Why We Usually Run Google Ads Before Investing in SEO

If a B2B company wants to invest in SEO, our recommendation is usually to run Google Ads first.

That might sound strange. SEO and Google Ads are different channels. One is building organic visibility; the other is paying for traffic.

But before investing months into ranking for a set of keywords, there is one thing we would like to know:

Are those keywords actually worth ranking for?

Keyword research can give us an estimate.

Google Ads can give us actual traffic.

And, more importantly, it can give us information about what that traffic does.

The problem with starting with SEO

Imagine you've done your keyword research and identified 20 keywords that look commercially relevant. The search volumes look good. The intent looks right. Competitors rank for them.

So you start building your SEO strategy around those 20 keywords.

You create landing pages. You publish supporting content. You work on the technical side. You get internal experts involved to create content that actually contains something useful.

Then you wait.

SEO is a long game. In a mature and competitive market, getting into the positions that actually generate traffic can take months or longer.

Eventually, you manage to rank for some of those keywords.

And then you discover that they don't convert particularly well.

That's the problem. You had to make the SEO investment before you could properly test the assumption behind the investment.

With paid search, we can reverse that process.

What would happen if you already ranked in the top positions?

This is the question we're really trying to answer.

Suppose you could take those 20 keywords and immediately put your company into the top positions. What would happen?

• Would the traffic actually be there?
• Would people engage with the page?
• Would they request a demo, start a trial or contact you?
• And eventually: which searches are associated with actual customers?

Paid search doesn't perfectly replicate an organic ranking. But it lets us buy access to those searches now instead of first spending months trying to earn the organic position.

That's why we often use Google Ads not only as an acquisition channel, but also as a source of information for SEO.

Keyword research is a hypothesis

There are plenty of tools that estimate how many searches a keyword gets per month. They're useful. But we don't treat those numbers as reality.

In accounts we've managed, we've seen both considerably higher and considerably lower actual traffic than keyword research suggested.

One reason is that people don't search using a neat list of keywords. There are long-tail searches. There are different ways of expressing essentially the same thing. There are variations around the original query.

On the paid-search side, match types also determine how closely a search has to correspond to the keyword we're targeting.

So when a keyword tool tells us that a keyword has a certain number of searches per month, that's useful information. But it's still an estimate.

Google Ads lets us see the searches that are actually happening.

Search volume isn't the most important thing

Actual search volume is useful, but it's not what we're primarily interested in. We're interested in what happens after the search.

Let's say keyword A has 1,000 relevant searches per month. Keyword B has 100. Based purely on keyword volume, A looks ten times more interesting.

But then we run paid search.

Keyword A generates plenty of clicks but almost no meaningful conversions. Keyword B repeatedly generates trials, demo requests or qualified leads.

Now the SEO priorities look very different.

This is why we don't want to choose SEO targets purely based on:

This keyword has a lot of searches.

We want to know:

What happens when people searching this keyword actually arrive on our website?

Traffic is useful only if it's the kind of traffic we want.

Paid search can tell you which keywords are worth fighting for

This becomes especially important in competitive B2B markets.

Ranking organically for a valuable commercial keyword is not simply a matter of publishing a page. Your competitors may already have been building their positions for years. If you want to rank above them, you need to do something substantial enough to push them out of an established position.

That's a considerable investment to make around a keyword whose commercial value you haven't tested.

So if we have 20 potential SEO targets, we would rather find out first whether perhaps five of them are substantially more valuable than the others. Then the SEO team has better information about where to put its effort.

That's the main benefit paid search can provide to SEO: prioritization.

This matters even more when SEO resources are limited

Most companies don't have unlimited SEO resources. There is only so much content that can be created. There are only so many landing pages that can be improved.

And good B2B content normally needs expert input from inside the company. If a writer needs time from a founder, salesperson or product expert to create something useful, that's part of the investment too.

So the question isn't just: which keywords could we rank for?

It's: which keywords deserve the resources required to rank for them?

Paid-search data can help answer that.

What we actually want to learn from Google Ads

When we're using paid search to inform SEO, we're mainly interested in a few things.

What are people actually searching for?

The search terms themselves can be more useful than the original keyword list. You start with what you believe people search for. Then you see how the market actually describes the problem. Sometimes the difference is small. Sometimes it isn't.

How much relevant traffic actually exists?

Keyword research gives us the hypothesis. The account gives us another view of the available traffic. This is particularly important in niche B2B markets, where small absolute differences can completely change the economics.

Which searches produce engagement?

Some searches look perfect on paper but produce visitors who clearly aren't looking for what the company sells. Others behave much better.

Which searches produce conversions?

This is where it becomes commercially useful. If certain search terms repeatedly produce the actions that matter to the business, those are much stronger candidates for SEO investment.

And if the company has sufficient volume and good enough attribution, we eventually want to go beyond conversions and look at which searches produce qualified opportunities and customers.

But don't overstate what paid search can validate for SEO

There is a common argument that PPC can be used to test your entire SEO strategy. We wouldn't go that far.

The biggest overlap we see is keywords and search intent.

A paid landing page isn't necessarily the SEO page you should build

Paid-search landing pages are usually built for conversion. SEO pages have a different job. So if a particular paid landing page converts well, that doesn't automatically mean you should simply turn that page into your SEO strategy.

Paid search isn't our main tool for testing messaging either

Search ads give you relatively little space. The job of the ad is mainly to communicate: we are relevant to what you just searched for.

If we want to test different messages, propositions and ways of explaining the product, paid social is usually a better environment. Paid search is much more about capturing existing intent.

So when we say we use Google Ads before SEO, we mean something fairly specific: we use it primarily to understand which searches are commercially worth targeting.

Paid search and SEO don't need to be sequential

Running Google Ads before investing heavily in SEO doesn't mean: run paid search, stop, then start SEO.

In an optimal situation, there can be substantial overlap. Paid search starts generating traffic and information. At the same time, you can start building the SEO foundation. As the paid account generates more information, you can use it to refine where the SEO effort goes.

This matters because SEO takes time. If you already know the category is strategically important, there's no reason to delay all SEO activity while waiting for perfect paid-search data.

The point is simply that we don't want to make a large SEO investment around untested assumptions if we can test some of those assumptions much faster.

Should every B2B company run Google Ads before SEO?

If we're forced to choose, paid search is our starting point in the vast majority of cases.

But the bigger point is not that SEO should wait until paid search is finished. It's that the more expensive and difficult an organic position is going to be to build, the more we want evidence that the position is commercially worth having.

If we have a list of 20 potential SEO keywords, we don't want to treat all 20 as equally valuable because a keyword research tool says they have search volume.

We want to see the searches. We want to see the traffic. And, where there is enough volume, we want to see the conversions.

Then we can make a better decision about which organic positions deserve the long-term investment.

Before spending months trying to rank for a keyword, find out what happens when somebody actually searches for it.

The broader comparison between the two channels is covered in B2B SEO vs. paid ads. If you already run paid search and want to know whether the account is buying the right searches before you decide on SEO targets, a B2B Google Ads audit answers that separately — €450 per account, with a written assessment and a prioritized action plan within 14 days.

Two related reads: the demand framework for SEO, Google Ads and paid social for deciding which channel does which job, and why B2B SEO vs. PPC attribution is often misleading before you compare their results. We run this work as a B2B advertising agency, with B2B Google Ads management as the usual starting point. More in our Google Ads articles.