Are SEO keywords hurting your brand?

Have you noticed how often brands call their own product cheap, best, or free just to get SEO traffic? Every time I see it, I keep asking myself the same question. Is ranking higher worth lowering how people see your brand? These keywords may bring clicks, but they also shape perception long before a user even lands on your page. And if you position yourself as cheap, people will believe you even if your product is anything but.

Over the years of building brands, I have learned that quick SEO wins often come with long term positioning damage. If you care about attracting the right users, this is something worth thinking about. Let me break down what I have seen, what to avoid, and how to choose words that protect your brand while still supporting your SEO strength.

SEO brings in traffic, and wrong keywords make them bounce away

When you sit close to both brand building and performance, you start seeing a pattern. The wrong words might bring in numbers, but they slowly damage how people see you. Well, you should know that the SEO is not a traffic game but also a positioning strategy. Here is how that plays out in practice.

1. SEO should not come at the cost of positioning

If your SEO plan forces you to use words you would never say in a sales call or investor deck, that is a signal to stop. When a brand that wants to be trusted, and taken seriously calls itself “cheap,” it is burning equity for the sake of a report screenshot. You might win a few extra clicks this month, but you train the market to see you as the lowest shelf option. That is very hard to undo later.

2. Words shape perception before anything loads

Most people do not experience your brand for the first time on your website. They experience it as a line in a search result, a meta description, or a snippet in an ad. Those few words already tell them what kind of company you are. If the first thing they see is “cheap,” “lowest,” or “best deal,” you have already told them you compete on discount, even if that is not how you see yourself.

3. Clarity and intent are more valuable than clickbait keywords

The best users I have seen rarely come in through generic phrases like “cheap product”. They search for something that sounds like a real problem: a use case, a context, a constraint. When your language matches that intent, you attract fewer people but better ones. Genuine people who read, compare, sign up and stay. Clickbait phrases inflate vanity metrics. Intent-driven phrases build actual business.

4. Cheap keywords attract cheap behavior

When you lean on “cheap,” you do not just describe the price point. You set the tone for how people will treat your product. They will bargain harder and leave the moment a competitor offers a better deal. I have seen funnels full of users who were easy to acquire but impossible to retain. This is because the first promise was a race to the bottom.

5. Your SEO reflects how confident you are in your product

Strong brands rarely sell themselves like a discount bin, even when they are affordable. They use clear, specific language about outcomes, fit, and quality. That signals the brand's confidence. When your SEO is full of big promises and shallow keywords, it has the opposite effect. People can sense when a brand really believes in its product and when it is trying too hard, just from the words you choose.

So how do you go about it?

When brands read this, they think of avoiding the keywords. The goal is not to avoid keywords but to pick keywords that suit your brand and attract the audience. That starts with changing how you think about the words you choose.

1. Use language you can say in person

Here is a simple test I would do. Would I say this phrase to a customer on a call and still feel comfortable? If the answer is no, it has no place in a title tag or meta description. This filter removes a lot of forced, loud words that exist only because someone said they rank well in a tool.

2. Optimize your website based on your intent

Every keyword carries a type of user behind it. Some are just looking around, some are hunting for the cheapest thing, and some are actively trying to solve a real problem. Your copy should clearly choose which group you want to attract. When you write for intent, you trade a little raw volume for a lot more relevance.

3. Keep your message consistent across touchpoints

Consistent language builds trust while scattered language breaks it. Your SEO, ads, website, and sales deck should feel like the same person speaking. If your search copy promises something your product or pricing does not support, people feel that gap immediately. As time passes, the mismatch does more damage than being one rank lower ever will.

4. Let your product or service lead your language

Instead of checking for the keywords that can force into this page, look for the clearest way to talk about what this product actually does. When you start from the product and work outward, your wording becomes sharper, simpler, and more believable.

5. Choose words that attract the users you want to keep

Short-term tactics can bring in people you would never want as long-term customers. The language you use decides who shows up at your door. If you talk like a discount brand, you attract discount thinking. If you talk like a focused solution, you attract people who are more likely to stay, learn, and grow with you. That is the lens I prefer to use when choosing every headline and snippet.

One last thought before you think about keywords again

With all of this, and with ym personal experience in handling clients. I suggest clients not to avoid using keywords for SEO. If I were to do this, I still care about keywords and use them. The difference now is how I use them. I treat them as clues to how people search, not as exact labels I must force into every line.

Having a writing assistant in the loop makes this easier. It can suggest cleaner phrases, remove the rough edges and find more natural ways to keep the intent of a keyword without making the brand sound cheap or desperate. Seeing how much that helped in my own work is what made me build the WEMASY writing assistant. Seeing how much that helped in my own work is what made me build the WEMASY Writing Assistant.