping grid. In this guide "paid ads" also covers paid social, such as Meta, because many ecommerce brands spend there too. The two kinds of ad do different jobs. A search ad meets someone who is already looking. A social ad interrupts someone who was not.
Founders ask which to choose often enough to measure. In the UK, "seo vs ppc" is searched about 300 times a month and "seo vs google ads" about 200.7
| Compare | SEO | Paid ads |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first results | Four months to a year2 | Almost at once1 |
| What you pay for | The work: pages, fixes and links | Every click, plus someone to manage it |
| When you stop paying | The pages stay and keep earning | The ads disappear and the traffic stops1 |
| What you are left with | Pages that rank and a store that reads better | Data on what sells, and to whom |
| Main risk | A ranking change, or an AI answer taking the click | Click prices rising faster than your margin |
| Control | Low. A position cannot be bought | High. Budget, keywords and timing are yours1 |
One myth to clear first. Paying for Google Ads does not improve your organic rankings. Google says so in its advice on hiring an SEO, and again in its own guide to this question.12
What paid ads cost
Three costs sit behind every paid order: the click, the share of clicks that buy and the person managing the account.
The click. There is no reliable UK average. Whito, which collects UK marketing prices, says no primary UK-wide survey of click costs exists. The eight published averages it checked run from £1.30 to £3.65, most small businesses pay £1.50 to £2.50, and Shopping campaigns typically cost less per click than search ads.3
The direction. Clicks are getting dearer. Channable's benchmark of more than 10,000 European ecommerce advertisers found that the cost of a click on Google rose 15% in the year to June 2026. Over the same year, return on ad spend fell by more than 40% on both Performance Max and Shopping campaigns.4
The management. Whito puts UK PPC management at £200 to £800 a month for a freelancer, £500 to £1,500 for an agency on a small budget and £1,500 to £5,000 on a mid-sized one, or 5 to 15% of ad spend once the budget passes £5,000 a month.3
Cost per order is the price of a click divided by the share of clicks that buy. Everything else is detail.
As an illustration, take a click that costs £1. A store where 2 clicks in 100 become an order pays £50 for each order. A store where 4 in 100 do pays £25. Your margin decides whether either figure works. If you keep 60p of every £1 of sales after the cost of the goods, you need more than £1.67 back for each £1 of ad spend before an order makes anything at all.
That is why the page matters as much as the ad. Google says higher quality ads typically cost less per click, and the experience on the landing page is one of the things it scores.5
What SEO costs
SEO has no price per click, which makes it look free. It is not. You pay for months of work before the orders arrive.
- Money. UK ecommerce brands typically pay £2,000 to £8,000 a month for SEO. Our price guide has the sources.
- Time. Google says to allow four months to a year before the benefits show.2 Its guide to this question adds that competitive searches can take longer.1
- Upkeep. Google also describes SEO as continuous work, not something you set up once.1
So the two bills have opposite shapes. Ads cost about the same each month for the same result. SEO costs the most at the start, when it returns the least.
What happens when the money stops
This is the part comparison tables leave out, and we have a year of our own data for it.
- Search
- Social
- FebSearch visits halve
- JunMeta ads off
See the numbers
| Month | Search | Social |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 25 | 2,539 | 2,435 |
| Nov | 2,667 | 931 |
| Dec | 2,368 | 1,435 |
| Jan 26 | 2,123 | 938 |
| Feb | 1,070 | 803 |
| Mar | 822 | 819 |
| Apr | 689 | 787 |
| May | 903 | 375 |
| Jun | 1,131 | 5 |
| Jul | 1,155 | 22 |
| Aug | 952 | 39 |
| Sep | 1,253 | 278 |
| Oct 26 | 1,968 | 63 |
Source: Shopify analytics for Flissie, the Shopify brand I run. Visits by people, with bot traffic removed, October 2025 to October 2026.
Two things happened to us in that year, and each is a lesson about one channel.
The paid line follows the budget. In October 2025, with Meta ads running, social sent 2,435 visits. We later switched the ads off, and by June 2026 social sent 5. A two-week campaign in September lifted it to 278, and it fell back to 63 the month after. Google describes the same thing in plain terms: once a campaign is paused, the ads disappear and the traffic stops.1
The search line does not, but it has risks of its own. Search visits halved between January and February 2026, from 2,123 to 1,070, and reached 689 in April. It was not a paused campaign: the social line stayed broadly level through those months. Search traffic can fall without warning. It climbed back to 1,968 by October, after the engine went in during July.
