Keywords Are Not Dead, They Need a Replacement Plan

What Replaces Keywords in Your SEO Plan?

Chris Green argues that declaring keywords dead is easy, but the real work is deciding what you track, how content is governed and what stakeholders will accept. He sees the "drop keywords" stance as often a reaction to old campaigns that chased rankings for their own sake. His alternative is to keep keywords as a way of mapping the questions a customer asks, then tie each query to a page that owns it and check whether that page still does its job.

For brand builders working on search, the piece is a useful corrective to the fashionable view that prompts and AI answers make search terms irrelevant. The author makes a practical case for keyword maps as memory: they stop well-meaning edits from quietly breaking earlier research. SEO leads, content strategists and anyone reporting on organic performance should read it before rebuilding their measurement around something new.