Google Ads bills you for every click. SEO improves the site you already own for one flat fee. This page shows you how to work out both bills. Our own price is $297 a month, with no contract. Figures measured July 8, 2026.
No contract · 60-day money-back guarantee on your first purchase · your site stays yours.
Spend on Google Ads when you need clicks this week. Spend on SEO when you want to stop paying for every click. Ads bill you per click, every time. SEO costs one flat fee, and the work stays on the site you own. Plenty of owners run both.
Here is each one in plain words.
Google Ads is paid search. You pick a search term and bid on it. Your ad sits at the top of the page. You pay Google each time someone taps it. Stop paying and the ad is gone that day.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means building pages that answer what people type. Google can then show those pages for free. It takes months to move. Once a page ranks, more visits cost you nothing extra.
People type this question in different words. Some type seo vs ppc. Some type seo vs sem. SEM means search engine marketing, and Google Ads sits inside it. Some type organic vs paid search. All of them ask one thing. Do you rent the clicks, or own the pages?
We work the SEO side. First a full audit of the site you already own. Then a plan for the fixes. Then ongoing work on the pages you already have, for $297 a month. For the full price map on that side, read how much SEO costs. Cannot be found at all right now? Start with the usual reasons a business does not show up on Google. Some of those are five minute fixes.
Google Ads has no set price. You pay per click, at whatever your trade costs. SEO with us is $297 a month, flat. Those are two different kinds of bill. Here is how each one behaves.
| The question | Google Ads | SEO with us |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Each click, one at a time | One flat month |
| What next month costs | More, if more people click | $297. The same $297 |
| How fast it starts | The same day you switch it on | Your plan lands in 14 days. Rankings move later |
| When you stop paying | The clicks stop that day | You keep your site and every fix on it |
| Who holds the asset | Google holds the ad account | Your pages sit on your own domain |
| Who can take it | Anyone willing to bid more | Nobody can outbid a page |
Now put a real number on the ads side. It takes two numbers. What one click costs in your trade, and how many clicks you want in a month. Google's Keyword Planner shows the click price for free. Multiply the two. That is your ad bill.
| What one click costs you | 100 clicks in a month | Our price for that month |
|---|---|---|
| $5 | $500 | $297 |
| $10 | $1,000 | $297 |
| $12.04, the price we measured on seo vs sem | $1,204 | $297 |
| $20 | $2,000 | $297 |
| $40 | $4,000 | $297 |
That table is multiplication, not a forecast. Put your own click price in and the answer changes.
Here is the break even, said plainly. At $12.04 a click, $297 buys 24 clicks. Once. The next 24 clicks cost another $297. Your own site works the other way around. You pay the same $297 next month, and the work on your site keeps adding up.
The SEO side has a price range of its own, and ours sits under it. These are the real options for the same work.
| Who does the SEO | A month | The usual catch |
|---|---|---|
| A freelancer | $250-800 | One person's calendar. Sick weeks ship nothing |
| Most providers | $501-1,000 | The most common band in the survey of 439 providers |
| A full service agency | $1,500-5,000 | You are buying hours. Ask how many turn into finished work |
| Your own marketer | $4,000+ | Salary alone. Tools and outside help still cost extra |
| Buying the parts yourself | $1,200+ | Tools $250-280, a one-time audit $500-2,000, a coder $75-150 an hour |
| GrowFasterSEO | $297 | You do not pick the task list. Want to run it yourself? Wrong fit |
The average retainer is $1,557 a month across 439 providers surveyed by Ahrefs. About 68.8% of them charge $2,000 a month or less. Those bands are widely published market ranges, not our measurement. The click prices below are ours.
Owners type eight main things while they weigh this, and those eight add up to 2,720 searches a month. You probably typed one of them to get here. Here are the four biggest. The last column is what one click on that search costs in Google Ads.
| What owners search (top measured terms) | Searches / month | Cost per click (Ads) |
|---|---|---|
| seo vs sem | 1,900 | $12.04 |
| seo vs ppc | 390 | $8.42 |
| seo vs google ads | 210 | $0.00 |
| organic vs paid search | 210 | $0.00 |
The 8 terms add up to 2,720 searches a month. Google Ads data, US targeting, measured July 8, 2026.
Look at the last column twice. Two of these four cost real money per click. Two cost nothing, because nobody bids on them. Advertisers save their budget for buy now searches. Questions like this one get answered by whoever published the best page. That is how you landed here.
So the real fight is not on questions like these. It is on the buy now searches your own customers type. There, every click has a price. And the clicks stop the day your budget does. We measure this the same way in every trade we cover, and we publish what we find in our market reports.
Your customers shop the way you just shopped. They type a problem into a box. Then they pick from what answers it. Buy those clicks and you pay again next month. We do ongoing work on the pages you already have, on the site you already own, for $297 a month. Your site stays yours, even if you leave. One of those is a receipt. The other is yours to keep.
Five things move an ad bill. You set three of them. Your market sets the other two. Check yours against this list before you compare any two numbers.
The SEO side moves on other things. How many pages your site already has. What shape those pages are in. And how many towns you cover, which is the heart of local SEO. One location needs the same work, just less of it, and small business SEO walks through what that looks like.
Yes, and plenty of owners do exactly that. They are two tools with two bills. They do not cancel each other out.
Here is the order most owners use. Ads cover this month. Your own pages cover next year. Run ads while your pages are still climbing. Once one of your pages ranks for a search, you can pull the ad spend off that search. Then put that money somewhere else.
One warning. Do not judge pages by an ad report. Ads report a click within the hour. Pages take months to show up at all. Two different clocks, two different tools.
Both of them touch the map, too. Paid pins and free listings sit on the same screen. How to rank on Google Maps covers the free side of it. One thing to be clear about: Google Business Profile management is not part of our plan. We improve the local search signals on the website you already own.
