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SEO is a mortgage. PPC is rent. PMax is a toddler.

29 October 2026 · Joss Froggatt

Let’s get this out of the way: the question for Episode 1 of Search Beef was a bit unfair.

If you had £100k to spend on search today, is SEO the smarter long-term bet over PPC?

Nobody gets handed £100k without a timeframe and no business attached. They also never get told to pick one channel and never touch the other. That’s not a marketing plan, it feels more like a hostage situation.

Ask any sensible, experienced marketer and the answer is “split it”. That’s correct, and it’s also a bit boring, and it doesn’t lend itself to debate very well does it? “Let’s split the budget” is the beige carpet of opinions: nothing wrong with it, but nobody remembers it.

So I took away that fence. Hannah Bryce (16 years in SEO, now consulting) when given the question, chose to defend SEO. Maddie Lightening ⚡ (Head of Paid Media at Hallam, 10 years in paid) opted to defend PPC. Sides picked, they both made the strongest case for theirs, and that’s where the really good stuff came out.

Most of what follows is in their own words, lightly edited for readability.

Hannah: SEO is a mortgage

Hannah opened by going after the wording of the question itself.

“The key thing here is the smarter long-term bet. We’re discussing long-term value rather than which channel will generate the most revenue in a short period like 30 days. And I think it’s like buying a house. If you buy a house for £300,000, it’s almost certain that it will never be worth that little ever again. You’ll be generating equity for the whole time you live there. With rent, once you pay that month, it’s gone.”

“Yes, it might include short-term benefits, like having your landlord pay for an engineer to come out when your boiler’s broken. But in the long term, once you stop paying the rent, the roof over your head disappears. PPC rents traffic while SEO builds it.”

Then she closed the loophole of “just reinvest the revenue”:

“We don’t actually get to increase the marketing budget just because we want to and just because we made some money. That money might go on stock or debt or bonuses. So what would happen when the £100k is gone? SEO leaves you with better website architecture, better UX, valuable content, stronger authority and organic rankings that continue delivering returns. PPC stops being a channel as soon as you stop spending.”

“If the question were how to make sales tomorrow, then PPC would definitely have the best case. But once PPC’s budget runs out, PPC stops, traffic stops and revenue stops.”

With my paid background, I wanted to interrupt about four times. The point of the format however, is that opening arguments are interruption free.

Maddie: speed has a price tag too

Maddie started by complimenting Hannah’s answer, then countered it in four parts.

First, speed:

“There is commercial value in speed. SEO is a long-term investment. It earns visibility over time. PPC lets you enter the auction today with commercially proven, valuable queries that start generating traffic whilst your competitors are still waiting for their organic rankings to improve. If that business needs pipeline quickly, waiting for SEO to mature has an opportunity cost, and you can’t recover the revenue that’s lost whilst you’re waiting.”

Second, PPC as research:

“We can use paid search as a market research engine, not just a media channel. A well-managed PPC account can give you the search terms that you can prove generate qualified leads or e-commerce value. You can use it as a testing ground to set up your organic strategy. I could whip up a campaign within a couple of hours and do all the keyword research in a day.”

Third, the ability to change your mind:

“It’s quicker to market, but it’s also quicker to pivot. If I entered the market and was instantly like, ‘I’ve made a mistake, I want to change my keyword strategy’, you could do that within a day.”

And fourth, the best line of the opening statements:

“Like family, you can’t choose your competitors. But you can bid against them. You can choose when you compete, where you compete and how you compete.”

The beef

“SEO isn’t free”

Maddie went straight at the mortgage:

“SEO isn’t free. You’re paying for technical expertise, content, digital PR, authority building, ongoing maintenance. But you don’t always have that guarantee, unless you’ve got an amazing SEO like Hannah, that the investment is actually going to generate rankings or conversions. The comparison isn’t CPC versus a zero cost for organic clicks. It’s the total cost of everything going in. Looking at it more like ROI instead of ROAS.”

Hannah’s answer was to extend the analogy rather than refute it:

“A lot of people will rent because they need somewhere now. They haven’t got the deposit, and the deposit could be having the right people in-house or the right person at an agency. This PPC person says they can get me money tomorrow, and I’ve not really found a decent SEO person that I really believe in. So yes, PPC can work better in that case. But unless you’re going to keep reinvesting, which nobody has the guarantee of, it’s going to be SEO, because of all the foundations you’ve built. Literally brick upon brick, window upon window.”

“What if AI Overviews eat the lot?”

I asked Hannah what happens if all that groundwork gets swallowed by AI Overviews, or a core update.

