Is SEO or Google Ads cheaper for a tradesman? Ads win month one, SEO wins by year two
The assumption almost every British trade starts with is that SEO is the free one and ads are the expensive one. It is the wrong way round for at least the first two quarters, and the gap is not small. A one-van business paying the smallest ad budget a UK agency will call sensible is spending about £9,600 a year. Local SEO at the going rate for the same business is about £3,900.
So SEO is less than half the price, and it is still the dearer of the two in month three, because in month three it has produced nothing. Ads produce enquiries on the day the card clears. That is the actual trade being made, and almost nobody selling either one draws it out over more than a month.
I have run both, including on this site, so the numbers below include mine. Every external figure was read on 2 September 2026.
For a UK tradesman, Google Ads are cheaper for the first few months and SEO is cheaper from roughly year two onwards. Ads at the smallest sensible budget work out around £200 a booked job and never get cheaper. Local SEO costs about £3,900 a year in Britain and gets cheaper per job every year it keeps working. Over three years the gap is about £17,100.
What Google Ads actually cost a UK trade, per booked job
The ads themselves cost the same per booked job at any budget. It is the management fee that makes a small account expensive, because the fee does not shrink when your spend does.
Take the figures one agency published for plumbing accounts and updated on 31 July 2026: £5 average cost per click, roughly one enquiry per ten clicks off a decent landing page, and about four booked jobs per ten enquiries. It calls £500 a month the sensible minimum to gather data in a smaller area and £1,500 competitive in most towns and cities, with management charged on top at £300 to £900 a month. Run those numbers at both budgets and something obvious falls out.
Receipt one: the smallest sensible budget
| Ad spend | £500 a month |
| Clicks at £5 each | 100 |
| Enquiries at 10 per cent | 10 |
| Booked jobs at 40 per cent | 4 |
| Management, the lowest published fee | £300 |
| Out of the account | £800 |
| Cost per booked job | £200 |
Twelve months of that is £9,600 for 48 booked jobs.
Receipt two: a competitive budget in a normal town
| Ad spend | £1,500 a month |
| Clicks at £5 each | 300 |
| Enquiries at 10 per cent | 30 |
| Booked jobs at 40 per cent | 12 |
| Management, the lowest published fee | £300 |
| Out of the account | £1,800 |
| Cost per booked job | £150 |
Twelve months of that is £21,600 for 144 booked jobs.
Why the small account is the dear one
Look at the ad spend on its own and the two receipts are identical. £500 divided by four jobs is £125 a job. £1,500 divided by twelve jobs is £125 a job. Google charges you the same either way. The whole of the difference between £200 and £150 is the management fee, which is £300 at both budgets: £75 added to every job on the small account and £25 on the larger one. That is a third more expensive for being cautious, which is the opposite of what caution is supposed to buy you.
It is also the strongest argument for running a small account yourself. At £500 a month the agency is taking 37 per cent of the total bill. At £3,000 it is taking a tenth. If you are starting at the floor, learn the interface. The full cost-per-booked-job breakdown for Google Ads goes through what changes when your conversion rate moves.
The number Google publishes that nobody multiplies
Google Ads bills against an average daily budget, and Google's own help pages say that at the end of the month you will have spent no more than 30.4 times that figure, not 30.
Set £15 a day thinking you have committed to £450 a month and the actual ceiling is £456, which is £5,472 a year. Google also states plainly that on a given day a campaign "might spend up to twice your average daily budget to take advantage of fluctuations of traffic", balancing back out across the month. Neither of those is a trick. Both surprise people who set a daily figure and never convert it.
The check to run. Multiply your daily budget by 30.4, then by twelve. That is the annual commitment you have actually made, and it is the only number worth comparing against an SEO quote. Doing the same arithmetic on ten published SEO prices is what reordered the local SEO cost table when I ran it last week.
What SEO costs, and what it pays in month three
Local SEO for a one-van UK trade sits between about £3,500 and £5,200 a year, and the first three months of it are close to a write-off no matter who you buy it from.
Google Search Central is careful about timescales and says only that "some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months". That is honest, and it is also exactly the sentence an SEO seller will never quote you.
