Declaring keywords dead is easy. Explaining what you’ll track, how you’ll govern content, and what stakeholders buy into is the harder part.

Every so often, someone in SEO announces “f*** keywords” or a similar sentiment. It’s not really a “hot take.” Moreover, it’s something that we see time and again.

Sometimes it’s a fair reaction to how reluctant some people in the industry are to change. Other times it feels more like a meme response, or a flex. A way to show you’ve moved on from old-school SEO without saying much about what you do differently, exaggerating a tension between pro/anti keywords without understanding it.

I have some sympathy for the sentiment for sure. I’ve worked on too many campaigns where success came down to whether a handful of keywords went up or down. Once those rankings became THE GOAL, it was easy to spend more time explaining two dropped places than asking whether we met the primary business need. More damagingly, in the worst cases we were left making decisions just for promoting keywords, rather than the business goals they were supposed to enable.

I don’t know how many people still run campaigns that way, and I suspect fewer than the “f*** keywords” cry implies. What interests me is how quickly the argument goes from “this is a bad way to judge a campaign” to “why are we thinking about keywords at all?”

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.

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