Keywords aren’t dead: The contrarian playbook for beating billion-dollar brands in search

The stuff no one is talking about.

July 22, 2025

This is a guest post by Omid G, Founder @ Marketer Milk and previous Organic Growth Manager @ Webflow

Right now is the worst and best time to get into SEO.

It's the worst time because there's never been so much misleading information online about what SEO is, how it works, and how to leverage it for your startup.

I mean, just look at LinkedIn or X (Twitter). All you see is "SEO is dead," "keywords don't work anymore," "vector embeds for LLM search," "AI killed top-of-funnel traffic," etc.

Most of it is confidently useless. And I'm not just saying that to sound smart. My little marketing blog outranks huge companies like Semrush, Zapier, and even HubSpot.

And my strategy hasn't changed since 2019.

What I'm going to teach you is how I've been doing SEO for almost a decade, leading SEO projects at Webflow, working with dozens of SaaS startups, and building my own SEO-first media company to six figures in profit with zero employees.

I live and breathe SEO every single day. Some would say too much. But this has allowed me to see what's really going on. And trust me when I say this:

There's never been a better time to invest in SEO. Because for the first time, it's much easier for startups to get involved and actually have a chance at beating the more established brands with hundreds of employees.

Big companies are giving up. CMOs who've never built a website from scratch and grown it meaningfully through SEO don't believe in it the same way they used to. This makes it the perfect environment to start with a new approach.

Why most SEO fails

Here's what has been the general playbook throughout the 2010s for startups to rank in Google:

Open a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and analyze competitors and topics you want to target. Filter keywords by most searched with low competition, export the list into a spreadsheet and hand it off to a content person on your team
The content person then creates content briefs from certain keywords and hands them off to a freelance writer
The writer writes the draft and sends it back to a content person in-house
The content person then uploads the content into a CMS, clicks publish, interlinks the new content with any existing relevant pages on their site, then waits
Rankings start to show after around 3 months
Rinse and repeat

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And this worked. Companies like HubSpot grew to millions in revenue by doing this. NerdWallet grew into a publicly traded company with $500M ARR doing this. I did this at companies I worked at early on in my career.

But this turned into an internet nightmare over time.

Real people, not marketers, who used Google to find answers to questions started to complain that the search results sucked. All the SEO professionals trying to game Google created an internet of content that ranked for specific keywords but wasn't really helpful.

The rise of ChatGPT disrupted everything and shined a light on this issue. And now Google's AI Mode (and AI Overviews) have launched to try and combat this.

Google's Sundar Pichai said that since their AI features in the SERPs (search engine results pages) have launched, they have sent more traffic to more websites. While many big companies are getting hit hard (and are vocal about it on social media), the tiny little blog written by someone who was passionate about the topic they were writing about is starting to see clicks out of nowhere to their blog post they wrote 4 years ago and forgot about.

Google's AI is hungry for surfacing original content that is not designed to simply game the algorithm for clicks. It wants Google users to find the best piece of content, so that users are satisfied enough to return to Google over and over again as their search engine of choice.

It's all about user retention.

Do you really think Google would kill its own search engine? Out of Google’s total advertising revenue, over $30B of it comes from network websites annually — this is the revenue Google makes from display ads on information websites. The same sites that get most of their traffic from Google SEO.

So SEO isn’t going anywhere. It’s just more distributed than before. It’s seeking humans over faceless corporations. And because of this, SEOs today can't play by the same old playbook of finding good keywords, creating outlines, then outsourcing their content production (the most important part) to freelance writers who only know what your business does based on what you told them in your brief.

The startups that win at SEO in the coming years are the ones that learn to become amazing content creators and copywriters who write from a place of lived experience.

And from there, they also pay attention to how algorithms read content so they can make sure that the "been there done that" content they're writing is also optimized in a way for all search engines to crawl, index, and distribute properly — from Google, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and whatever new platform comes out.

