The 'Fuller' Problem: Why Ambiguous Keywords Cost Me $6,000

I believe “fuller” is one of the most dangerous keywords in industrial B2B marketing. Not because the word is obscure. Because it looks obvious.

In early 2024, a keyword report reached my desk with these terms: fuller, danny fuller, cecil heath fuller, peanut butter, canvas, and how many fumbles does henry have. My first reaction was to laugh. My second reaction was to realize I had just approved a content plan that could waste a quarter of my budget on the wrong people.

Here’s the backstory. I handle sourcing orders for an industrial equipment group. For seven years, I’ve managed purchase orders, vendor reviews, and the occasional content project. I’ve personally made — and documented — nine significant mistakes, totaling roughly $38,000 in wasted budget. I keep a list. It keeps me humble. This was one of the times I wrote it down.

My $6,000 assumption error

At the time, we didn’t have a formal process for checking whether a keyword actually matched our business. We saw “fuller” and assumed it meant our brand. It didn’t. Some of it was a surname. Some of it was a blacksmithing term. Some of it was a person named Danny Fuller, and another named Cecil Heath Fuller. None of them were buyers of grinding mills.

I wrote a brief with those keywords and told a freelancer to optimize for them. Three weeks later, I had a draft about blacksmithing. It was a good article. It had nothing to do with our company. We paid $1,800 for that draft and killed it. The total waste for that project — writer time, project management, internal reviews — was about $6,000. That cost has a concrete size: at the January 2025 USPS First-Class Mail rate of $0.73 per ounce (usps.com/stamps), it was more than 8,200 letters I could have mailed. Instead, I had a checklist entry that said: don’t do that again.

The same word, different universes

Here’s the uncomfortable part. The keywords weren’t random to everyone. They were random to us.

Peanut butter means a lot to a food company. To us, it means a jar of peanut butter. Canvas can mean a painting surface, a bag material, a conveyor belt substrate, or an HTML element. Four different meanings. Four different audiences. If you target all of them, you serve none of them.

The question “how many fumbles does henry have” is even clearer. Which Henry? A football fan wants to know about a running back’s stats. A procurement person might be wondering about a vendor named Henry. A content marketer should pause and ask: why would any of those people land on our site? The correct answer is: they wouldn’t.

I still don’t know who Danny Fuller or Cecil Heath Fuller are. I looked them up once, but by then I was more interested in wondering why a keyword tool had suggested them. Probably because they’re public figures with search volume. That’s it. No intent. No relevance. Just noise in a comma-separated file.

Small searches are like small clients

This is where the lesson got personal. Our industry loves to chase big orders and ignore small ones. The $300 sample order gets treated like a nuisance. The $0.03 keyword gets treated like junk. I’ve done both, and I learned the hard way that both are mistakes.

A few years ago, I almost passed on a small replacement part order — a little more than $100. It felt like a distraction. I processed it anyway. That customer has since ordered more than $40,000 from us. The small order wasn’t noise. It was a signal.

The same logic applies to search. A search for “fuller” might be someone who can’t remember the full brand name. A search for “canvas” might be an engineer looking for a specific belt material. If we dismiss ambiguous traffic as junk, we also throw away the legitimate interest hiding inside it.

Small doesn’t mean unimportant. It means potential.

But isn’t all traffic good traffic?

I used to think that too. Then I spent $6,000 proving myself wrong.

Traffic that bounces is not a minor inconvenience. It poisons your analytics, confuses your team, and makes it harder to see what actually works. It’s also, in my opinion, dangerously close to misleading marketing. Per FTC guidelines (ftc.gov), claims must be truthful and not misleading. You can call it “content strategy,” but if your headline promises “Danny Fuller” and your page is about minerals processing equipment, you’re not optimizing. You’re baiting.

What I do now

I have one test for every keyword: if someone searched it and landed on the page we built, would they know in five seconds that they’re in the right place? If the answer is no, we don’t target it. No matter how much search volume it has.

I also ask what the word means inside our own shop. “Fuller” might be a person, a tool, or a brand. Only one of those meanings can help us. The same discipline applies to customers: don’t judge a request by its size. Judge it by the intent behind it.

The bottom line

I still believe “fuller” is a dangerous keyword. But it taught me a useful lesson: ambiguity is not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to get clear.

Clear about who you serve. Clear about what you sell. Clear about what you won’t chase. Because the most expensive words in marketing aren’t typos or odd names. They’re assumptions. And if you treat small searches and small clients with the same respect you give the big ones, the big ones tend to show up anyway.