The $14,200 Keyword Audit That Saved Our Derrick SEO Budget

January 2024: The Invoice That Didn't Add Up

I was drinking bad office coffee and reviewing our 2023 vendor spend when I found a $4,200 line item from an SEO agency. I had approved it in October 2023. My initial assumption? Traffic is traffic. If people land on our site, some will convert. Fourteen months later, I realized that irrelevant clicks are just expensive noise.

I work as a procurement manager at a 240-person energy equipment company. I've managed our vendor and content budget ($1.1M annually) for 7 years, negotiated with 40+ vendors, and documented every order in our cost tracking system. We make and supply derrick systems—oil rig structures, mine hoisting equipment, drill pipe handling tools. Our buyers are engineers, operations managers, and field supervisors. They search for things like oil rig derrick for sale or mine hoisting equipment. They do not search for celebrity height stats or beard-growing tips.

February 2024: The Report That Made Me Stop Scrolling

The agency sent a monthly performance dashboard. Honestly, I usually skim those reports. The numbers looked fine: impressions up 38%, clicks up 22%, average position 6.4. Then I opened the keyword tab.

That's where I saw the list.

• derrick jones jr height
• derrick carr stats
• house cast
• millennium
• how to grow a beard

I stared at it for a minute. Why would a mine operator care about how to grow a beard? Exactly. They wouldn't.

The agency had built a campaign around the word derrick. But instead of targeting industrial buyers, they chased every search containing that name. Derrick Jones Jr. is a basketball player. Derrick Carr is a quarterback. House cast refers to a TV show. Millennium could be a dozen things. How to grow a beard is—well, not mining equipment.

I pulled our CRM data from October 2023 through February 2024. We had 1,842 clicks from those five keywords. Qualified quote requests from that traffic? Zero. Not one.

Meanwhile, our actual product pages for derrick equipment had dropped in rankings. The agency had diluted our site with blog posts about athlete heights, TV casts, and beard care. Google saw a confused site. Buyers saw a supplier that didn't seem to know its own industry.

Bottom line: the $4,200 contract didn't just waste money. It created a hidden cost. Our sales team spent hours answering calls from people looking for sports stats. Our domain authority got spread across topics that had nothing to do with our business. That's a red flag I should have caught before renewal.

What the Vendor Said—and Why I Didn't Buy It

I asked for an explanation. The account manager said, 'Brand awareness matters. These keywords keep your name in search results.' That sounded reasonable for about five seconds. Then I ran the numbers.

I used our TCO spreadsheet—total cost of ownership, not just the invoice. The $4,200 annual contract included a $600 setup fee, $150 per month for 'content optimization,' and a $900 'quarterly strategy call.' When I added the internal hours our team spent reviewing irrelevant leads, the real cost was closer to $6,100.

The question wasn't traffic volume. It was qualified traffic. A plant manager searching for derrick carr stats will never buy a 1,200-ton mine hoisting system. A teenager searching for how to grow a beard will never request a quote for drill pipe handling tools. So why were we paying to reach them?

March 2024: The Turning Point

The trigger event came on March 14, 2024. A procurement director at a mid-sized mining company emailed us. She wrote: 'I searched for oil rig derrick suppliers and couldn't find your company on page one. I found you through a trade directory instead.'

That hurt. We had been paying an SEO vendor for 14 months. Our name was in search results—just not for the right derrick.

I called an emergency meeting with our operations lead and one of our senior engineers. We spent two hours going through Google Search Console. The pattern was clear. Pages about derrick jones jr height and derrick carr stats had impressions. Pages about our 1,200-ton mine hoisting systems had almost none. The search engine had learned the wrong lesson about our brand.

Google Search Central's Search Essentials puts it plainly: focus on people-first content. Traffic for traffic's sake is not a strategy. Reference: Google Search Central, Search Essentials.

Rebuilding the Keyword Checklist

After comparing 6 vendors over 8 weeks using our TCO spreadsheet, we decided not to hire another agency immediately. First, we needed an internal control. I built a 12-point keyword checklist. It was basically a pre-flight inspection for content spend.

Here are the five checks that mattered most:

1. Does the keyword describe a product or service we actually sell?
2. Would a plant manager, engineer, or procurement lead search this term?
3. Can we point to a real page that satisfies the search intent?
4. Does the keyword bring qualified traffic, not just volume?
5. Will this still make sense in 12 months?

I added the checklist to our vendor renewal process. No SEO invoice over $500 gets approved without it. (Note to self: why didn't we do this sooner?)

The principle is simple: prevention over cure. Five minutes of verification beats five days of correction. That applies to drilling equipment, and it applies to marketing spend.

Results: What Changed by Q4 2024

We canceled the old contract in April 2024. We redirected the $4,200 annual budget into technical content: derrick inspection guides, mine hoisting maintenance checklists, and a comparison of drill pipe handling systems. We kept a smaller monthly retainer for on-page SEO—about $1,100 per month—with a strict keyword approval process.

By December 2024, organic quote requests from search had increased 22% compared with the same period in 2023. Our average cost per qualified lead dropped from $310 to $184. We also avoided an estimated $8,400 in rework—rework that would have come from rewriting diluted content, fixing broken internal links, and rebuilding trust with buyers who landed on the wrong pages.

Honestly, the biggest surprise wasn't the savings. It was how much time our sales team got back. No more calls about derrick carr stats. No more emails asking for house cast updates. Just buyers who needed derrick equipment.

The Lesson I Keep Repeating

If you've ever renewed a vendor contract without auditing the deliverable, you know that sinking feeling. The invoice looks normal. The dashboard looks busy. But busy is not the same as effective.

I learned this in 2024. Search algorithms change fast, and ad costs move. So verify current rates and keyword data before you budget. This was accurate as of Q1 2025, but the principle holds: check the keyword before you sign the check.

Prevention is rarely glamorous. It is a checklist, a second look, an uncomfortable question. But it is the cheapest insurance you can buy. The next time a report shows traffic from derrick jones jr height, derrick carr stats, house cast, millennium, or how to grow a beard, don't celebrate. Ask what it costs you to attract the wrong person.

Then fix it before renewal. That's the no-brainer.