Your brand is interested in online marketing because your consumers shop online.  If you’re a popular brand and well established, it is likely won-over consumers come to you.  However, such conveniences are a reality for a very small percentage of brands.  A larger percentage of shoppers leverage ‘keywords.’  Words reflecting their product/service need.

The ‘Epiphany’

Usually, when brands first understand the keyword relation to search results, they have an ‘epiphany.’  Surely, you have to fill Web pages with words describing your products/services.  The more keywords inserted, the better results, right?  Very wrong.  This is called ‘keyword stuffing.’  First, search engines penalize Web sites for this.  Secondly, good rankings are only a portion of the whole online marketing pie.

PPC vs. Organic

The difference between PPC results and organic results is money.  PPC ads can be costly.  The process of online advertising demands diligence, time, and energy most SMB entities don’t have to spare.  Gaining organic traction takes time and PPC traction warrants money.  Some brands decide to ‘accelerate’ rankings by adopting ‘black hat’ methods.  Very wrong.  While black-hat methods may achieve desirable effects, it will be short lived.  Search engines are smarter than ever, leaving less room for unscrupulous practices.

Negative Keywords

PPC stands for (pay-per-click); brands are charged each time a browser ‘clicks’ on an advertisement.  Of course, a brand has to expect each click is not going to guarantee a conversion.  Unfortunately, if a brand is not considering negative keywords (words or phrases having ambiguous meaning to users) it may be paying for advertising to the wrong target markets.  For instance, your product name may share its appellation with a slang term for another (completely different) product or service.  It seems unlikely but it actually a matter of concern for many campaigns.

On-page

There are on-page elements to address, which help both users and search engines better realize the content of a given page.  Meta information and header tags help along with a page’s content.  As referenced, search engines are very smart these days.  In the past, a particular percentage of keywords was the recommended practice.  These days, LSI or latent semantic indexing is becoming more of a trend.  The process makes for a more natural writing and reading experience.