Using HitTail to Increase Your Organic & PPC Traffic

Although I believe directly targeting keywords on new websites can lead to being penalized by Google, I still believe it’s beneficial to indirectly target them within articles and pages on our websites.

For example, if you have a website on Weight Loss and noticed the secondary keyword ‘weight loss cure’ in Wordtracker reporting 689 searches, instead of targeting ‘weight loss cure’ and making that a title of a page, I believe it would be better to name the page ‘The Cure for Weight Loss Revealed’.. then you aren’t blatantly targeting a highly searched for term thus more likely to avoid any penalty which I strongly believe exists on Google, although I’m no professional.

I heard about HitTail a while back when it was first released and I’ve only just got around to taking a look at it and signed up today for their plus package at $4.95/month. HitTail is an analytics package with a difference. It’s uniquely focussed on tracking the search terms people use to arrive at your website, specifically the long tail search.

The Long Tail of Search

The keyword ‘weight loss’ receives 10,354 searches according to Wordtracker and of course this is a hugely competitive search term. The chance of the lowly webmaster or ameature ranking for it is zero - but you can get just as much traffic by targeting the secondary keywords related to ‘weight loss’.

The next 99 results in Wordtracker containing the keyword ‘weight loss’ contain in total 12,812 searches - more than ‘weight loss’ - and there’s over 1,000 of these terms so you’re talking perhaps in total over 30,000 searches per day on what’s called the ‘Long Tail’ of the search term ‘weight loss’.

Example of long tail keywords for ‘weight loss’:

• fast weight loss diets (78 Searches)
• best weight loss program (76 Searches)
• weight loss information (76 Searches)
• weight loss foods (75 Searches)
• free weight loss program (75 Searches)
• online weight loss programs 72 Searches)
• weight loss food (72 Searches)
• simply weight loss program (72 Searches)

These secondary words in the long tail are easier to rank for thus it’s more beneficial to target these when trying to achieve ranks in the search engines.

HitTail Is Different From Other Analytics Packages

You may think Google Analytics or other packages already track the phrases people search when they arrive at your site, and they do, but this is where HitHail differs - it creates lists of those keywords which you can sift through and decide to create pages around. It lets you move keywords and phrases on to a ‘To Do’ list and it won’t display duplicates once you’ve removed them from the original list or chose to delete them. Currently other analytics packages don’t offer these features.

It is possible to do this manually by importing your logs in to Microsoft Excel but to do it at the level HitTail performs at requires quite a bit of advanced knowledge of Excel - filtering duplicate entries etc and even then you’re unable to access keywords immediately as they happen without having to constantly import them and apply filters.

Using HitTail to Increase Your Organic Search & PPC Traffic

If by using HitTail you find people are finding a page of your website by typing in ‘blue widgets discount’ and you discover you’re ranking for ‘blue widgets discount’ in Google in 6th position, then you can go about improving that rank by tweaking the corresponding page with some basic SEO or even creating a whole new page specifically targeting the term.

For example, if the title of the page they’re finding is titled ‘Widgets Discount’, you could simple add ‘Blue Widgets Discount’ to the title and find in a short space of time that page getting a better rank - perhaps from 6th up to 1st place, delivering you a bucket load more traffic from that search term.

Not only can you use HitTail for improving your organic results but you can also use it to discover unique phrases that your competitors may not know about or be able to find in tools such as Wordtracker. You could then create pages for these terms to improve your organic results and also target them in your PPC campaigns on the cheap.

I’ll post an update on HitTail once I’ve used it significantly enough over a period of time to demonstrate its capabilities. At just under $5 per month I believe this service is invaluable to almost any website. Visit Hittail.com to learn more

2 Comments

1. Great article about the power of long tail keywords. I use HitTail as well, and it is one of the best, if not the best, tool out there.

   Jonathan

   http://www.photosforsouls.com

   Comment by Jonathan — April 4, 2007 @ 2:56 am

2. Organic traffic through the longtail

   One of my goals is to obtain 100 uniques per day through organic traffic to this blog. I plan to do this by using gaining traffic through SEs via longtail keywords.
   So, what is the longtail? Long tail keywords are keywords that make up a short phrase. …

   Trackback by Hear My W00t — June 24, 2007 @ 8:06 pm

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