Ads or SEO first for a local service business? Ads turn on today; SEO pays off in months. Here's the honest order to do them in, and why.

You've got a budget for online ads and one real goal: more qualified leads for your service business. The question that stalls most owners is which platform to put the money on, Google Ads or Meta (Facebook and Instagram). Both camps have loud advocates, and the "cheaper leads" pitch for Meta is tempting when you're watching every euro. Straight up front: I run Google Ads, not Meta, so I've got a horse in this race. I've still given Meta its real due below, because pretending

It's the first question almost every (new) business owner asks me, and it's the one with the least satisfying answer online. Search it and you get a shrug: "it depends." True, but useless. You have a real decision to make and a real number to put in a budget field. The right number is a calculation, built from two things you can actually work out: how many leads you want, and what a lead costs in your market. This post gives you the formula, the current 2026 numbers to plug i

Google by default optimises toward whatever is cheapest to generate, and the cheapest leads are usually the worst ones, so out of the box the platform is optimised to find you more junk.

Performance Max can work for lead gen, or flood you with junk. Here's the one thing that decides which, when to use it, and how to run it without wasting budget.

If your cost per lead has been creeping up (or jumped overnight) and nothing obvious changed on your end, you're not imagining it. Google Ads has quietly gotten more expensive to run badly. Average cost per click is now more than double what it was ten years ago ($5.42 vs $2.32, WordStream 2026), and the platform hands more of the decisions to its own AI every year. The good news: rising CPL is almost always caused by a short list of specific, findable things. It's loud and d