Honestly, I almost deleted the email. Marketing asked me to review a keyword list for our Falcon product line, and I thought I was coming in to compare vendor quotes. Then I saw the list.
- falcon
- falcon sound to scare birds
- black falcon cruise terminal parking
- brown
- harmon
- why is it called a breakfast
I manage procurement for an energy and mining equipment company. So maybe I'm an odd person to gatekeep SEO keywords. But I've spent six years tracking every invoice and every contract renewal, and I know a hidden cost when I see one. That list kind of screams hidden cost.
Two ways to read the same keyword list
If you treat search volume as the only price tag, terms like 'falcon' or 'falcon sound to scare birds' look valuable. A lot of people type those into Google every month. But a keyword, like a vendor quote, isn't valuable until you calculate what it actually costs to turn it into a qualified lead.
So here's the comparison: Option A is the high-volume route, chasing every query that contains the word Falcon. Option B is the aligned-intent route, chasing only the queries that signal someone is looking for energy or mining equipment.
Dimension 1: Relevance
Option A seems cheaper at first because the upfront research is already done. But relevance is the part most cost tools miss. 'Black falcon cruise terminal parking' isn't a manufacturing buyer. It's a person trying to find a place to leave their car before a cruise. If your website is about industrial equipment, that click is a dead end. It won't request a quote, it won't sign up, and it will probably bounce in eight seconds.
Option B, on the other hand, may bring fewer visitors. Terms like 'mining conveyor belt parts' or 'drilling rig replacement coils' are nowhere near as popular. But the person searching them essentially describes the problem we solve. That's not traffic, it's a sales conversation waiting to happen.
Dimension 2: Cost per qualified lead
Let's use a simple example. Say a broad keyword and an aligned keyword each cost $500 to cover with content. The broad term brings 1,000 visits; the aligned term brings 200. On the surface, broad wins. But suppose one out of every 200 broad visits converts into a lead, while one out of every 20 aligned visits converts. Broad gives you five leads for $500, or $100 each. Aligned gives you ten leads for $500, or $50 each. The traffic number was a trap.
(Numbers are illustrative, but that's the whole point: unit pricing doesn't tell you TCO.)
Dimension 3: Long-term trust
Search engines are basically procurement bots. They compare what you publish to what they know about your company and try to match it with a query. A page about 'falcon sound to scare birds' doesn't fit an industrial equipment supplier. Over time, that mismatch makes it harder for your site to rank for anything, because you've told Google you're not a focused resource.
The old belief that more content equals more authority comes from an era before search engines got good at intent. Today, a page that answers 'why is it called a breakfast' is not an asset for an equipment company. It's a liability.
The specific queries, one by one
Falcon sound to scare birds
If your company sells bird deterrents, great. Ours doesn't. This query has clear intent, but it's intent to buy a different product.
Black Falcon cruise terminal parking
This is a local parking query. Unless you run a garage at a port, those people are not in your market.
Brown
'Brown' could be a color, a surname, or part of a brownfield remediation query. On its own, it means almost nothing. The one-word terms that look easiest to rank for are often the hardest to convert.
Harmon
Maybe someone misspelled 'harmonic.' Maybe they're looking for a person or an audio brand. There's no way to know. That's the opposite of a qualified lead.
Why is it called a breakfast
This one is my favorite. It's a real question with real search volume and zero connection to industrial equipment. Publishing an article about it will not bring buyers. It will just confuse your site's relevance.
When should you ever choose Option A?
If you're a media brand earning money from ads, broad queries are fine. But a B2B equipment supplier with a sales pipeline can't afford that kind of vanity traffic. Choose the broad approach only when you have a dedicated content budget, no lead-generation mandate, and a large team that can build separate topical authority. For the rest of us, the aligned-intent route is the lower TCO.
If you still want to test the weird stuff, set a hard cap. Run a small experiment, track assisted conversions, and cut it the moment the cost per lead exceeds your normal channel. I built a cost calculator after getting burned on hidden fees twice, and the same principle applies here: measure the total cost, not the click price.
The lowest quote is rarely the lowest total cost.
I only believed that after ignoring it once and eating an $800 mistake. A free setup turned into $450 in extra fees, and the cheap vendor ended up costing more than the expensive one. Keyword lists work the same way. A high-volume term with no buyer intent is a low quote with hidden fees.
So if someone hands you a list with 'falcon' and 'why is it called a breakfast' in it, don't just start writing. Calculate the TCO first.