Local SEO
or Google Ads?

It depends on how long you can wait and what margin each customer leaves you, not on what budget you have. Ads switches visits on the same day and switches them off as soon as you stop paying; local SEO takes months to move, but what it gains stays and keeps bringing in calls with no cost per click. If the business needs revenue this month, there's no debate: Ads. If you're building a base that will last beyond the next campaign, every month without working on SEO is a month you don't accumulate. An annual maintenance contract can bear an acquisition cost that a one-off €60 repair can't. And the decision isn't permanent: many businesses start with Ads because they need cash now, and reduce that spend as local SEO starts to sustain the calls on its own. The actionable bit: work out first how much margin one of your customers leaves, and decide from there.

Before spending anything, your Google Business Profile: a well-chosen primary category, real opening hours, a phone number someone actually answers and your own photos, not stock images. It's free, and for a business with a physical address in Granollers it usually brings in more calls than the first few months of any paid campaign. The second step, also free, is reviews: ask for them right after you've solved someone's problem, never buy them. The third step, before investing a single euro in Ads or SEO, is checking that the website converts: that it loads quickly, the phone number is visible without scrolling and the form doesn't ask for ten fields. Only once those three points are covered does it make sense to see whether the budget stretches to Ads, SEO or neither just yet. Starting with the campaign before the profile is spending money bringing visitors to a door that isn't ready to receive them.

There's no honest figure that applies to everyone, and anyone who gives you an exact date is selling you hot air. What can be said, part by part: optimising your Google profile can move within weeks, because it competes with nothing except filling it in properly. New content on the website takes months to settle, because Google needs time to recrawl it and compare it with what already exists. Building authority against competitors who've been publishing for years is the slowest part, and there's no shortcut there except consistency. The important thing is to measure the right thing while you wait: don't just look at your position in search results, which fluctuates daily, but at the calls and forms coming in from organic search. If after a reasonable time that figure hasn't moved at all, the work needs reviewing, not just more waiting. And if someone sells you a fixed number of weeks, ask them to put it in writing.

It's the most sensible option if the margin allows: Ads gives you calls while local SEO matures, and you reduce that spend as organic starts sustaining them on its own. It covers the gap SEO can't cover at the start: the first months when the website has hardly any traffic of its own. What doesn't work is splitting an already tight budget between both at once: the campaign doesn't get enough volume to give reliable data, and SEO doesn't get the content and review effort it needs to get going. If money is limited, it's better to concentrate it on one route for a few months and review the results than to spread it thinly across both and get nowhere with either. The sign that it's time to scale back Ads isn't a date in the calendar: it's when the calls only the campaign used to bring start arriving through organic search too.

With a simple calculation almost nobody writes down: how much you pay for each call or form that comes in, how many of those contacts actually become customers, and how much margin each customer leaves once the cost of the service is deducted. If what you pay to win a customer fits comfortably within that margin, the campaign works; if it equals or exceeds it, you're paying to work without earning. The most common failure isn't that the sums come out badly, it's that they aren't done: people look at the campaign spend and little else. Doing it properly needs a minimum of tracking set up before you start — knowing which ad or keyword each call comes from — and not relying solely on what the platform itself reports, since it tends to take credit for contacts that would have arrived anyway. If you don't have that calculation done right now, that's the first job, before raising or lowering any budget.

Yes, but the approach changes. Google distinguishes between businesses with an address open to the public, such as a shop or a clinic, and service-area businesses that work at customers' homes or from an office without receiving visitors: plumbers, electricians, advisers who travel. In the second case you can set up the profile with the exact address hidden, defining the radius or towns you actually work in, and still appear in local searches for those areas. What is harder is competing in the map pack against businesses with well-located physical premises, because proximity weighs heavily in that result. There it pays to strengthen content and reviews, which count for more when there's no physical address helping on its own. If you work across several towns, be clear about which ones are really a priority rather than trying to cover them all equally, because a profile that stretches too far loses strength in each of them.

Quite a lot, and in two different places: in what position Google shows you on the map, and in how many of the people who see you end up calling. A business with few reviews, or badly managed ones, loses clicks even when it appears in a good position, because searchers compare before deciding. Getting them legitimately is one of the few things in this field that costs no money, only consistency: ask at the moment you've just solved a problem, not days later by email, which is when the fewest people respond. Replying to all of them, good and bad, counts too: a proper reply to a negative review usually convinces later readers more than a perfect review left unanswered. What you must never do is buy them or incentivise them with discounts in exchange for a five-star review: they're detected fairly easily, and the penalty when they are is usually worse than the problem you were trying to solve.

Then the cost per click in your sector is already pushed up by that competition, and it's worth doing the sums before you go in, not after you see the first bill. Before launching a campaign, check which ads are already running on the searches where you wanted to appear: it gives you an idea of how many people are bidding and what message they're using. In very competitive sectors, bidding directly on the most generic keywords tends to be expensive, because you're up against people who've been fine-tuning their campaigns for longer. The more sensible route is usually to start with more specific, less contested queries, where the searcher has a clearer need and fewer advertisers are fighting over it; they cost less per click and tend to convert better because the intent is more defined. At the same time, that very scenario of heavy competition on Ads is the clearest sign that local SEO is worth investing in, because there the advantage isn't bought every month: it's built once and it stays.