I always had a hunch that this is what Google cared about, even when it didn’t always reflect in search results (because almost no one was doing it right). But my conviction grew, and it was why I was so confident to quit my 9-5 job 3.5 years ago to build my media company, Marketer Milk. I knew I could beat the big guys because I was going to write from my own lived experience. And I was going to do it in a way that would make Larry Page and Sergey Brin proud for building the best search engine in the world.

The Google founder's test

Most marketers have a hard time with SEO because they think more about what Google can do for them, rather than what they can do for Google.

Think about it this way: if you were the founder of Google, how would you want people to create for your platform?

Would you want websites gaming it with content from people faking their expertise? From AI-generated slop that does nothing but fill up a page with information that can already be found on the web?

If I were the founder of Google, and I knew millions of people would be using my service every day, I would be extremely careful with what I allow to show up for a given search query.

Any time I want to target a new keyword, I look at the SERP, and I ask myself "what would Larry Page or Sergey Brin be proud of to surface as the #1 spot for this given query?"

And I'm brutally honest about it.

Here's what I believe they would say, based on how I've been able to rank high for over 20,000 keywords on my site:

"We want content on our platform to come from people who have been there done that. We want clear, honest, and original promises. The content should also flow logically and be on a website that is pleasing to look at and browse around. From a technical standpoint, we want the content to be designed in a way to make it easy for our crawlers to find and understand. And from a human, user perspective, we want the content to feel world-class — from the writing style, to the images and graphics used, to the real-world examples shown. Better yet, we know some people like to read and some like to watch videos. So pages with YouTube videos that are embedded would give users an experience where they get to choose what's best for them. This is what we want. We want the first result for a given keyword to be so good that it makes the searcher go 'this is exactly what I was looking for.' We want to end the user's search journey as quickly as possible because this is what will make people love our platform, Google."

So I ask you, do you think about your SEO or content strategy this way?

If you look at a page on your site currently, does it:

Have an H1 title that promises exactly what searchers want?
Can readers skim and find their answer in less than 30 seconds?
Do you have at least one piece of original media like custom graphics/images or a YouTube video?
Does each section answer the next logical question someone would have?
Does your content have original insights, ones that competitors can’t copy?

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Most websites don't. Most marketers within large organizations have a hard time getting buy-in to do all of this because it's a lot of work (with no guarantee of success). I get it. It's hard to get internal subject matter experts to write when they have other obligations. It's hard to get freelancers or agencies to see your vision because they're busy juggling multiple clients.

SEO is hard. And that’s what makes it worth it.

But I have news for you. If you're a startup founder or a marketer on a small in-house team, this is your time to shine. Especially if you're working on a product you deeply understand and are passionate about showing others how it solves real-world problems.

There are startups currently doing this. And they're beating billion-dollar brands doing so. Let's look at a few.

From zero to beating billion-dollar brands

As of writing this post, my tiny little marketing blog ranks #1 in Google (and is highly cited in LLMs) for the term "AI marketing." It's been clicked on well over 300,000 times in the past two years.

I outrank Harvard University, IBM, Sprout Social, and a ton more big brands.

In that article, I showcase some of my favorite AI marketing tools. Ones I've actually tested and still use to this day. I also made a YouTube video about the same topic and embedded it in the article.

Some of the tools I mention in that post are brand new startups, ones that other pages ranking for that term have not mentioned at all. The article was written by me, a marketer who loves AI and is constantly looking for the best tool (not the one that does the best marketing).

And for doing so, Google has rewarded me for my honesty and effort.

And I've done this over and over again, ranking #1 in AI Overviews for keywords like "SEO blog writing," "SaaS content marketing," "B2B SaaS SEO," and a ton more.

Let's look at another company, Efficient App, run by a couple, Alex and Andra.

Their website, built entirely on Webflow, ranks #1 for the term "browsers." Yes, I'm serious.

They outrank Wikipedia, Reddit, PCMag, and a ton more huge websites.

If you look at their article, you can tell not only is it written 100% by a human, but it also has a YouTube video on the same topic embedded into the post.

Another clear example that the small, honest publisher who knows what they're talking about is beating big billion-dollar brands.

But these aren't just one-off successes. And I'm not saying that you can go rank #1 with just one page on your site.

