Do you run a business in Bury? Are you trying to decide between SEO and Google Ads (and local Bury SEO, specifically, since that’s what actually gets you found by local customers)?

If so, you’re weighing up two different kinds of investment. One of them can get you seen online today, and start earning you foot traffic or customers right now. The other takes time, but once it’s built, it can take your business to the next level.

The case for Google Ads

Search is the single biggest channel in digital advertising here in the UK. According to IAB UK’s 2025 Digital Adspend report, produced with Oliver Wyman, search made up 44% of all UK digital ad spend in 2025. That came to an eye-watering £17.9bn, which is more than social, video, and display ads combined. That’s the scale of the auction a Bury business is bidding into the moment it looks to Google Ads as a revenue stream.

How much do Google Ads cost?

What that auction costs per click though, specifically for you, is hard to pin down before you actually give it a go. We looked across the trades and local-service sector as a benchmark and found sources claiming anywhere from £2-£8 per click at the low end up to £15-£25. None of these are independently audited; they’re published by marketing agencies with services to sell, and they don’t agree with each other because cost per click depends entirely on your specific keywords, competition, and quality score. That’s just the reality of how the Ads auction works, and it’s exactly why nobody, including us, can hand you a reliable number until we’re looking at your actual account.

Do Google Ads make business sense?

What is consistent is the shape of the deal: you pay, your ad gets displayed, and the user ends up on your site. Then, so long as your site is well-optimised, they hopefully convert into a paying customer. This means ads are super useful for getting in front of people fast and making money fast.

The drawback is that you don’t own that stream, you’re only renting it. When you turn that tap off, the users stop coming.

The case for SEO

SEO (or search engine optimisation, or search marketing, or whatever you want to call it) means improving your site and your footprint across the web so that both Google and users like you. It’s a service we offer, and it’s often offered alongside Google Ads/PPC.

The point is to put your site at the top of search engine results to earn you more clicks, and then convert those clicks into customers. It’s basically the long-winded way of doing the same thing as Google Ads do.

As a rule, the top result gets the most clicks. It used to be that that spot got around a 40% click-through rate, or CTR (a metric you’ll see a lot in digital marketing spaces). In other words, 40% of the people that saw it, clicked it; it’s less than that these days because of AI overviews. Ahrefs’ most recent study, based on 300,000 keywords and Google Search Console data through December 2025, found that when Google shows an AI Overview above the results, click-through rate for the #1 organic result drops by 58% compared to what it used to be. But the businesses in first are still beating out all the ones below them in terms of organic traffic, which is where you want to be.

How much does SEO cost?

There’s cheap SEO and expensive SEO. It depends on what industry you’re in, how big your business is, what your goals are, and the state that your website is in.

We did some more research to find a national average, but it’s tough to find data because agencies tend to be cagey on how much they charge, as you might imagine. We didn’t find any figures for UK businesses, but we did find them for the US market. Ahrefs polled 439 SEO service providers and found an average monthly retainer of $2,917, rising to $3,209 specifically among agencies. SE Ranking surveyed 260 agencies and found nearly two-thirds charging under $1,000 a month. Both are real, disclosed, named surveys, which is the closest you’ll get to the truth in this industry!

Does SEO make business sense?

It certainly does. The whole point of SEO done right is that it brings in more money than it costs.

SEO works by making your website better: easier to find, easier to use, and more convincing once someone lands on it. That means more of the right people finding you when they search, and more of those people actually buying from you or getting in touch, whether that’s booking a job, making a purchase, walking through your door, or whatever business success looks like in your industry.

Unlike Google Ads, you’re not paying for each of those visitors individually. Once your site is ranking well, that traffic keeps coming without you paying per click for it. You do the work once: get your site set up right, build up your rankings, and it keeps earning you enquiries and sales month after month. Plus, pure business search is still strong even with AI Overviews; searches with clear commercial or local intent (like “SEO agency Bury,” “web design Bury,” someone ready to hire someone) are far less likely to trigger an AI Overview, because there isn’t a simple factual answer for Google to summarise.

The trade-off is time. SEO takes months to build, not days. But once it’s working, it’s a growing source of paying customers that doesn’t switch off the moment you stop spending, and it gets more cost-effective the longer it runs.

What this means for a Bury business

SEO could mean finding a tonne more customers or clients, which is good whatever industry you’re in.

If you want to see where your Bury business currently stands and what a genuinely tailored plan would cost, get in touch for a free SEO audit and we’ll give you real numbers instead of industry guesswork.