Many export owners treat SEO and Google Ads as an either/or: either “ads are too expensive, let’s wait for SEO” or “SEO is too slow, let’s just run ads”. Both extremes lose money. This lesson sets out what each is good at and how to combine them so acquisition cost keeps falling.
Direct answer: run both at once, with different jobs
SEO only: almost no inquiries in the first six months, and many people give up in month four, wasting everything already invested. Ads only: traffic drops to zero the day you stop spending, while competitor bidding pushes CPC up and acquisition gets ever more expensive. Combined: ads carry you through the SEO incubation period, SEO takes over most of the traffic once it works, and the overall cost curve keeps falling.
Comparing the two
| Dimensions | Google Ads | SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Time to results | Traffic and inquiries on day one | A new site reaches a stable period in 6–9 months |
| After stopping | Traffic drops to zero immediately | Rankings and authority keep producing traffic |
| Cost trend | Competitors bid, and CPC rises year on year | High at first, lower later — cheaper the longer you use it |
| Trust | Marked “Ad” — some buyers will not click | Organic results earn more trust |
| Suitable stage | New site period, peak-season positioning, keyword testing | The long-term main battlefield, building brand authority |
Three-step combined playbook
Step 1: Use ads to validate which keywords actually bring inquiries
SEO keyword selection can only go on search volume and inferred intent, while the Ads backend shows the real CTR, inquiry cost and buyer quality for every keyword. Spend a small budget on decision-stage long-tail terms (e.g. “100W flexible solar panel OEM”) for the first 2–3 months of a new site to generate conversion data.
Step 2: Hand the high-converting keywords over to SEO
Turn the keywords with acceptable conversion cost and clear intent in Ads into SEO content first: product pages, buying guides, specification comparisons. These keywords are validated by real inquiries, so they succeed far more often than keywords picked by gut feel. Conversion data accumulated on Ads landing pages can also be applied directly to conversion optimisation on SEO pages.
Step 3: Once rankings climb, scale back the matching ads
Track which keywords SEO has already pushed into the top 3 with stable organic clicks, and shift ad budget away from them onto new keywords that do not rank yet. Ad budget should always go where SEO cannot yet reach.
How to split the budget
- Months 0–3: Ads carry 100% of paid traffic, focused on testing keywords and winning immediate inquiries.
- Months 3–6: SEO starts producing impressions and sporadic inquiries, and the ad budget comes down to 70–80%.
- Months 6–12: Category pages reach the top 10 and SEO drives more than half of inquiries, with 20–30% of the ad budget kept for peak season and new keyword testing.
FAQ
- Should a new site do SEO first or run Google Ads first?
- Run both at once. SEO on a new site takes 6–9 months, so spend the first six months on ads with precise decision-stage keywords to cover immediate inquiries; once rankings stabilise, scale the ad budget down step by step.
- Can ad keywords be reused directly for SEO?
- Yes, and you should. The Ads backend holds real CTR, conversion cost and inquiry quality for every keyword, so writing the best converters into SEO content first beats choosing by search volume alone.
- Once SEO works, should you stop ads entirely?
- Not recommended. Keep a small budget to cover keywords SEO has not ranked for yet, to fight for peak-season positions and to defend against competitor terms; keep shrinking it as SEO coverage grows.