PPC Management
Paid search does the one thing SEO cannot: bring in enquiries this week. We run it alongside a campaign rather than instead of one, and we charge a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of your spend. A percentage pays us to spend more of your money, and that is not an incentive you want sitting on our side of the table.
Quoted once we have seen the account and the market, based on the work involved rather than your budget. If we tell you to cut spend on a campaign that is not converting, our invoice does not change. A realistic floor for running paid search seriously is about £700 a month including the ad spend itself.
See what everything costsWhere paid search fits
The overlap with SEO is the whole point. Three months of ad data tells you exactly which terms turn into enquiries and which only attract clicks. That is evidence organic would take a year to produce, and it makes every SEO decision after it cheaper and better founded.
Flat fee, not percentage of spend
You should be able to trust that a budget recommendation is about your results, not our invoice. A percentage model quietly puts those two things in conflict.
Paid buys the data organic needs
The keywords that convert in ads are where organic should aim. Running both means the expensive channel funds the research for the cheap one, so you stop guessing from keyword volume.
When paid search is the right answer
We will say plainly that SEO is usually better value over two years. But there are four situations where paid is simply the right purchase, and pretending otherwise wastes your money:
- 01
You need enquiries this month
SEO does not work that fast, and no honest agency will tell you it does. Ads can be live in a day. If you have a cash-flow problem or a quiet quarter, paid is the tool.
- 02
You are testing a new service or market
Spending £600 on ads to find out whether anyone actually searches for your new offering is far cheaper than spending six months building content for a market that does not exist.
- 03
Your market is seasonal
If eighty per cent of your revenue lands in six weeks, an always-on SEO campaign is the wrong shape. Ads can be turned up and down to match, and turned off when the season ends.
- 04
You are in a market where organic will take years
Some sectors are so dominated by national brands and aggregators that a small business will not reach page one in any reasonable time. Better to know that now and buy the traffic.
Why we do not charge a percentage of spend
The standard UK agency model is a management fee of 10–20% of whatever you spend on ads. It is worth understanding what that arrangement does to the advice you get.
If your agency earns 15% of spend, every recommendation to increase budget increases their revenue, and every recommendation to cut a campaign reduces it. Nobody has to be dishonest for that to distort things. It just means the easiest conversation is always "let’s increase the budget" and the hardest is "you should be spending less here".
We charge a flat monthly fee based on the work involved: how many campaigns, how often they need attention, and how much building versus maintaining is going on. If we tell you to cut spend on a campaign that is not converting, our invoice does not change. That is the whole argument.
The same principle runs through how we price SEO: published, fixed, and not tied to how much of your money passes through us.
Paid and organic are better together than apart
Most agencies sell these as alternatives. Run properly they are one system, and each makes the other cheaper.
Paid tells organic where to aim. Within three months, an ads account knows exactly which search terms produce enquiries and which produce clicks that bounce. That is real conversion data on real money. Pointing your SEO content plan at the terms that already convert beats guessing from keyword volume by a distance, and it is the single biggest reason to run both.
Organic brings paid costs down. As your organic listings improve, you can pull back paid bidding on terms you now rank for and move that budget to terms you do not. Businesses running both usually see their total cost per enquiry fall over eighteen months even with the ad budget flat.
Holding both positions raises total clicks. Showing up in the ads and in the organic results for the same search reliably wins more clicks than either alone, particularly on commercial terms where the ad block pushes organic below the fold.
Remarketing catches what organic earns. Content brings people in at the research stage. Remarketing puts you back in front of them when they are ready to buy, weeks later, so the research visit is not wasted.
What Google Ads actually costs a UK small business
Two separate numbers, and mixing them up is where most of the confusion starts: what you pay Google, and what you pay whoever manages it.
Ad spend depends entirely on your market. Cost per click in UK small business sectors typically runs from about 80p in low-competition trades to well over £15 in legal, insurance and cosmetic surgery. A local trade might spend £400–£800 a month usefully; a competitive professional service can absorb several thousand without trouble.
Management is either a percentage of that spend (normally 10–20%) or a flat fee. Below roughly £500 a month of ad spend, most agencies will not take the work at all, because a percentage of that does not pay anyone to look at it properly.
A realistic floor for a small business running paid search seriously is around £700 a month all in. Below that, you can still run ads yourself, and for a simple single-service local business that is often the right call. The platform is genuinely usable, and a management fee on a £250 budget is hard to justify.
The mistakes we find in inherited accounts
When we audit an existing Google Ads account, the same handful of problems explain most of the wasted money:
- 01
No conversion tracking, or broken tracking
Startlingly common. Without it nobody, including the previous agency, knows which clicks became enquiries, so every optimisation has been guesswork dressed up as data.
