If you want to grow your company, Google Ads are great, but SEO must be the foundation.

Google Ads is a fast way forward: add products, increase your budget, and drive so much traffic to your site that you can almost hear the engines roar. Few things can accelerate sales like this. But Google Ads without SEO can put you in a tricky position.

You run a relatively small e-commerce store and realize that Google Ads is the path to rapid growth. Month by month, your account and product range expand, and revenue rises at the same pace. If you have good agreements with your suppliers, solid logistics contracts, and costs that don’t spiral out of control, you’ve created a machine that grows your business every month. Often, though, only up to a certain point.

The trick with Google Ads is to spend as much as you can afford. If you make 15 SEK per sale, then you should spend 15 SEK on Google Ads. That’s what your competitors are doing. If you’ve wondered why so many fast-growing e-commerce companies aren’t profitable, there’s a big part of the answer. They count on the customer’s lifetime value making it worth paying their entire margin right away, or even more. That’s why the moment comes when you can’t increase your budget further — you’re capturing all the traffic you can, while your competitors systematically place higher bids and benefit from a stronger brand.

The reason your competitor can bid more is partly their strong brand, which gives them a better click-through rate and lowers their prices. It’s also because they drive organic traffic. The cost of organic traffic doesn’t rise in step with sales growth, unlike Google Ads. SEO is often an investment that doesn’t pay off as quickly as Google Ads, but once it does, it delivers returns without increasing costs.

If 30% of your sales come from organic traffic, you keep those 15 SEK from all of that revenue. Sure, you’ve paid a fixed cost for your SEO investment, but that cost is quickly outweighed by the constant inflow of 15-kronor notes. That’s where you find your margin and can continue accelerating with Google Ads.

That’s exactly what your competitor is doing.

You should also know:

• How Cykelkraft grew to 250 million SEK