In March 2024, I opened our search console and laughed at a query: “1978 lincoln continental coupe for sale.”
We're Continental—the industrial technology company that makes tires, energy and mining equipment, automotive components, and industrial solutions. We don't sell classic cars. My first reaction was to ignore it. My colleague Miranda didn't.
Before you judge me, let me explain. I'm a content operations lead handling SEO briefs for six years. I've personally made—and documented—23 significant mistakes, totaling roughly $48,000 in wasted budget. This one was mistake #17. Now I maintain our team's checklist to prevent others from repeating my errors.
The query dump nobody wanted
Miranda pulled a 90-day list of queries from Google Search Console. It looked like someone had thrown random searches into a blender:
- continental
- 1978 lincoln continental coupe for sale
- continental drift simple definition
- miranda
- 2026 winter olympics skiing
- how many rings does rose have
I said, “These are not our customers.” Miranda said, “They're typed by someone. Some mean us. Most don't. Our job is to know the difference before we write a single paragraph.”
I assumed “Continental” meant our brand. Didn't verify. Turned out it meant at least six different things.
The expensive assumption
We had a leadership directive that quarter: “Own the keyword Continental.” The objective was to make Continental the go-to page for anyone searching our name. I assigned a writer to produce a 2,000-word pillar page called “The Complete Guide to Continental.” It covered tire lines, energy solutions, battery technology, automotive components, and industrial equipment.
We didn't have a formal search-intent review process back then. We had approval channels, style guides, and a brand keyword list. But nothing forced us to ask: “What is the person behind this query actually looking for?”
It looked good. Actually, it looked good to me. It was thoroughly technically correct. And for three weeks, it was a ghost.
The page generated 412 visits in the first month. Actually, 398 if you exclude our internal clicks. Even 398 was decent for a new piece, but our analytics told the real story: average time on page 23 seconds, no signups, no “contact sales” clicks. Zero qualified leads. The total production cost was $3,200. You could hear the budget burn.
That's when I finally believed what Miranda had been saying for years: search intent matters more than the keyword.
The lesson, in checklist form
What I should have done is a simple search-intent check before approving the assignment. In the first 18 months after that failure, we used this checklist on 61 content requests. It caught 47 unique potential errors—or rather, 51 if you count duplicates. The point: it works.
1. Separate the word from the intent
“Continental” is a word with multiple parents. It can refer to a tire brand, an industrial supplier, a Lincoln model, a geological concept, or even a hotel chain. If you're optimizing for “continental” alone, you're guessing. The query might be “continental tire” (commercial), “1978 lincoln continental coupe for sale” (transactional), or “continental drift simple definition” (informational). The same word, three different jobs.
Now we tag every keyword by intent before it gets a title.
2. Check the “People Also Ask” rabbit hole
A query like “continental drift simple definition” is not about us. It's educational. As of February 2025, the USGS's simple explanation is that continental drift describes the movement of Earth's continents relative to one another—Alfred Wegener proposed the idea in 1912. If a B2B industrial company tries to force that topic into a content calendar, readers leave. We only write educational content when we can genuinely serve the reader. An informed customer is a better customer.
If a query has no commercial signal, it doesn't go in the content calendar. Unless we're deliberately doing customer education, with a real path to our products.
3. Verify names and entities
“Miranda” could be a person, a moon of Uranus, a rights warning, or a character. On our side, Miranda is the colleague who kept saying “check intent.” If someone typed “miranda” into Google, they weren't looking for her. But if an article about “Continental” mentioned “Miranda” without context, it would confuse everyone.
We now ask: “Who or what is this phrase referring to? And does the searcher want the same entity we're writing about?”
4. Respect seasonality and events
Around the same time, “2026 winter olympics skiing” spiked. It had nothing to do with our business, even though we make winter tires. The world was preparing for Milano Cortina 2026. Our name “Continental” appears at gas stations and on ski-country rental cars, but that doesn't make an article about Olympic downhill racing relevant to our buyers.
Trending searches are tempting. They're also how you end up with 23 seconds on the page.
5. Fact-check even the joke queries
“How many rings does Rose have?” became a running joke in our weekly meetings. But it has a real lesson: before you write about “Rose,” know which Rose you mean. Derrick Rose has zero NBA championship rings. Pete Rose has two World Series rings. The answer changes depending on the entity. The same logic applies to “Continental.” You can't write a useful page if you don't know whether the searcher wants tires, a classic car, or geology.
The result and the reversal
I only believed search intent mattered after ignoring it and watching a $3,200 page go nowhere. The embarrassing part was that “search intent” was not new information. I'd attended the training. I just thought I didn't need a checklist because the keyword seemed obvious.
After we started using the checklist, we killed 11 planned articles before they were written. That saved an estimated $18,000 in production costs. We shifted the budget to topics with actual buyer intent—like “continental hydraulic system specifications” and “continental tire load rating guide”—and qualified inbound interest doubled within a quarter.
So glad I double-checked the next pillar page before publishing. We almost repeated the exact same mistake.
What this means for you
If you're a B2B buyer, engineer, or procurement manager searching for “Continental” to evaluate a supplier, you want specifications, safety data, documentation, and real application stories. You don't want a blog about a 1978 Lincoln Continental coupe for sale. You don't want a one-sentence answer about continental drift. You want to know whether the company you might work with actually understands your industry.
That's the customer-education side of this story. Helping customers understand what we do is not about keyword stuffing. It's about giving them enough clarity to make a confident decision. If you search for “continental” and land on a page that says “we make things with rubber and steel,” that's a sign the company hasn't done its own search-intent homework.
The final lesson
According to Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines (as updated in December 2023), a page should satisfy the “needs met” of the user's query. The same information can be excellent for one search and worthless for another. There is no perfect article about “continental” that satisfies every person. There is only a correct article for a specific version of “continental.”
So the next time someone says “we need to rank for Continental,” ask: Which one?