Search has a newer risk as well. Pew Research found that people who saw an AI summary on Google clicked a normal search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for people who did not see one.6
Neither line is safe. One depends on a budget and the other on a ranking. The difference is what is left when it goes wrong: a paused campaign leaves nothing behind, and a page that slips can be improved.
Which to fund first
The answer depends on where the store is, so here are the four positions we see most.
- A new store with no sales dataYou do not yet know what sellsPaid ads, in small testsTo learn which products and words convertSEO, built on what the ads taught youOnce a product has proved itself
- Sales, but thin marginsAds only pay in a good weekSEO and conversion workSo more of the visitors you have go on to buyAds on your best sellers onlyWhere the sum still works
- Healthy margins and steady ad resultsThe account is profitableKeep the ads runningDo not switch off what paysSEO alongsideSo growth stops depending on one budget
- A launch or a sale with a dateYou need visitors this weekPaid adsSEO cannot move that fastSEO for the same page next yearSo the next launch starts with visitors
Source: an illustration of the method, not data.
Google's own guide lands in the same place. It suggests ads when the goal is traffic in the short term, SEO for the long run, and both together for a well-rounded plan.1
How to measure each one
Judge both channels by orders and profit, never by clicks.
- For ads, know your break-even. Return on ad spend is sales from ads divided by ad spend. Break-even is 1 divided by your gross margin, so 1.67 at a 60% margin.
- For SEO, measure over a year. Take the profit on orders from search, subtract what the work cost, and compare the two across twelve months, because the cost arrives first.
- For both, count orders. A click is a visit, not a sale. Read each channel by the orders it brings and by what those orders cost.
Attribution is never clean. A shopper who sees an ad on Monday and searches for your name on Thursday will often be counted as search, so switching ads off can lower search visits too.
Using both without paying twice
- Let ads test, and let SEO keep. The search terms that convert in an ads account are a list of pages worth building.
- Fix the page before raising the budget. The same page work lifts conversion for paid and unpaid visitors, and Google scores the landing page when it prices your clicks.5
- Move budget as pages start to rank. When a page reaches the top results for a search, test a lower bid on that search and watch total orders, not ad orders.
We sell SEO, so weigh this accordingly. It is not an argument against ads, and we still test them on our own store. It is an argument against depending on a single budget line. Our guide to ecommerce SEO strategy covers what to build first.
Questions
- Is SEO better than PPC for ecommerce?
- Neither is better in general. PPC is faster and stops when the budget does. SEO is slower and keeps earning once the pages are built. Most stores end up using both, in an order set by their margin and by how soon they need sales.
- Do Google Ads help SEO?
- No. Google says advertising with it has no effect on a site's place in the organic results. Work on the landing page can help both, because the page affects the quality of an ad as well as how it ranks.
- Is SEO worth it for a small ecommerce store?
- It is when the store can wait four months to a year for the return, and when the margin on an order is too thin to pay for clicks. A store that needs sales this month should start with ads.
- What is a good ROAS?
- One above your break-even, which is 1 divided by your gross margin. At a 60% margin that is 1.67, so a return of 2 makes a little and a return of 1.5 loses money on every order.
- How long does SEO take compared with PPC?
- Ads can bring visitors on the day they start. Google says SEO typically takes four months to a year from when changes begin until the benefits show.
Sources
- 1
- 2Do you need an SEO?Google Search Central.
- 3UK PPC costsWhito research by Jacob Whitmore, updated 8 November 2026.
- 4Channable data shows advertisers lose 46% ROAS as Google clicks cost morePPC Land, 12 July 2026, reporting Channable's ecommerce Google Ads benchmark.
- 5About ad qualityGoogle Ads Help.
- 6Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the resultsPew Research Center, 22 July 2025.
- 7Ahrefs Keywords ExplorerUK monthly search volumes, read on 10 November 2026.
Drafted with the Rembanx engine on Claude from the sources above, then checked and approved by Matthew Banks. Prices, product features and search volumes were checked on 10 November 2026 and can change.