- 02
No negative keywords
Broad match without a maintained negative list means paying for "free", "jobs", "DIY", "how to" and your own staff searching for the company. It is usually the fastest saving in the account.
- 03
Everything in one campaign
Six services, four towns and one budget means the highest-volume service quietly eats the money whether or not it is the most profitable.
- 04
Ads pointing at the homepage
Someone searching "emergency boiler repair Sheffield" should not land on a homepage listing eight services. Sending paid traffic to a page that matches the ad routinely doubles conversion rate on its own.
- 05
Smart campaign types left on autopilot
Performance Max and Smart campaigns are not bad in themselves, but handed no exclusions and no asset direction they will happily spend a local trade’s budget on brand searches and irrelevant placements.
How we work
Ads are managed alongside a campaign rather than sold as a separate product, on a flat monthly fee quoted once we have looked at the account and the market. You own the Google Ads account, the conversion tracking and the historical data, in your name, from day one. If you leave, you take the account and its history with you, which is the part that actually has value.
If you are weighing paid against organic and want the honest version, we wrote about the four situations where you should not buy SEO. If you would rather get a grip on budgets first, here is what SEO costs across the UK market. And if the website itself is the problem, here is what a replacement costs.
Live in days, then tightened weekly
Paid does the one thing SEO cannot: bring enquiries in this week. The work after launch is what decides whether it stays profitable.
- Step 1Account and market audit
What the account already knows, what it is wasting, and whether paid is even the right call for your market. Sometimes the honest answer is that your budget is too small to manage, and we say so.
- Step 2Tracking before spending
Conversion tracking wired to real enquiries first, because an account without it is guesswork with an invoice attached. This is the single most common thing we find broken in inherited accounts.
- Step 3Build and launch
Campaign structure, negatives from day one, and landing pages that match the ad rather than dropping everyone on the homepage. Live in days, not weeks.
- Step 4Weekly tightening
Search terms reviewed, negatives added, budget moved to what converts. You get the numbers monthly and you own the account and its history throughout.
Flat monthly fee
Quoted on the work involved, never as a percentage of your ad spend, so advice to cut a budget costs us nothing.
A realistic floor for running paid search seriously is about £700 a month including the ad spend itself. Below roughly £500 of monthly spend, managing it for you is hard to justify and we will say so.
Straight answers to the usual questions
How much should I spend on Google Ads?
Enough for the data to mean something, which for most UK small businesses is at least £400 to £600 a month of ad spend. Below that you get too few clicks to tell whether a campaign works or you got lucky. Cost per click varies enormously by sector (under £1 in some trades, over £15 in legal and cosmetic), so the right figure depends on your market and on what one customer is worth to you.
Do you charge a percentage of my ad spend?
No. We charge a flat monthly fee based on the work involved. A percentage model means every recommendation to increase your budget increases our revenue and every recommendation to cut it increases nothing, which quietly distorts the advice even when nobody means it to. On a flat fee, telling you to reduce spend on a campaign that is not converting costs us nothing.
Should I do PPC or SEO?
Both, if the budget allows, because they feed each other, but if you have to choose it comes down to your timeframe. Need enquiries this month, testing a new service, or working in a seasonal market: paid. Building something over two years where cost per enquiry matters more than speed: organic. The strongest case for running both is that three months of ad data tells you exactly which terms convert, which makes every SEO decision afterwards better founded.
How quickly do Google Ads work?
Clicks within hours of going live, useful optimisation data within two to four weeks, and a properly tuned account after about three months. The first few weeks are always the most expensive per enquiry, because you are paying for the learning. Anyone showing you a cost per lead from week one is showing you a number that will change.
Can you fix an account another agency set up?
Usually, and it is a good share of the PPC work we take on. We start with an audit of what is actually running: whether conversion tracking works, whether there is a negative keyword list, and whether campaigns are structured so budget goes where the margin is. The common findings are broken tracking and no negatives, and both are quick wins that show up in the next bill from Google.
Do I own the Google Ads account?
Yes, and you should insist on that with any agency. The account, the conversion tracking and the historical performance data should be in your name from the start. An account you cannot take with you means starting from zero learning data if you change agency, which is a real cost and one most people only discover when they try to leave.
The other services we run
- AI Search OptimisationEntity and schema modelling · Content written to be quoted · llms.txt and entity files
- Branding & Graphic DesignLogo design · Brand identity systems · Brand guidelines your printer can follow
- Web Design & DevelopmentBrochure and service sites · Booking and member sites · E-commerce builds
- Technical SEOFull technical audits · Crawling and indexing fixes · Core Web Vitals
- SEO ConsultantIndependent SEO audits · Strategy and roadmaps · Second opinions on your current agency
- Local SEO ServicesGoogle Business Profile, completed properly · Map pack rankings · Citation building and clean-up
Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.