Transcription
Keyword research is dead, and 99% of people haven't figured out why. Every single hour that you spend in a tool like Ahrefs analyzing keyword difficulty and domain ratings is wasted. Google's algorithm changed. The people still doing keyword research are playing a game that ended years ago.
Now, think about how much time you spent analyzing search volume, analyzing keyword difficulty, competition scores, all in an effort to rank a business. But what if none of that mattered for SEO? What if Google's algorithm bypassed all of it? Now, that's exactly what happened. And once you see why, you're going to be able to cut your research time by 90% and actually rank businesses faster.
By the end of this video, you're going to understand the specific algorithm change that made keyword research obsolete, why metrics like domain rating don't matter for local rankings, and exactly what to do instead that takes a fraction of the time. Now, I figured this out after scaling my agency to 7 figures and realizing that my team and I, we were complicating everything. But why exactly? Doesn't Google still care about keywords anymore?
Now, here's something that most SEO professionals don't realize. The same technology that powers ChatGPT and frankly all AI models is the same technology that Google uses to understand entities. Google actually invented this technology back in 2017. The "T" in ChatGPT that stands for transformer. Google's algorithm and ChatGPT are cousins. Google's current algorithm is not reading your website scanning for keywords. That's what it did back in 2016. It's processing information the same way that ChatGPT does. And this is why optimizing for one helps with the other.
But how does this actually look in the search results? Google will build a profile of your business from multiple sources. Your GBP, your website, citations, reviews, schema. It's pulling together all of this to answer two questions: What is this business? And how much do I trust it? It is not matching keywords. It's asking, "Is this a plumber? How sure am I that this is a plumber?"
So, let me demonstrate this. This is pretty interesting. So, I'm going to come to Google search here and I'm just going to type in "plumber Houston." Now, let's look at the three results: Village Plumbing, Cooper Plumbing, and Nyx Plumbing. Now, I'm going to go back to Google. I'm going to type in "emergency pipe repair Houston." We have Village, Cooper, and Houston Plumbing. Two of the same three businesses show up. But, let's check out something else. Another service that all plumbers offer. We'll come back to Google and this time we're going to type in "water heater installation Houston." Completely different results. None of the same three are here. Why? Because Google sees water heater installation as a different entity than emergency pipe repair and as a different entity from plumber.
So this right here is exactly why service entity research matters so much more than keyword research. You aren't chasing keyword variations. You're identifying the distinct service entities that Google recognizes. If you miss one, you're going to be invisible for that entire category of searches. So obsessing over long-tail keyword variations within a service, that is pointless if Google sees them as the same service entity. But identifying which services Google treats as separate entities, that's the real goal.
But if keywords don't drive rankings, then clearly domain authority does, right? Wrong. This is one of the biggest myths in local SEO that you need a high DA or domain authority to rank. For most local businesses, this is completely irrelevant. Local rankings are focused on the Google Business Profile and they use a blended algorithm. It's different from the normal organic algorithm. The signals that matter are proximity, relevance, and trust.
Now, you might be ready to argue that domain rating is a component of trust. And you'd be right. It is a component of one of the three signals. But even as a component, it's not even the main component for trust. So, reviews. Let's talk about reviews. They are very important for conversions, but they're not very important for actual ranking. I see this mistake constantly. Agencies are out there claiming businesses need more reviews to rank. I'm not sure if it's a mistake or if it's an outright lie from the agency, but either way, this just isn't true.
Let me show you that Houston plumber search again. So, the first thing I'm going to do is do something that no one ever does. I'm going to click "more businesses." This is why if you rank number four, you're basically invisible. No one does this. But let's take a look. Here's number one, 9,000 reviews. Number two has 488. Number three has 4,000. Now here's number five. 3,200 reviews. Way more than him. Let's keep looking. 468. 12,000 reviews. He's all the way down in the 10th position. Here's 1,400 reviews. 3,500 reviews. 700 reviews. All of these have more reviews than the plumber sitting in the second position for a competitive term. Here's another one. 2,800 reviews. 19,000 reviews. Plumber primary category. He's all the way down, completely invisible. Whereas Cooper is in the top three, second position with 488. If you ever speak to an agency and they tell you that reviews are important to rank, please, please run the other way.
Now, you might be thinking, "What about domain authority? I claimed it also wasn't very important." Let me show you. Here we have again the number two result with only 500 reviews. And here's their domain authority, 25. Same business. All right, let's come all the way down to John Moore, 20,000 reviews. Let's run their domain authority. And here's that figure, 69. The bigger company has a higher domain authority, more reviews, the bigger budget, more backlinks. It doesn't matter. Their GBP is a mess. Their website is a mess. It's full of generic blog posts. Google just doesn't care how authoritative the domain is and how many reviews they have. So, stop checking competitor DA. It's a vanity metric for local businesses. Instead, check their Google Business Profile. Check their categories. Check their services. Check how big their website is. Those are the factors that actually move the needle to rank a business's Google Business Profile.
So, if we're not doing keyword research, what are we actually doing? I call it service entity research. You're not analyzing keyword difficulty. You're figuring out what services people actually ask about. So, here's how simple this is. Go to Google, type in your niche plus the city name, and look for the "People also ask" questions. That's it. Those questions reveal exactly what services people need without opening a keyword research tool.
