Treasure Map to Ranking

An entity SEO course by Casey Keith, taught with PirateSERP

Treasure Map to Ranking, an entity SEO course for digital marketers, teaches you how Google identifies the things a page is about and what that means for the way you write and organize content. The course has 23 chapters in five units. Each chapter is an animated, narrated lesson of 5 to 9 minutes, with captions, quick checks, and practice questions. You need no coding experience and no math background.

Why this course exists

Search began as string matching: a page about coffee was a page that contained the word “coffee” often enough. Since Google launched the Knowledge Graph in 2012, search has also resolved words to entities, the people, places, products, and ideas those words point to. Keyword matching continues to run alongside entity understanding. This course explains both, shows where each applies, and shows what each means for your pages.

What you can do after the course

• Explain what an entity is, and how a search engine recognizes and disambiguates one.
• Describe how embeddings turn text into numbers, and how cosine similarity measures closeness of meaning.
• Write clear sentences, including semantic triples, that people and machines can both read.
• Cover a topic in depth instead of repeating one phrase.
• Keep each page focused on one main topic.
• Run a repeatable entity SEO workflow, with realistic expectations about what you can measure.

What the five units cover

1. Foundations (chapters 1 to 4): what entities are, where entity search came from, how search engines read language, and entities in depth.
2. How search represents meaning (chapters 5 to 10): knowledge graphs, where entity facts come from, embeddings and vectors, cosine similarity and semantic search, sentence embeddings, and language models from BERT to MUM.
3. How searches meet pages (chapters 11 to 13): reading the searcher’s query, entities in ranking documents, and entity cards with query assistance.
4. How Google ranks (chapters 14 to 19): what the public record shows, what Google says itself, retrieve-then-rerank, links and PageRank, AI Overviews and AI Mode with query fan-out, and what quality raters check.
5. Putting it to work (chapters 20 to 23): semantic triples and content structure, what style guides teach, topical authority and workflows, and measuring and verifying your results.

How each chapter works

Watch the animation, listen to the narration, and turn on captions if you prefer to read. Quick checks appear during the lesson: you tap the part of the picture that answers the question. Each chapter ends with a summary and practice. Many chapters point to a matching tool in PirateSERP, the entity SEO suite Casey Keith builds, so you can try the idea on your own pages. The chapters build on one another, so take them in order.

How the course weighs evidence

Google does not publish how its ranking works. Every claim in the course states its source: Google’s own documentation and announcements, the court record from the antitrust trial (real, but partial), or research, patents, and practitioner opinion, which carry less weight. When a point is Casey’s reading of the evidence, the course labels it as Casey’s interpretation.

Who teaches it

Casey Keith is an entity SEO strategist, software founder, and educator from Ventura, California, and a former Silicon Valley security engineer. Casey founded PirateSERP, co-founded Localised SEO, founded and teaches at SEO Training Camp, and created the Treasure Map entity SEO curriculum this course is built on.

What the course does not cover

Treasure Map to Ranking covers the meaning layer of search: how engines recognize things, turn meaning into numbers, and match it to what people ask. It does not guarantee rankings, and no technique in it is a guaranteed way to rank. It touches only briefly on technical SEO, local SEO, and paid search, which are separate disciplines.