Since April, one of the online shops we look after has paid an average of 7p for each click on its Google ads. That is across 27,274 clicks, not a lucky week. Over the 30 days to 24 October it was 5.9p. On 24 October it was 4.4p.
People ask me how. The short answer is that the ads and the SEO share the same pages, and Google rewards good pages with cheaper clicks. The long answer is this article, with the real numbers, the mistakes, and what it means if you run a business in Chester rather than a fish shop.
7p
average cost per click, Apr–Oct 2026
22.78%
click-through rate on Search
19/21
keywords with Quality Score 8–10
2.6×
purchases after our September changes
The number, and what it isn’t
The shop is Aquatropics, a London aquatics retailer and a client of ours. We run its Google Ads, its SEO and the AI assistant on its website. From 1 April to 24 October 2026 its Google Search campaign got 27,274 clicks from 119,730 impressions, a click-through rate of 22.78%, at an average of 7p a click. Leave out people searching for the shop by name and the average is still 7p.
Before anyone gets excited, the honest part: fish is a cheap market. Google’s Keyword Planner says advertisers in the UK pay between 16.7p and 22.1p on average for these searches. So 7p is not a miracle in a market where everyone else pays £5. It is about a third of the going rate in a market that is already cheap. That gap is the interesting bit, and it is where SEO comes in.
| Search | UK average CPC | Aquatropics paid | Quality Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| tropical fish | 19.2p | 6.9p | 9/10 |
| tropical fish for sale | 18p | 7.6p | 8/10 |
| tropical fish online | 22.1p | 6.8p | 8/10 |
| buy tropical fish online | 21.4p | 6.2p | 8/10 |
| aquarium fish for sale | 16.7p | 7.8p | 8/10 |
How Google prices a click
Google runs an auction every time someone searches. It does not simply sell the top spot to the highest bidder. It ranks ads by Ad Rank, which combines your bid with the quality of your ad and page, plus things like the search context and your ad assets. Then it charges you roughly what you need to beat the advertiser below you, not your full bid. Google explains this in its help pages on Ad Rank and actual cost per click.
So two advertisers can sit in the same position and pay very different prices. The one with the better ad and page pays less. Google sums that quality up as a Quality Score from 1 to 10, built from three parts:
Expected click-through rate
How likely people are to click your ad when it shows.
Ad relevance
How closely the ad matches what the person searched.
Landing-page experience
How useful and relevant the page is once they click.
Notice what is missing: your organic ranking. Being number one in the free results does not knock a penny off your ads. Anyone who tells you otherwise has the auction wrong, and as a Google Partner we would rather explain it properly.
Where SEO comes in
Two of those three parts come straight from the website. When we read the Aquatropics keywords on 25 October 2026, Google rated the landing-page experience above average on all 21 of the 21 keywords it scores, and expected click-through rate above average on 18. Of the 21, 19 have a Quality Score of 8, 9 or 10.
That part isn’t down to tricks in the ads account. The ads send people to category pages, like the main tropical fish page, that we built and keep improving for SEO. They match what people search, they load quickly on a phone (89% of these clicks come from phones), and they answer the questions buyers have about delivery and live arrival before they have to ask. Google’s landing-page score rewards exactly those things. So does organic search.
The headlines help the click-through rate. They use the words people type: “Tropical Fish For Sale UK”, “Next-Day Live Fish Delivery”, “Live Arrival Guarantee”. The click-through rate on Search has stayed above 20% every month since April.
Two channels, one set of pages
The SEO work started earlier. Organic clicks to the shop grew from 4,714 in July 2025 to 18,439 in January 2026, and the average position moved from 14.5 to 4.6. Most months since then have brought 11,000 to 15,000 organic clicks.
SEO wins the long, specific searches first. “betta fish for sale” ranks around position 7 and brings 100 to 250 clicks a month for free. The big, broad searches like “tropical fish for sale” still sit on page two organically. So that is what the ads buy: the broad searches that SEO hasn’t won yet. When SEO wins one, the ad money can move elsewhere. Every page we improve for SEO also improves the ads that land on it, so the work pays twice.
