The number nobody quite agrees on
This is one of the most common questions small business owners ask, and the honest answer is: it depends how much time you have, and what you’re selling. In the UK, average Google Ads cost-per-click currently sits somewhere around £3.50–£3.65 across all industries, according to UK PPC agency Whitehat SEO’s own benchmarking — but that average hides enormous variation underneath it.
Where you are matters as much as what you sell
Ecommerce and retail keywords can cost under £1 in some cases, while legal services regularly run £6–£9 or more per click. Location adds another layer entirely: a solicitor advertising in central London can pay considerably more per click than the exact same keyword in Leeds or Cardiff, simply because more competitors are bidding in the same postcode.
Immediate versus compounding
Whatever the number, the upside of paid search is immediacy: turn a campaign on, and you can be in front of buyers within hours. SEO works on a completely different clock — typically three to six months to see meaningful movement — but once it’s ranking, that traffic keeps arriving without a per-click cost attached.
In practice, most small UK businesses benefit from both, just in sequence: paid search for the enquiries you need right now, while SEO builds the asset that keeps working long after the ad budget stops.
A practical starting point
For a business trying paid search for the first time, the temptation is to guess a monthly budget and hope. A better starting point is working backwards from what a new customer is actually worth, and what you can afford to pay to acquire one profitably — then testing a modest budget against a small number of tightly targeted keywords before scaling anything up. Most wasted ad spend doesn’t come from the platform being expensive; it comes from targeting too broadly, too early.