To make this work, you need topical authority. Google needs to trust you as a publisher who is an expert on a given topic as a whole. And you build this by finding a sub-niche within your broader niche and creating related content that can all be interlinked together.

I came to this realization back in 2019 when I was leading SEO efforts on the Webflow blog. Any time we released content related to web design, it ranked well (and fast). But when I tried to divert a little and talk about something related to marketing, it struggled to rank.

For example, my blog attempts to be about all disciplines in marketing. But I'm able to rank high for "AI marketing" because I also have individual pages reviewing some of the AI tools I mentioned, and I interlinked them together. I have a lot of content related to using AI in marketing.

So you have to think more like a product marketer and understand what the entire landscape of your niche looks like and what a potential customer cares about. For example, if you're a startup like Notion, this could be creating pages around content calendar related keywords like:

How to create a content calendar
Asana vs Monday
Asana review
10 best content calendar tools for marketers

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And then, you would interlink all of them together.

I can't go into everything in full detail here so I'll link a few articles on this stuff that I already wrote about:

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But everything I've talked about so far pertains to written content: the type of content you create and how you create it.

This is only one part of the equation. Great SEOs know that in order to win, you need to be a smart content creator who also understands algorithms.

You need to know two things: How to satisfy search intent (the content production part), and the basic fundamentals of SEO best practices (the technical part).

SEO is copywriting + systems thinking

When I start a new website and want to grow it through search engines, I often refer to the 10/90 rule:

10% technical (crawlability, speed, schema, internal links, backlinks)
90% craft (matching intent, structuring information into clear H2, H3, & H4 headings, keeping attention and scroll depth)

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Most modern website builders, like Webflow, take care of the 10% technical stuff. You just need to make sure (and this is even more important for LLMs) that your website has:

Organizational schema markup on the homepage
Article schema markup on your blog articles
A sitemap that can be submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Canonical tags that are set on every single page on your site
ALT text for all images for accessibility
Images with proper file names (going after keywords) that are also low in size (less than 150 KB) so things load fast
Clean URL slugs that go after specific keywords (no weird strings of letters or numbers or using your exact H1 title in the slug)
The UI/UX is responsive on all device types: desktop, tablet, and mobile
Your SEO-driven pages can be accessed in 3 clicks or less from your homepage
Other trusted websites, related to your industry, that link to your site

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This is the technical side that is real signal. Everything else is noise.

The other 90% is the craft. And this is where you can think about your SEO strategy in terms of editorial SEO or programmatic SEO.

Everything I've talked about so far is editorial SEO — producing great content around specific keywords you want to rank for. It's a lot of work, but if done right, it works (no pun intended).

The other side of SEO is programmatic. But I mention the editorial stuff first because you need to know those fundamentals to understand how to effectively create a programmatic SEO plan.

So what is programmatic?

This is when you find a repeatable format of pages you can create over and over again. It usually means you create a templated page that can be easily edited with content to match a given keyword. Let me show you some examples so it makes more sense.

Let's take Wise, for example — a fintech company for startups.

They found a clever strategy around ranking for keywords related to banking routing numbers.

The goal was to rank for highly searched keywords, I'm talking like thousands of searches per month for each keyword, like:

Chase bank routing number
Wells Fargo routing number

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And a ton more. Just find a repeatable keyword that has a dynamic and static element to it:

{Bank name} + routing number

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To do this, they created one landing page design that can be used as a systematized template over and over again. And they created a URL structure for these (9,000+) landing pages that looks like this:

wise.com/us/routing-number/bank/{bank-name}

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The bank name part is what changes dynamically for each landing page. And of course, the actual page content changes from the H1 title tag to the meta description and some (not all) of the copy on the page.

Clay is another example. They found keyword combinations around:

{Brand name} + headquarters

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From there, they created hundreds of pages with URLs like:

clay.com/dossier/amazon-headquarters-office-locations
clay.com/dossier/openai-headquarters-office-locations

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And a ton more.

And Clay ranks #1 for most keywords they're targeting in these programmatic pages.

