In short
SEA is paid advertising inside search engines: ads that appear when somebody searches a particular term. You pay per click, not per impression. What separates it from SEO is not visibility but timing and cost — SEA works the same day and stops the moment you turn the budget off.
SEA and SEO are not alternatives
They answer the same search at different costs. SEA is rent: you stay at the top while you pay. SEO is construction: it takes months and then stays.
In practice SEA usually comes first — not because it is better, but because within four weeks it shows which terms actually produce enquiries. Getting that answer through SEO takes half a year.
What a click costs in Switzerland
Considerably more than in the German market, because competitors bid against higher deal values for the same slot. For agency terms, measured click prices sit between CHF 12 and 18, and individual ad formats run far above that (Semrush, Swiss database, August 2026).
That makes the arithmetic simple and unforgiving. At CHF 15 per click and a two percent close rate, one job costs CHF 750 in clicks. Anyone who does not know that number is buying visibility, not customers.
The mistake that costs most
Running ads before measurement works. Without functioning conversion tracking you see clicks and cost but not which term produced an enquiry — so you optimise the number you can see instead of the one that counts.
The second is missing negative keywords. Without them you pay for searches about job openings, tutorials and competitors.
How we handle it
No franc of ad budget before measurement is demonstrably working. That is not caution, it is arithmetic: without measurement, every optimisation is a guess.
How we work: Google Ads. Where SEA only bridges the gap until organic visibility carries, the second half belongs to SEO.
Related terms
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you — even when it did not come from us.