Search marketing:
SEO, ads and tracking in one place

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one part of search marketing, focused on organic, unpaid results. Search marketing is broader: it also covers paid search ads and, increasingly, visibility in AI search engines.

SEM (search engine marketing) is the English term for search marketing, covering both the organic and paid sides together. PPC (pay per click) is the click-based advertising model: you only pay when someone clicks. CPC (cost per click) is the price you pay for that click.

In everyday work, none of these is an end in itself: the real question is always how much a lead or an order costs, not how much a click costs.

GEO (generative engine optimisation) means building your company’s content so that ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Overviews cite it as a source. Much of it overlaps with good SEO: clear facts, structured data and credible external mentions.

Yes, but it’s changing. AI answers don’t come from nowhere: they read websites and cite sources, typically ones that also perform well in classic search results. If you were invisible on Google before, you won’t appear in AI answers either.

What’s changing is that fewer searches turn into clicks, but the visitors who do click through are more purposeful. That’s why it’s worth investing in specific, answer-focused content and in tracking, rather than in raw visitor numbers alone.

Online marketing is the broader term: it covers every internet channel, from newsletters through social media to influencers. Search marketing is the part of it that builds on visitors arriving from search, meaning people who are already interested.

According to Keyword Planner, in Hungary the term “online marketing” gets 720 searches a month, and “search marketing” gets 70. For most companies, search is the best-performing channel, because the customer is telling you exactly what they want.

If you need leads quickly and have budget for it, start with ads: within days you’ll see which searches bring in buyers. If your site already gets traffic and the goal is lasting, cheaper visitors, start with search engine optimisation.

In practice, the two support each other: advertising data shows which keywords are worth building content around, while SEO gradually reduces your dependence on paid ads. The table above compares SEO vs PPC criterion by criterion.

It’s worth it when you have a measurable goal (a quote request, a call, a purchase) and there’s genuine search demand for it. With a small budget, start with a narrow, well-targeted campaign. Only scale up once the tracked results justify it.

Not always, but it pays off well in two cases. One is remarketing: reaching people who visited from search but didn’t buy, cheaply, through social ads. The other is when the product is visually striking or new: in that case nobody is searching for it yet, so you need to build demand first.

For purely professional, urgent services (a burst pipe, a house move), search remains the primary channel.

Tracking and the product feed come first, because without them Shopping and Performance Max campaigns learn from bad data. Next comes advertising built around brand names and specific products, which pays back the fastest.

Search engine optimisation of the category pages starts in parallel: it’s slower, but it’s what delivers lasting traffic. Social remarketing is the third step.

Search ads bring traffic within days of a campaign going live, provided tracking is set up correctly. SEO results build more slowly, typically over months depending on how strong the competition is, but they last longer in return.

When acquiring a new customer costs less than that customer brings in. To know this, you need two figures: what an average customer is worth to you (first purchase plus repeat orders together), and what it costs to acquire one.

Ranking position and visitor numbers alone are misleading: badly targeted high traffic is worth less than ten good leads a month. That’s why our reporting is tuned to revenue and quote requests, not clicks.

Advertising stops the day you pause it, and traffic drops immediately. The results of search engine optimisation, by contrast, remain: the technical fixes and the content you’ve had written stay on the site, and rankings can hold for months.

Over the long term, though, competitors will gradually overtake you, so it’s worth continuing at least at a maintenance level. All access and data stay with you, so you can pick it back up at any time.

It consists of two parts: the ad budget, which you pay directly to Google or Meta, and the fee for the work itself (campaign management or a monthly SEO retainer). On the Hungarian market, monthly SEO retainers run roughly €180–1,300 + VAT.

Before starting, we always estimate what budget makes sense for your market: too small a budget means the campaign can’t learn, and the money is spent without any useful insight.

There’s no annual commitment: our monthly cooperation can be cancelled month by month. Given how SEO works, we recommend at least 6 months, because meaningful results don’t show up in less time, but we don’t tie you to that with a contract.

Not your passwords: on Google Ads, Search Console, GA4 and Meta we get access as a partner, through our own account, which you can revoke at any time. For your website, we only need as much access as the work requires.

If you don’t yet have GA4 or an ads account, we set it up in your company’s name. The principle is the same throughout: all data and accounts remain yours.

Yes, that’s a common setup. At many companies, someone already manages the campaigns, but the technical side (tracking, speed, feeds, structured data) doesn’t belong to anyone. In that case, we take care of that layer and don’t touch the campaigns.

We clarify the boundaries of responsibility in writing at the start, so there’s no overlap and nobody points fingers if results dip.

An online marketing agency’s strength is campaigns, creative and strategy. For the website, the tracking code and the product feed, though, you typically need to call in an external developer, which slows down fixes.

As a development team, we keep the technical layer in-house too: tracking, speed, structured data, feeds, landing pages. If you already have an agency you trust, we can slot in alongside them as your technical back-up.

Because Google’s and Meta’s algorithms learn from the conversion data coming in. If tracking is incomplete, the system optimises against bad data, and spend flows into campaigns that only look good on paper.

That’s why, as a first step, we check whether GA4 and ad-platform conversions match your actual orders. If there’s a large gap, server-side tracking is the solution.

You’ll get a monthly report written in plain language: what happened, what changed since the previous month, how much a lead cost and what the plan is for the next month. You can access the detailed data at any time, with a live reporting dashboard on request.

Then that’s where we start. Both are free, and setting them up takes a few hours of work; in return, from that point on you can see which searches your site appears for and what happens to your visitors.

It’s important to know that these systems don’t collect data retroactively: whatever isn’t tracked today is lost for good. That alone is a good reason not to leave tracking for later.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) looks at why your existing visitors turn into so few leads or buyers: a slow site, a long form, missing prices, a hard-to-find button, unclear delivery terms.

It’s worth starting once you already have traffic but still get few orders. The same ad budget generates more revenue if the landing page performs better. As developers, we also carry out the fixes ourselves, verifying the results with tracking.