Typically (like many other writers) I focus more on the content itself than stuffing it beyond recognition with keywords; spending time writing meaningful paragraphs and enticing headlines rather than bowing to the god of SEO. I’ve always done okay with the search engines and currently bring in 300-400 visitors a day through Google alone – which is acceptable but it has remained at this level for the past 3-4 months. So today I went in search of ways to improve my SEO and stumbled across a fascinating service.

Enter HitTail – helping you understand the long tail
HitTail is an online analytics provider unlike anything I’ve seen before. You install a Javascript urchin on your site (as you do for Google Analytics) and every visitor to your site is recorded to HitTail. It isolates those who entered via search engines and extracts the search terms upon which they entered – it logs these (as any analytics tool does) and provides information based on this. It shows you live data (to the minute) of visitors entering your site and highlights the keywords (as per the below screenshot)

What HitTail does
It’s able to chart which of your keywords are your primary ones and which constitute the “long tail” of your site. I’ll explain what the long tail is shortly… This helps you gain an understanding of how people are finding your site and which keywords are working well for you. In addition to highlighting this information, HitTail offers keyword “suggestions” on terms that help constitute your long tail – under the premise that you should target these to increase your overal natural search engine traffic.

While the suggestions aren’t always useful (as a couple of mine haven’t been), they do offer some insight into keywords that you could be using to greater effect. Therefore you can add suggestions to your “to-do” list, prompting you to blog about them and therefore increase your overall search engine presence.

So what is the “long tail”
Some of you will have heard the term before, but remain unsure as to exactly what it means. The long tail refers to the seemingly never-ending list of obscure interests that populate the Internet. Let me explain using an example of a website that sells shoes:

The primary set of keyphrases for a website that sells shoes will be things like:
“shoes”
“buy shoes”
“red shoes”

Whereas the long tail is a massive list of keyphrases that are deemed more obscure, like:
“indian wing-tip shoes”
“buy cheap red leather shoes”
“cowboy boots from the old west”

While most website owners only focus on the primary keyphrases (because they are the most obvious), they only constitute around 40-45% of the search engine traffic for your site. Completely disregarding the importance of the long tail is kissing goodbye to 55-60% of your potential traffic.

How HitTail shows me my long tail

Long tail = sales
The ironic thing is that while many bloggers/site-owners neglect the long tail keywords; because they are the most direct and specific they often convert better into sales than idle, generic terms. “Buy italian wing-tip shoe” is likely to convert better than “buy shoes” because it’s more specific and the user has a very focused information requirement.

So, without digressing too much from my original topic, HitTail is a great service (free up to 100,000 visitors per month) and I believe it really has the potential to improve your natural search engine traffic. I’m going to be giving it a go for the next month or two and we’ll see how things improve. But my advice is to try it and see how you get on.

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