“SEO makes the AI side work. Where does brand traffic come from? People are searching for the brand because of what we’ve got on those pages. We’re being recommended in LLM responses and AI Overviews because of what it says on the website, because somebody in SEO said ‘this is the content we need’. So if an algorithm update wipes you out, then you’ve got a crap SEO. That’s just the end of it really.”

Maddie then brought up the part of Google that’s easy to forget:

“Google is also a business. They’ve got their own sales targets and KPIs. They tend to prefer paid media because we’re putting money directly into their pockets. I can just storm in and place ads in the AI Overview box now. I could do that without doing all of the website prep, and be above the competitors almost immediately.”

When I pushed that paid is simply faster into AI answers, Hannah didn’t flinch:

“I think you can get in there overnight. I have got in there overnight. And not by silly things like putting rubbish in your footer. I’ve built websites where the next day you’ve got the AI Overview saying what that website does. Not anywhere near as well as paid though. Over to you, Maddie.”

And Maddie, despite her job title, admitted speed isn’t the whole story:

“LLMs came out and now search is way more conversational, and we can’t predict that with traditional keyword targeting. That’s why broad match came in, and I don’t think it’s harsh to say that everyone hates broad match. If you just rush to be quick to market without that smart strategy, that is a waste of your £100k.”

(Someone disagrees about broad match. They’re coming on the show next week.)

“PMax has gone off and done whatever it wants”

Given the chance to land one unanswered punch, Hannah chose Performance Max:

“What if you’ve put a lot of your budget on PMax, and PMax has gone off and done whatever the hell it wants? With SEO, you’ve done the wrong thing, rankings have dropped, you just fix it. Or if it’s a dev change, you revert. Whereas with PMax, I’ve been on calls where we’ve been like, ‘Crap, that’s just spent thousands of pounds overnight on the wrong thing. And I swear I didn’t set it up that way.’”

Maddie’s reply is my favourite moment of the episode:

“Anything Google brings out that’s automated and you don’t have complete control over, which for the last seven years has been almost everything, is like having a toddler loose with your money. There’s nothing wrong with teaching your toddler how to spend money. But you’re not letting them run wild around the shop, are you? You’re still holding their hand.”

“I have been in that exact scenario where I’ve woken up and found that £500 has gone to YouTube overnight. But I’ve normally seen that pay off. So keep an eye on your PMax campaigns, and also check what happens afterwards, because it might not always be as bad as you think. Which brings me to my other motto: fail fast.”

“Fail fast” vs the 12-month sales cycle

I’ve been burned by “fail fast mentality” in a business where deals took months, so I pushed. Maddie’s answer was an SEO argument coming from a PPC lead:

“We’ve got clients where it takes six to twelve months for a lead to become qualified. So yes, organic is completely vital to their strategy. I lean on their organic strategy really heavily. But the business can’t always wait, so paid goes and gets them. That only works with a multi-stage tracking funnel: scroll depth, time on page, brochure downloads, return visits, then MQL and SQL. If you’re waiting all the way for that SQL, you’re failing over six to twelve months at a time.”

Where they ended up

The most telling answers came when I asked why this debate is different now. Neither guest talked about their own channel.

Hannah: “Attribution’s huge. They found us on social media, then they went to ChatGPT, then all of our competitors, then they got an email from us, did some more ChatGPTing, and when they finally decided, they landed on a paid ad. Who knows? Everyone’s in it together now.”

Hannah: “The main way I’ve worked with PPC in the past has been me saying ‘I want to change this landing page’, and them saying ‘absolutely not, you’re going to fill it full of fluff and it won’t convert’. And then I changed the landing page, and it converts better for both.”

Maddie: “Now I’m in my head of organic’s DMs every single day. ‘I’m thinking about doing this, what do you think?’ It’s a constant back and forth. And CPCs go up every single year, so choosing how you plan your media is way more important. There are more plates to spin.”

Then the verdict: did either of them change their mind?

Maddie: “Yes. Hannah opened my eyes. I didn’t know you could sway organic rankings in such a short time period, which makes one of my core argument points slightly invalid. But please still invest in paid media, because that keeps me in a job.”

Hannah: “I still think SEO is the way to go. But if you can afford it and you can do both, paid search is a great channel and will get you results quicker. If it could be split, I’d split it.”

So yes, after 40 minutes we arrived at “split it”. The difference is that we got there through the medium of healthy debate rather than skirting around it. You now know why you’d split it, what each half is actually buying, and what the other side would say before you’ve said a word in the budget meeting.

This is the whole idea behind Search Beef. It’s not a win/lose format. Two practitioners, one question, and you walk away with two perspectives instead of one.

So where’s your £100k going? Pick a side in the comments.

Watch or listen to the full episode:

Next week: is broad match actually good now? Spoiler alert, episode 2 breaks the format.