Let me show you real quick a very fast example. Again, I'll come back to Google and we'll just type in "plumber Houston" and I'm just looking for the "People also ask" questions. Here it is. So, look at what comes up: "How much do plumbers charge per hour?" "Can plumbers make $100?" "How much do local pl..." All of this is about how much they charge. Here's a little trick to get more relevant questions. If I click to open and close, I get more and more questions coming up. And what we're doing here is we're looking for things like this: "How much does a plumber charge to change a washer?" This is obviously a service. Now, we can keep doing this. We can also go deeper. We can hit Reddit. We can search that same niche and look what people are actually asking for help with. Real problems, real language, real demand.
Or even better, let AI do the heavy lifting. I'll share the prompt on screen. I'll also drop it in my school community. There's a link in the description. That's where I keep my entire prompt library from every video I have on YouTube. Plus, you can get direct answers to all of your SEO questions. 3,000 members there already. Like I said, linked below. So take that prompt, drop it into your AI model of choice, and it's going to give you a list of services that people are actually looking for.
Now, the goal is simple. We want to find services that people need, and we want to add them to the Google Business Profile. We want to talk about them on your website, and we want to include them in your schema. We're not looking at search volume. We're not looking at keyword difficulty. Just do people ask about this? If yes, add it.
But once you have this list of services, how do you know if Google actually treats them as separate entities? This is where the entity test comes in. It's a step that most people skip. Most people don't even know about it, and it's why they so often fail. We need to verify if Google sees "emergency pipe repair" as a unique entity or just a synonym for "plumber."
So, here's the test. We're going to open two tabs like this. In the first tab, we're going to search for the primary category so that we can see the three ranking businesses. Then in the second one, we're going to check the new service option. So for this case, maybe we'll do "washing machine replacement Houston." Now we can look at the map results. Then congratulations, you found a unique service entity. In this case, Google clearly sees "plumber" as very different from "replacing a washing machine." In fact, it's giving me appliance repair shops for replacing a washing machine. But we saw in the "People also ask" questions that people are asking if a plumber can replace a washing machine. If instead the results are very similar, Google sees them as the same entity. You don't need a separate strategy to rank for both. But when you do find those unique entities like what we saw earlier with water heater replacement or here with washing machine replacement, that's your gold mine. That's where the traffic is hiding.
So now you can generate a list of verified entities. What are you going to do with them? We don't want to just stuff words into your homepage. It's not 2017 anymore. That just doesn't work anymore. Instead, we need to structure the website to mirror these unique entities. Every entity needs its own dedicated page. If you found 30 services in your research, then you probably need 30 service pages. Most local sites have a services page with a bulleted list. Honestly, that's garbage.
Let me show you a terrible example. This business has ranked decently well for "plumber Houston," but not super well. And we can see straight away they basically just have a random list of services that are right on the homepage. Google can't rank bullet point lists like this. For local businesses, the goal is to rank your Google Business Profile, but we know that Google uses your website content and URLs and your website structure to build relevance for that Google Business Profile. So Google knows what to rank your GBP for. So if you want to rank your GBP for "tankless water heater repair," having a bullet point that says "water heaters" just isn't enough. You need a URL, a dedicated page specifically about "tankless water heater repair" to prove to Google that you actually do that unique service entity. You need to make sure that the H1 tag matches the entity. You need to make sure the URL slug matches that entity. And then this is the secret sauce. You need to wrap that page in schema markup. Schema is code that speaks directly to the robot. It tells Google or an AI model, "Hey, this isn't just text. This is a specific service we offer."
If you don't know how to write schema, no problem. ChatGPT or your model of choice can do it for you. Copy that code, paste it into a schema checker, search for "structured data testing tool," make sure it comes back with zero errors and zero warnings. If there are any errors or warnings, copy those errors or warnings, give them to the AI model of choice and say, "Fix these errors and warnings." Once you get zero errors, zero warnings, put it on that specific page. Okay? So now you have a dedicated page targeting a specific entity verified by your research and highlighted with code with schema that talks directly to Google and to AI. This is how you dominate a niche. You're not hoping for keyword matches. You're building a library of answers for every specific problem, every specific service that your market has. This will take you less than a half hour to do this research, not the 3 hours we used to spend on keyword research. And you're going to get better targeting because you're finding real demand. You're not chasing metrics.
Now, I know what you might be thinking, Caleb, everyone uses AI now. Does Google search even matter? And the answer is yes. The data shows that Google search volume is actually at an all-time high. It's still growing, not shrinking. People aren't leaving Google for AI. Even though you might be, most people aren't. Most people are using both. They're going to ask AI for recommendations, and then they go to Google to verify the business, check the reviews, and find the phone number.
And the best part about this service entity research strategy is it covers you for both Google and for AI. I mean, come on. We know that AI doesn't use keyword research. There's no search volume. There's no long-tail keywords. There's no keyword difficulty score. It's recommending businesses based on its understanding of what a business is and what it does. So, think about it. If someone asks AI, "Who can clear my main drain line in Houston?" How would it know to recommend you, right? It's not going to do it based on keywords. It's looking for businesses that explicitly offer that service. And without service research, you might never think to add "main drain line cleaning" to your GBP, your website, your schema, to a unique page. And you would be invisible on both Google search and invisible on AI. People who are still doing keyword research are optimizing for a platform that frankly doesn't exist anymore. No current modern platform still uses keywords. Maybe Bing. Who knows what Bing is doing? But service entity research covers Google and AI in one process. So that is exactly why keyword research is dead, especially for local, and what actually matters to get you ranked.
Okay, so now you have the strategy: Google uses entities, not keywords. Service entity research beats keyword research. Validate your entities with the map pack test. Build dedicated pages to drive relevance to your GBP. But strategy without a system is just theory. So, if you want the step-by-step process that my agency uses to rank local businesses in 14 days, check out this video right here.