According to this article in New York Times more and more small businesses are scaling down their PPC campaign budgets and investing more in creating content that naturally improves their search engine rankings. You can do this too.

Cost of pay per click programs like AdWords are bound to rise as most of the commerce is shifting onto the Internet. From basic services to the most advanced purchases people are turning to the Internet to not just buy but also research in order to make informed purchase decisions.

PPC campaigns can be great if you have the budget. You can target the exact keywords you want traffic for and provided you have created a nice landing page, even the conversion rate can be awesome. Provided you have the budget you can start getting targeted traffic for the most competitive keywords within the next 30 minutes of launching a new website or a new product or service. The key is, “cost”.

Average PPC cost ranges between $ 1-20 depending upon your business. Of course there are many less competitive keywords that might cost you less than a dollar but you have to keep in mind that this is recurring cost and less competitive keywords cost more and convert less.

Content writing can help you reduce your PPC campaign costs.

How?

You can improve your search engine rankings organically rather than through a PPC campaign. Once you have obtained good rankings and your links begin to appear on the first page of search engine results, whether you get 1 click or 1000 clicks the only money you have spent is on the content writing job.

Of course you cannot get good rankings just by creating a couple of pages. You need to optimize your content and make it search engine friendly, you have to cover all the topics and subtopics, and have to publish regularly in order to make search engines crawl your website and index new content. The greatest benefit of improving your search engine rankings through quality content writing is that you don’t have to pay for every click no matter how many visitors you get.

Optimized content writing also improves your conversion rate tremendously. There are technical as well as psychological reasons. When you’re getting traffic via PPC campaigns you don’t pay much attention to the quality of content. You may spend some time on particular landing pages that draw traffic from your PPC programs, but other than that you are not much bothered about user-friendly language and optimized content. This keeps both search engines as well as visitors primarily unsatisfied.

When you start creating content for better search engine rankings you automatically end up creating high-quality content. This is because, due to the recent ranking algorithm changes, search engines like Google insist that the more human-friendly your content is, the better rankings you get. So it becomes a self-serving circle. You create content to reduce your PPC costs, to increase your natural search engine rankings, and in order to do that, you need to create content that serves your visitors better. And when you serve your visitors well, your conversion rate automatically improves.

According to the article mentioned above, quality content writing also reduces your PPC bidding. If you are improving your natural search engine rankings, the money that you need to pay for every click is also reduced.

As more and more competitors join the fray the PPC campaign costs are going to rise. They have already become prohibitive for many businesses. Content writing on the other hand gives you an advantage that your competitors may not have because not everybody can create quality content. So don’t stop your PPC campaign if you don’t want to, but along with that start investing in an experienced content writer who can start creating high-value content for your website, business blog and social networking profiles.