🌐 How does Google Ads Compliment SEO

Digital Marketing Articles, Local SEO
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Google Ads

In today’s competitive digital world, businesses across South Wales are realising that relying on just one marketing channel isn’t enough. To truly maximise online visibility and attract consistent enquiries, combining south Wales Google Ads with SEO could be a smart strategy to adopt. Especially, for new businesses that are building an online presence and visibility.

At HML Marketing, we’ve spent over 20 years helping local businesses grow their online presence through proven digital marketing solutions. Here’s how Google Ads and SEO work hand in hand to deliver powerful results.

Instant Visibility While SEO Builds Momentum

1. Instant Visibility While SEO Builds Momentum

SEO is a long-term investment that builds your website’s authority and organic rankings over time. However, it can take a few months to see results, especially for competitive keywords.

That’s where Google Ads comes in. Paid search campaigns can get your business to the top of Google instantly, driving targeted traffic and leads while your SEO strategy gains traction. Together, they create a perfect balance of short-term and long-term growth.

2. Data-Driven SEO Decisions

Google Ads provides valuable insights into which keywords, audiences, and locations generate the most clicks and conversions.

By analysing this data, we can refine your SEO strategy to target the highest-performing search terms and focus on the areas where your business performs best. For example, whether that’s Cardiff Bay, Bridgend, Newport or central Swansea.

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3. Boosted Brand Visibility and Trust

Appearing in both the paid ads section and the organic search results strengthens your brand’s credibility. When customers see your business multiple times on the first page of Google, they’re far more likely to trust you and click through to your website.

This “double exposure” effect helps you dominate search results, reinforcing your brand authority and increasing click-through rates.

4. Balanced ROI — Short-Term and Long-Term

Running SEO and Google Ads together ensures your marketing investment delivers both immediate results and sustainable growth.

  • Google Ads = instant traffic and leads.
  • SEO = long-term rankings and reduced advertising costs over time.

The two channels complement each other perfectly. Therefore, giving your business the best of both worlds.

5. Strengthening Your Local South Wales Presence

For businesses targeting local customers, combining Local SEO (optimising Google Maps listings, directories, and location pages) with Google Ads location targeting ensures maximum visibility to nearby prospects actively searching for your services.

Whether you’re in Cardiff, Pencoed, Porthcawl, or Newport, this integrated approach helps you stay front and centre where it matters most in your community.

The Bottom Line

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SEO and Google Ads aren’t rivals — they’re partners.
Together, they form a complete digital marketing strategy that delivers visibility, trust, and consistent growth for your South Wales business. At HML Marketing, our experts combine the precision of south Wales Google Ads with the staying power of SEO to help you achieve measurable, lasting success online.

📞 Let’s talk today about how we can tailor a Google Ads and SEO strategy that gets your business seen and chosen by the right people. 👉 Visit hmlmarketing.co.uk

Quick Query HML

What is National SEO?

National SEO is a long-term investment that can separate your business from the competitors. Although similar to local SEO, National SEO focuses primarily on ranking for broad keyword terms rather than ranking for specific geographical terms.

Optimising a website involves many activities to increase your rankings and likelihood of people finding your website. We want to increase your websites' relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Here's just a few of the activities we employ -

  • editing website content, adding new content
  • doing HTML, and associated coding
  • promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links
  • optimising mobile search as it's surpassed desktop search
  • promoting mobile first on search is key

HML pledges' to offer the very best value online marketing service to all our members and our guaranteed commitment to outperform your competitors, generate you more income through our rigorous SEO work and comprehensive open reporting.

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More Options for National SEO?

Find out about what's included in our National SEO membership packages and do compare us, as we pride ourselves on offering the best value comprehensive SEO with guaranteed commitment. National SEO Guide & Pricing

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO (search engine optimisation) targets local people doing local searches for your products or services which accounts for nearly half of all searches.

46%
of searches now have a 'local intent'

So what is local search optimisation?

Local SEO is similar to National SEO in that they both aim to improve the visibility of your website in a web search engine's unpaid results (SERP - search engine results page) often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results. The higher ranked on the search results page and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive. These visitors can then be converted into customers.

Local SEO, however, differs in that it is focused on optimising a business' for local people searching for its products or services. These can be brick-and-mortar businesses with physical locations, like a grocery store or dentist's office, or service-area businesses that operate throughout a certain geographic area, like an electrician or house cleaning company.

With good enough SEO and authority, anyone in the world can rank for a search query like ‘how to fix my dripping tap’. But when someone is looking to purchase locally a product or service, it becomes ‘plumbers near me’ or ‘best plumber in [their location]’. That’s a local search and you’ll need local SEO to ensure you rank high enough for people for find you.

How do we optimise for local searches?

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As these people searching, typically include a location or ‘near me’ (which aren’t even necessary if searching using Google Maps), search engines understand that what the searcher wants is business suggestions or lists based on location, and so that’s precisely what they offer up in the local search engine results pages (SERPs).

Ranking for local search involves a similar process to general SEO but includes some specific elements to rank a business for local search. Local searches trigger search engines to display two types of results:

On the Search engine results page: local organic results. The local organic results include web pages related to the search query with local relevance. These often include directories such as Yelp, Thompson Local, Facebook.

The 'Local Pack' displays businesses that have signed up with Google and taken ownership of their 'Google My Business' (GMB) listing.

This includes everything from claiming a business listing to ensuring a franchise location appears in a local search on Google (a process known as location data or citation management). It can also extend to managing online ratings and reviews, local-centric social media engagement, and beyond.