Where Google’s automation helped, and where it didn’t
Until late September the account ran two campaigns: the Search campaign and a Performance Max campaign, Google’s fully automated type that chooses its own placements across Search, Shopping, YouTube and more. In the 29 days to 25 September, Performance Max paid 25.3p a click with a 7.4% click-through rate. The Search campaign paid 6.5p with 22.7%.
On 26 September our team stopped Performance Max. On the Search campaign we turned off AI Max, Google’s setting that lets its AI match your ads to searches beyond your keywords, and the automatically written ad text, and halved the daily budget. On 5 October, with clean purchase tracking in place, we moved the Search campaign to Google’s value-based bidding.
That last step matters. We are not against automation. Automated bidding is very good at finding the right bid when it has real purchases to learn from. What we switched off was the automation that chose its own searches, placements and words. Here are the 29 days either side, across the whole account:
| 28 Aug–25 Sep | 26 Sep–24 Oct | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average cost per click | 12.6p | 5.6p | -55% |
| Clicks | 7,827 | 8,295 | +6% |
| Click-through rate | 13.65% | 26.19% | +12.5 pts |
| Purchases tracked | Baseline | 2.6× | +160% |
| Ad cost per purchase | Baseline | 18% of it | -82% |
“Purchases” here are the online orders Google Analytics records and Google Ads imports, not audited sales, and October is not September. So I treat this as a strong signal, not a lab result. But paying less than half as much per click, for more clicks and well over twice the orders, is hard to argue with. The full figures are in the Aquatropics Google Ads case study.
How we combine the data, and where AI fits
The reason the two channels stay in step is that we look at their data together, every day, rather than in separate monthly reports.
Ad search terms feed the SEO
The searches people actually type before they click an ad show us the words buyers use. Repeated terms become page copy, FAQ answers and new category content.
Search Console feeds the ads
Searches where we already rank near the top need less ad money. Searches stuck on page two get ad cover until SEO catches up.
AI does the reading, a person decides
Our AI agents read the Google Ads, Search Console and Analytics data every day, sort thousands of search terms and flag anything unusual. A person checks and makes every change.
Customers tell us the rest
The website’s AI assistant answers customers around the clock, and visitor recordings show where people from the ads hesitate. Both feed the next round of page changes.
Search changes all the time. Google keeps adding automatic settings, new competitors appear, and what people type shifts with the seasons. Daily monitoring, with alerts when spend or cost per click moves outside its normal range, means we see a change within a day, not at the end of the month.
What went wrong, and what’s next
It wasn’t a straight line. From November 2025 to March 2026 the same campaign ran mostly on Google’s Display network, the banner ads on other websites. The click-through rate was about 1.2% and it tracked no purchases at all. In April our team moved it to Search only, with buying keywords, hand-capped bids and purchase tracking, and click-through went above 20% that month.
There is more to do. Ad relevance is the one Quality Score part still below average, on 14 of 21 keywords, because all of them sit in a single ad group. Splitting it by theme is next. And the ads currently show for only about 12% of the searches they could, mostly because the daily budget is deliberately small. That is a nice problem: there is room to grow at this price.
What this means for a business in Chester
You will probably not pay 7p. Local service searches cost pounds, not pence: Keyword Planner puts “marketing agency chester” at £2.55 a click on average, and trade searches are often more. That makes Quality Score matter more, not less. A 30% saving on a £3 click is worth far more than a 30% saving on a 10p one.
The method carries over:
- Send each ad to a page that answers that exact search, not your homepage.
- Make that page fast on a phone, with prices, area and contact details easy to find.
- Read your search terms every week and block the ones that will never buy.
- Use automated bidding only if you track real enquiries or sales. For a local trade with a handful of enquiries a month, manual bids and a tight area usually work better, which is how we run Chester Property & Garden Maintenance.
- Plan SEO and ads together, so one improvement helps both.
Figures from Google Ads (account 738-047-9515), Google Keyword Planner and Search Console, checked 25 October 2026. We don’t publish the client’s spend or sales figures.
