Oilfield SEO: It’s Just Like Picking Up 11,000 Acres in Pecos County

“First person to leave a comment about oilfield SEO wins a set of steak knives!”

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Let’s keep this conversation going with one of my favorite subjects; outranking your competitors in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). It sounds painful and difficult (it’s not). And I assure you leaving piles of cash on the table is infinitely harder than saying your target keyword a few times in an article.

Oilfield SEO.

See? I already did it twice!

Oilfield SEO Transcript

Let’s talk about oilfield SEO. Please, please don’t skip this video just yet.

Yes, SEO sounds weird, Search Engine Optimization, but let’s make it very practical. Let’s go ahead and compare it to the land grab.

Everybody knows how it works in this industry when the land grab is on. When I entered the industry back in 2010, the Eagle Ford land grab was on. You had operators out here paying $10,000 per acre for lease bonuses. These days there’s a heck of a lot of interest in the Permian. Although, that’s the gift that keeps on giving so when is in their interest in the Permian?

But, the way the land grab works is you want to beat your competitors to the punch. Let’s say you have a lead on 11,000 acres out in Pecos County. It’s a $500 per acre lease bonus and you’re going to have to give the mineral owners whatever the royalty is. You’re looking at the offset wells and thinking, “Wow, this is really great production on the offsets. The leases adjacent are producing really well. I know if we can wrap up this acreage before anybody else does, we are going to be making good money off of this acreage for the next 10, 20, 30 years.”

The exact same thing applies to the Internet, it’s just digital. It’s a digital land grab driven by oilfield SEO.

How does this work?

The Great Crew Change is Changing Everything

The way that marketing has always been done in the industry is the way it’s always been done in every other industry. You did trade shows, which still have merit. You did magazine ads and so forth, which still have merit. Especially in this industry.

What you cannot do today is rely exclusively on those avenues to drive business.

Why?

You might’ve heard of something called the “Great Crew Change” or the “Big Crew Change” that’s happening right now. Obviously, the way that business has always been done in the industry is through relationships.

The CEO knew such and such, who knew such and such for 30, 20, 15 years. They trust each. There’s a lot of back-and-forth business and everybody prospers.

Here’s the problem; those guys are retiring. They’re retiring very quickly.

And over the course of the next 5 to 10 years, the gray hair is going to continue to turn over. We know this is an industry. And when that gray hair turns over, it’s going to be replaced by bald guys like me and people younger than me.

And what do those people do, the Millennials, Gen X, Gen Z and all of this other stuff? Where do they find answers when they need things? Obviously, the Internet.

You go to Google, type in what you’re looking for, and – boom – you have it. Now, the problem in the industry we have right now is nobody’s connecting the land grab in the physical world with the potential they have for a land grab in the digital world.

Practically Speaking Oilfield SEO

So I want to make this practical for you. I went ahead and did a little research. Let me just say, Google will tell you how many people – roughly, on average – search for certain terms per month.