Six questions make two numbers comparable. Ask them before you sign, and before you fund an ad account. Ask for the answers in writing. A seller who cannot answer fast is telling you something.
A promised ranking. A free audit that turns out to be a sales call with a price at the end. And a contract longer than six months, signed before one page has gone live. None of the three are illegal. All three cost owners real money every year.
A very low quote has a math problem too. Research tools alone run $250 to $280 a month, before anyone does any work. So ask what is left to pay for the fixes. We laid that out in what cheap SEO really buys. The rest of the checklist is in what a package should contain.
SEO is the wrong buy for some businesses, and we would rather say so now. Paying for it at the wrong moment wastes real money. Here is when to put the money into ads instead, or into neither.
GrowFasterSEO is $297 a month. A year paid up front is $2,970, which works out to $247.50 a month. There is no contract. That monthly price is under 25 clicks at the $12.04 we measured above.
It also sits below every band in that table but one. Only a freelancer can come in under it, and a freelancer is one person with one calendar. So the fair question is what is missing. Nothing is missing. The labor is built a different way.
An agency bills you for the hours. People do the crawls, the checks and the reports by hand, every month, for every client. We wrote software to do the parts that repeat. It crawls your site, runs the audit, checks your page speed, and puts the problems in order. Then your account manager picks what gets fixed next and checks the work before it goes on your site.
That is the whole reason for the gap. Software handles the volume. A person holds the bar. Take out either half and the price goes up or the work gets worse.
One more piece, because buyers ask about it now. Tools like ChatGPT read your pages too. We get the content you already have ready for them, and your monthly report covers how you are showing up. Our AI search page shows what that work looks like.
Three things this plan is not. It does not buy or run your Google Ads. It does not manage your Google Business Profile. And it is not a website build. The plan works on the website you already own. We do not need you to rebuild it first.
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What other people charge, above and below, comes from widely published market rates. Those are not our measurement. Our own price is.
That is a lot of work for $297 a month. It is meant to be. Software does the repeat work, so we do not bill you for hours the way an agency has to. And with no contract, we have to earn next month.
Your 60-day money-back guarantee. You get 60 days to change your mind, counted from the day of your first purchase. Not happy with the quality of the work? Send one email and we refund it. It is one window on your first purchase. It never renews and it never resets. We guarantee our work. We never guarantee results, because nobody honest can.
Monthly $297/mo · Yearly $2,970, which is $247.50/mo and two months free · Pick your plan
SEO with GrowFasterSEO is $297 a month, flat. Google Ads has no flat price. You pay for every click, at whatever your trade costs. At $12.04 a click, the price we measured on seo vs sem, $297 buys 24 clicks. Once. The bigger difference is what happens when you stop. Stop paying for ads and the clicks stop that day. The work we do sits on your own site, and your site stays yours.
Google Ads can bring clicks the same day you turn it on. SEO is slower. You get your action plan within 14 days. We start on the priority fixes as soon as we can get into your site. Movement in rankings usually takes three to four months, and it builds from there. Nobody controls Google's clock, so nobody can promise you a date. Need clicks this week? Run ads.
Yes, and plenty of owners do. Ads cover this month. Your own pages cover next year. Once one of your pages ranks for a search, you can pull the ad spend off that search and put it somewhere else. They are two tools with two bills, not rivals.
A tight budget usually points at your own pages. The price stays at $297 no matter how many people read them. Google Ads charges per click, every click, forever. A small ad budget buys a small run of clicks. That run ends the day the money does.
You need two numbers. What one click costs in your trade, and how many clicks you want in a month. Google's Keyword Planner shows the click price for free. Multiply the two. That is your ad bill, before you pay anyone to build or run the ads.
Yes, and the work is smaller. Fewer people search in a small town, so there is less to compete with. Fewer shops are bidding, and fewer are looking after their own site. A smaller map takes less work to cover.
An agency bills you for the hours. We do not. Software does the work that repeats. It crawls your site, runs the audit, checks your page speed, and puts the problems in order. Then your account manager picks what gets fixed next and checks it. Same jobs, paid for a different way.
Both, and that is on purpose. Software does the volume. A dedicated US account manager owns your account, the same person start to finish. Nothing goes onto your site until they have checked it. Message them any time and they answer.
Software drafts. People check. Every change passes a fact check first, and your account manager reads it before it touches your site. Anything we cannot back up never goes out under your name. This page follows the same rule.
You can do it yourself, and some owners do. The problem is time. Real SEO means research, fixes and checking. Every week. Most owners fix two things and stop. The average agency retainer is $1,557 a month across 439 providers surveyed by Ahrefs.
No. Our $297 plan is the audit, the fixes and the ongoing work on the site you already own. We do not buy, build or manage ad campaigns. Want ads as well? Run them yourself, or hire a shop that does only ads.
No. Google Business Profile management is not part of the plan. We improve the local search signals on the website you already own. If you want to know how the profile itself works, our page on how to rank on Google Maps explains it.
No. The plan works on the website you already own, as it is. We do not need you to rebuild it first, and a rebuild is not part of the $297 plan.
Yes, all of it. Every change we make sits on your own domain. Ownership is not a clause you have to trust. It is where the files live. Cancel future renewals any time from your account and your site stays yours.
You get 60 days to change your mind, counted from the day of your first purchase. Not happy with the quality of the work? Send one email and we refund it. It is one window on the initial purchase. It never renews and it never resets. We guarantee our work. We never guarantee results.
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Checkout takes two minutes. Setup takes about fifteen. Then your account manager audits your site and puts the fixes in order. Every week you see what was finished.
$297/mo · no contract · cancel anytime from your account.