“F*** Keywords”, Well, What Are You Replacing Them With?

Every few months, a new wave of "hot takes" hits the SEO community, usually claiming that keywords are dead. It is a sentiment that feels liberating at first. After all, we have all been in those meetings where a client or stakeholder panics because a single term dropped from position two to position four, regardless of whether the overall traffic or revenue actually moved.

But there is a difference between rejecting the obsession with individual rankings and rejecting the concept of keywords entirely. When people shout that keywords are dead without explaining what they are using instead, it often feels more like a performance than a strategy. The real challenge is not ignoring keywords, but figuring out how to use them without letting them dictate your entire business strategy. This connects with What AI Says About Your Locations when the same signal needs a clearer operating decision.

The Danger of Making Rankings the Primary Goal

I have a lot of sympathy for the anti keyword crowd because I have seen the damage that keyword centric reporting can do. When a handful of specific terms become the sole measure of success, the focus shifts away from the actual business need. You end up spending your time justifying a minor fluctuation in a ranking report rather than asking if the site is actually solving the user's problem.

The worst case scenario is when the keywords themselves start driving the creative and structural decisions of a website. Instead of building a user experience that converts, teams start making changes purely to "promote" a keyword. This creates a disconnect where the site is optimized for a search engine's algorithm but becomes frustrating for the actual human being who lands on the page.

The pivot we need is not to stop thinking about keywords, but to stop treating them as the goal. A keyword is a signal, not the destination. The tradeoff here is between the comfort of a simple metric (rankings) and the complexity of a meaningful one (business outcomes). If you remove keywords from your reporting, you must replace them with something equally concrete, or you will lose the trust of your stakeholders.

Mapping Pages to Actual User Intent

Keywords are essentially shorthand for human intent. Consider a search like "hotels near Heathrow with a shuttle." On the surface, it is just a string of words. In reality, it is a bundle of specific questions: Does the shuttle run when my flight lands? Do I need to book a seat in advance? Is it a free service?

This is where many businesses fail. They want to target the way they define their services rather than the way people actually search for them. A company might insist on using the phrase "ground transportation solutions" because it sounds professional, but a user searching for a "shuttle" will find that phrasing cumbersome. It forces the user to do more cognitive work to realize the page is actually what they need.

The goal is to treat a search query as a starting point for a series of answers. Whether you call this a content cluster or a hub and spoke model, the intent is to capture the customer journey. A keyword map remains useful long after the content is published because it acts as a guardrail. If a page is rewritten six months later and the shuttle timetable is moved to a general FAQ, you might inadvertently break the intent match that was making the page successful.

When deciding how to structure your content, ask yourself: am I using the language of my industry or the language of my customer? The tradeoff is often between "brand prestige" and "user accessibility." Choosing the latter almost always leads to better conversion rates.

The Reality of Tracking Visibility

It is great to organize work around broad topics and use embeddings to group language. In fact, that is how modern SEO should function. However, at some point, you still have to benchmark your visibility. You cannot simply "hope" you are visible; you have to choose specific terms to type into a search box or a prompt to see what happens.

You can aggregate tracking for a whole cluster, but that aggregation is built on a foundation of individual queries. To get stakeholder buy in, you either need to agree on a set of representative prompts and terms, or you have to track so many elements that the individual fluctuations no longer matter. The latter approach is possible, but it significantly increases your costs and doesn't actually remove the need to optimize for specific intents on individual pages.

A more practical approach is to track a few representative searches for each key page. This allows you to see which URLs are appearing and whether they actually answer the question. This data tells you if the page is doing the work you intended, if you have internal competition (cannibalization), or if a competitor has a more direct answer.

The decision here is about granularity. Do you want a high level "visibility score" that looks good in a slide deck but tells you nothing about user experience, or do you want a targeted list of queries that act as a health check for your most important pages? I prefer the latter because it provides actionable insight rather than just a vanity metric. A useful companion note is You Won’t Be Able to Check Them, because it looks at a nearby part of the same system. The same pattern also shows up in AI Is Merging Paid and Organic Visibility, where the practical question is how the signal becomes visible.

Connecting Rankings to Business Outcomes

The biggest weakness in most SEO strategies is the gap between ranking and revenue. It is very easy to observe a ranking, which is why the industry has struggled to find a replacement metric. But a ranking is just a moment in time. The link between that moment, the subsequent click, and the final business event is often disconnected.

Knowing if you rank for a term is an important data point, but fixating on it in isolation is a mistake. Any single data point, when viewed alone, can be misleading. The goal should be to use ranking data to build a larger story. If you are winning the ranking but not the conversion, the problem isn't your SEO; it is your landing page or your offer.

If I were to revisit old campaigns that were too focused on single terms, I would likely keep the same keywords, but I would change how I used them. I would use them to define which searches matter most and to ensure the correct pages are serving those needs. But when it comes time to judge the success of the campaign, the ranking would be a secondary detail.

The real question is: what happened to the customers we tried to win? By shifting the focus from "where do we rank" to "what did the user do after they found us," you move from being a technician to being a business partner. The tradeoff is that this requires more integration with analytics and sales data, which is harder to set up than a simple rank tracker, but the insight is infinitely more valuable.

Which Page Is Catering To What Intent?

Take an example search like [hotels near Heathrow with a shuttle]. It's a decent shorthand for what someone wants to know before they book. Is there a shuttle to the terminal? Does it run when my flight lands? Do I need to reserve a seat. Local visibility depends on whether the details across pages, profiles, categories, reviews, photos, and service descriptions reinforce the same answer for a specific location based query.

The useful check is whether this improves the system behind search performance, not only the words on the page. Internal links, crawlable content, clear entities, current evidence, and a sensible page structure all help the recommendation become easier to trust.