But what both Wise and Clay do is basically editorial SEO disguised as programmatic. It's just a repeatable CGC (company-generated content) format that can be done at scale.

Let's take this a step further and look at Care.com — a service marketplace for finding babysitters, pet care, house cleaners, and more.

They do REAL programmatic SEO, as I believe this is the right way to approach it for marketplaces (who get the most benefit from pSEO).

They rank really high for "near me" local keywords. For example, in the home cleaning services space, they have created pages that use the URL structure:

care.com/house-cleaning/{city-name-state}

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And they've generated thousands of these pages, 3,300+ to be exact, targeting all the major cities in America.

This way, if someone in Los Angeles, CA searches for "cleaning services near me" the SERP would show a page with the URL:

care.com/house-cleaning/los-angeles-ca

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And if someone in Springfield, IL searches for "cleaning services near me" the SERP would show a page with the URL:

care.com/house-cleaning/springfield-il

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Can you see how powerful this is?

This strategy has allowed Care.com to create a UGC (user-generated content) growth loop. Every time a new cleaner signs up in Los Angeles, their profile becomes user-generated content that is added to the Los Angeles landing page to make it stronger. More profiles = more content = better rankings = more customers finding the page through Google (and potentially new service providers finding the platform too, reigniting the loop).

But it doesn't stop there. The word-of-mouth effect amplifies everything:

Service providers get clients through these Google searches
Happy customers tell neighbors about their cleaner
Those neighbors go directly to Care.com to book
All this activity (direct visits, bookings, reviews) sends positive signals to Google
Google sees Care.com as the trusted platform and ranks it even higher

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It's a self-reinforcing cycle where SEO and word-of-mouth feed each other.

But this isn't just Care.com. Airbnb does this, Upwork does this, Amazon does this, eBay does this, Yelp does this, and most marketplaces that are serious about their organic growth do this.

The idea is to create a container (that is SEO optimized) that can be a home for the right user-generated content.

So as you can see, SEO growth can look different for various businesses. There's a lot of nuance and it's highly dependent on your product.

Some startups just focus on editorial. Some startups (like marketplaces) focus on programmatic. And some companies, like Zapier, focus on both (blog content + app integration pages).

There needs to be a proper product-channel fit, and you have to know what your business looks like to create the right strategy.

That’s why it’s so dangerous to blindly listen to what “SEO experts” say on social media (even me). Those people don’t know the nuances of your business, and there’s no one-size-fits-all for SEO advice. Most SEO “influencers” are trying to generalize a subject that has no business being generalized.

But in the end, you can see that every single thing we have talked about still revolves around keywords. Yes, some search queries are changing to longer-tailed questions that people ask in AI chatbots and Google’s AI Mode. But the pages being cited for those queries are still optimizing around a keyword related to those questions.

For as long as search engines are alive, people will be searching for things (keywords), and results will show based on those searches. Keywords aren't dead. SEO isn't dead. But maybe the way you've been approaching it is.

I hope by now you have a better understanding of how you can approach it, and you're just as excited as I am for a new wave of content creators that "get it" who will outrank the billion-dollar brands.

There's never been a better time to invest in SEO.

Your 30-day playbook

All of this can be overwhelming, I get it. You can't just read a blog post or take a course on SEO and be good at it. It takes years of skin in the game to develop a deep intuition with good pattern recognition.

But to every startup founder I've consulted with, I tell them a few things to get the ball rolling. Let me briefly tell you what you can do in the next month.

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Week 1: Foundation

Install Google Search Console for your site (do the same for Bing Webmaster Tools after)
Pick 5 keywords using free tools (Autosuggest, Trends, Keyword Planner)
Audit your top page against the Google Founder Test we talked about

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Week 2-3: Execute

Write/rewrite 1-2 pillar pages with original media
Create 3 supporting pages (from your 5 keywords)
Internal link everything

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Week 4: Optimize

Check Search Console for early signals
Refine based on actual search queries
Plan your next topic cluster

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If you want to learn these steps in-depth, you can check out my blog. Or better yet, check out my YouTube channel for over-the-shoulder guides on all of this stuff.

Much love, peace out! ✌️