A Buyer’s Problem With Bad Keyword Lists: No, We Won’t Write About Derrick Henry as a Kid

I'm the office administrator for a 38-person oilfield equipment supplier. I manage about $1.1 million in annual purchasing across 20 vendors—maybe $1.1, I'd have to check the system. And if there's one thing I've learned after five years of this, it's that a bad keyword list tells you a vendor didn't do their homework.

Most keyword lists deserve the recycling bin

I don't say that lightly. We sell derricks—the steel structures that hold drilling equipment. They're heavy, expensive, safety-critical, and nearly impossible to sell to anyone who isn't already in the oil and gas or mining business. So when a marketing vendor sent over a proposed blog package the other day, I almost laughed.

“derrick henry as a kid,” “derrick gunn,” “divide,” “peanut butter,” “how much does henry weigh.”

That was their keyword strategy. For a derrick equipment company. I asked if the email account had been hacked. The account manager said, “These will get clicks.”

The divide between clicks and need

The divide I care about is the one between search traffic and purchase intent. A click from someone who wanted a young Derrick Henry highlight reel won't turn into an RFQ. Neither will a person hunting for peanut butter recipes. They land on our site, see a photo of a 10-ton derrick, and leave. That's not a lead. That's a cost.

I'm not against being found by a broader audience. If someone searches “how much does Henry weigh” and lands on a spec page for a unit actually named Henry, that might work. But “Henry” in the keyword list isn't a crane or a mast system—it's an NFL player. I didn't need Google to tell me that.

What I look for now

After the March 2023 incident with a vendor who couldn't provide a proper invoice, I started checking everything more carefully. Now I have a simple test for any proposed keyword: can I connect it to a product line, a service, or a question a real buyer would ask?

• “Derrick inspection checklist” — yes.
• “Mast load test procedure” — yes.
• “Derrick Gunn” — no product called by that name. I don't know who Derrick Gunn is, and neither does our ERP system.

“Peanut butter” has a real place in our industry. When drilling mud gets extremely viscous, some operators describe it as thick as peanut butter. That's a useful analogy. But putting “peanut butter” in a keyword strategy for an industrial equipment supplier isn't creative. It's lazy.

The honest limitation

I'll tell you what I tell every vendor who walks in with a content plan: we don't need mass traffic. We need a dozen qualified buyers a month. That's the honest limitation of a niche B2B site.

Looking back, I should have fired that first content vendor sooner. At the time, their sample article sounded polished. But polished doesn't matter if the topic is wrong. If I had approved the “Derrick Henry as a kid” post, sure, it might have earned some clicks and maybe a laugh. It wouldn't have earned a quote.

What I recommend instead

Recommend this: make content around the terms your customers actually type. For us, that means “derrick inspection checklist,” “hoisting equipment replacement parts,” “mine shaft sinking equipment,” and “load test for masts.” Those don't get millions of searches, but they get the right people. A lot of people argue that any traffic is good traffic. That's true if you run a quiz site. If you sell $500,000 pieces of steel, traffic only helps when it can be turned into a conversation.

Google's Search Central documentation says to create content for people, not for search engines (developers.google.com/search/docs, accessed January 2025). A person looking for Derrick Henry's childhood stats won't find our derrick photos useful. They'll bounce, and that bounce matters.

My bottom line

So here's my position: no keyword gets approved if I can't explain how it helps a derrick buyer. If that means posting less, fine. I'd rather be genuinely useful to a handful of procurement engineers than play peanut-butter games with a thousand visitors who all leave.

And if someone asks me again about “how much does Henry weigh”? Henry is our veteran derrick fitter. He weighs about 210 pounds. The derrick behind him weighs 12 tons. Which one do you actually need to know?