How much does Google Ads cost? What a click costs in South Wales, trade by trade.

Google Ads has no price list: you pay per click, and what a click costs depends entirely on what you sell and where. For South Wales businesses the range is wide. A click on "hotels Llandudno" costs under £1, "roofer Cardiff" runs £3 to £10, an emergency locksmith search can pass £15, and a personal injury solicitor in Cardiff pays up to £45 for a single click. A realistic starter budget for a local trade is £300 to £1,000 a month before anyone manages it. This guide publishes the actual click prices we pulled from Google's own Keyword Planner this week, trade by trade, and shows how to turn them into a monthly number and an honest comparison with ranking for free.

How the price of a click is actually set

There is no rate card because every search runs an auction. Advertisers set the most they will pay for a click on a given search, Google multiplies that by a quality score for the ad and its landing page, and the highest combined bidder takes the top slot, paying roughly a penny more than the next one down. Two consequences follow. First, the price is set by your competitors' appetite, not by Google: a search that four national lead-generation firms fight over is expensive even in Neath. Second, a fast, relevant landing page genuinely lowers what you pay, because quality score is a real multiplier, which is one of the few places web design and advertising costs touch directly.

The figures below are Google's "top of page" bid ranges for the UK, the amount advertisers are actually paying to appear above the organic results for that search, taken from Keyword Planner in the first week of September 2026. The low end is what a well-run campaign might pay; the high end is what the auction reaches when it gets competitive.

What a click costs in South Wales, trade by trade

Search	Monthly searches	Cost per click
hotels Llandudno	4,400	£0.43 to £1.01
recruitment agency Cardiff	2,400	£0.28 to £0.99
solicitors Cardiff	1,900	£2.08 to £7.88
roofer Cardiff	1,600	£2.94 to £9.94
locksmith Cardiff	1,600	£3.45 to £13.27
estate agents Swansea	1,600	£0.77 to £5.27
dentist Swansea	1,300	£0.87 to £3.26
electrician Swansea	880	£1.59 to £8.42
accountants Cardiff	880	£2.68 to £8.69
family solicitors Cardiff	720	£2.63 to £13.21
personal trainer Cardiff	590	£0.47 to £1.12
web design Cardiff	590	£2.00 to £7.48
carpenter Swansea	390	£0.92 to £3.50
roof repairs Cardiff	390	£2.97 to £13.78
boiler service Cardiff	320	£3.03 to £12.65
emergency locksmith Cardiff	260	£3.25 to £15.81
driveways Cardiff	260	£1.22 to £3.03
builders Bridgend	170	£0.95 to £3.15
conveyancing solicitor Swansea	170	£3.75 to £11.06
emergency plumber Swansea	110	£2.35 to £9.08
boiler repair Cardiff	140	£2.46 to £15.11
no win no fee solicitors Cardiff	140	up to £34.58
personal injury claims Cardiff	10	up to £45.21

The pattern is not random. Cheap clicks belong to searches where the visitor is browsing or the value of one customer is modest: a hotel night, a gym session, a recruitment agency's candidate. Expensive clicks belong to urgency and high ticket value together: a locked-out homeowner, a boiler dead in January, a legal claim worth thousands in fees. If your trade is in the second group, so are your competitors' budgets.

Geography moves the price too. The same trade a few miles apart lands in different auctions: builders in Bridgend pay £0.95 to £3.15 a click while roofing firms in Cardiff pay three times that, because the city carries more searches, more national bidders and more agencies running campaigns for them. A valleys business advertising into its own town often finds the auction quieter and the clicks cheaper than the Cardiff numbers suggest.

Turning a click price into a monthly budget

The arithmetic every business should do before touching the platform: budget equals clicks times click price, and enquiries equal clicks times the share of visitors who actually get in touch. Take a Cardiff roofer paying a mid-range £6 a click. A £600 monthly budget buys about 100 clicks. If the landing page converts one visitor in ten into a call, that is ten enquiries, at £60 each, before a single job is won or the agency fee is counted. A Llandudno hotel at £0.70 a click gets 850 clicks for the same £600, which is why accommodation and hospitality can make ads work on thin margins while a locksmith at £12 a click gets 50 clicks and needs a very sharp landing page to break even.

Run your own trade through that sum with the table above and you have a more honest forecast than most agency proposals. The variable you control is the conversion rate, and it lives in the website, not the ad account.

If you would rather earn those clicks than rent them, our SEO and performance service is built for exactly the searches in that table, with published prices and monthly reporting rather than a percentage of your spend.

The costs that sit around the click

Google's bill is only the clicks, but the real cost of running ads has three more lines. Management: UK agencies typically charge either a flat monthly fee, commonly a few hundred pounds for a small local account, or a percentage of spend, and either way it often rivals the media budget itself for a small business. Waste: campaigns set up on broad matching quietly buy clicks for searches you never wanted, which is where most DIY budgets leak in the first months. And the landing page: sending expensive clicks to a slow generic homepage is the most common way a campaign that should work does not, because the click was paid for and the visitor left in four seconds.

A click is rented attention. What you built to receive it decides whether you bought a customer or a bounce.

Set against those, the honest all-in figure for a small trade running ads properly, media plus management, lands in the £600 to £1,500 a month range, and the moment you stop paying, the traffic stops the same afternoon.

The comparison with ranking for the same searches

Every search in the table also has an organic result list beneath the ads, and the clicks there are free at the point of use. A page-one organic position for "roofer Cardiff" at 1,600 searches a month, taking even a tenth of those clicks, delivers 160 visits that would cost roughly £960 a month to buy at £6 each. Over a year that is more than £11,000 of click value from one page, and it keeps arriving after the work is paid for. That is the entire case for building pages that rank, and it is why we treat the town and service pages we build as assets rather than marketing.

The honest counterweight is time. Ads deliver visitors on the first day; organic rankings for competitive Cardiff and Swansea searches take months of proper work and are never guaranteed, and the map pack is decided partly by where your business physically sits. Our guide to local SEO for South Wales businesses lays out what that work actually is, and our SEO cost guide puts honest prices on getting it done.

When ads are the right call anyway

Balance demands it, because ads are not the villain. They are right for a new business that needs its first customers before any page can rank, for seasonal or one-off pushes where the demand window is short, for testing a new service before committing to pages for it, and for emergency trades in cities where the organic and map results are so contested that a rented top slot is the only fast route. The mature pattern for most established local businesses is both: ads for the urgent and the new, organic for the searches you intend to own for a decade, with the ad spend shrinking as the rankings arrive.

What to do with these numbers

Find your trade in the table, or ask us for the searches you care about, and do the three-line sum: clicks you can afford, enquiries at a realistic conversion rate, cost per enquiry against what a job is worth. If the sum works, run ads to a fast page built to convert and measure everything. If it does not, or if you are tired of paying rent on attention, the alternative is a website and local SEO plan at prices we publish, starting with a straight conversation about which searches are winnable for you. Get in touch and we will show you the click prices for your own searches, no obligation, and tell you honestly whether buying them or earning them is the better deal for your business.