So here are my own numbers instead, because I am running this experiment in public on this domain. Sitework's site went live in May 2026. In the ten weeks to 25 August 2026, with 113 posts published and me writing them full time, Google Search Console recorded 8,694 impressions and 27 clicks.
Twenty seven clicks is an afternoon of ad spend. I would be selling you something if I dressed that up. The fair caveat is that "trade website design" is a national commercial term with agencies bidding on it, and a plumber competing for one British town is fishing in a far emptier pond, so the same effort moves faster. The shape of the curve does not change, though. It is flat, then it is not.
Three years, side by side
Over three years the ads route costs about £28,800 and the SEO route about £11,700, a difference of £17,100, and at the end of it one of them leaves you with something and the other leaves you with a stopped account.
The comparison below runs ads at the floor budget, because that is what a single van in a normal English or Welsh town actually spends, and SEO at £300 every four weeks on an existing site. Four-weekly billing is thirteen payments a year, not twelve, which is why the annual figure is £3,900 rather than £3,600.
| Google Ads, floor budget | Local SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Month one out of the bank | £800 | £300 |
| Enquiries in month one | About 10 | Close to none |
| Enquiries in month twelve | About 10 | Depends on the site |
| Year one | £9,600 | £3,900 |
| Year two | £9,600 | £3,900 |
| Year three | £9,600 | £3,900 |
| Three-year total | £28,800 | £11,700 |
| Booked jobs over three years | 144 | Nothing guaranteed |
| The day you stop paying | Enquiries stop that afternoon | Pages keep ranking, then fade |
| What you own at the end | Nothing | The pages and the rankings |
That bottom row is the one that decides it for most people once they see it written down. Ads are a rental. Everything you have bought disappears the afternoon the card is declined, and the price per job in year three is the same as it was in week one because there is no mechanism by which it could fall. SEO is the opposite risk: you might spend a year and get nothing, but if it works, the cost per job falls every month you keep the pages.
Where the crossover actually is
SEO becomes the cheaper channel the moment your site brings in more than about twenty booked jobs a year, which is under two a month.
Divide £3,900 by twenty and you get £195 a job, which just undercuts the £200 the ads route costs. Everything above twenty jobs a year is SEO winning by more, and it keeps widening, because the price is fixed while the traffic is not. Forty jobs a year is £98 a job. Sixty is £65.
Twenty booked jobs a year is a genuinely low bar in year two and a genuinely hard one in month four, which is the whole of the argument in one sentence. Whether you can get there depends on how many people in your patch search for your trade at all, and that varies more by area than by trade.
Check it against what a job is worth to you
Cost per job means nothing without job value next to it. A plumber charging £45 to £75 an hour, or £200 to £350 a day, who is paying £200 an enquiry-turned-job through ads, has just handed over most of the gross on a short callout. That maths works on a bathroom and it does not work on a tap washer. Trades with high average job values can absorb ads indefinitely. Trades doing lots of small work cannot, and for them the crossover arrives much sooner.
When Google Ads are simply the right answer
Ads are the correct choice whenever the constraint is time rather than money, and pretending otherwise to sell an SEO plan is how the industry earned its reputation.
There is a third route worth a mention here, because it is neither of these. Google's Local Services Ads charge per lead rather than per click, and Google's own help pages list the United Kingdom and Ireland among the eligible countries, with plumbers, electricians, heating engineers, locksmiths, cleaners and roofers among the covered categories. Worth knowing before you commit: Google's migration notice says the first phase moved selected US advertisers to Performance Max in August 2026, and that non-US accounts transition in 2027.
When SEO is the only thing that will work
If you intend to still be trading in three years and your average job is under about £500, ads alone will quietly cost you more than a van over that period, and SEO is the only route that gets cheaper.
The £17,100 three-year gap is not an abstraction. It is a second-hand van, or a year of a labourer, or the difference between taking August off and not. It is also the reason I sell SEO at £300 every four weeks on an existing site rather than as a percentage of ad spend: the incentives point the wrong way when your marketing bill goes up every time you spend more.
The one case where neither works is the one worth being blunt about. If you have no proper website, no Google Business Profile and no reviews, do not buy either. There is nothing for the optimisation to sit on and nowhere useful for the ad clicks to land, and you will spend several hundred pounds proving it.