HitTail the long tail keyword tool
Since Google Panda and several Google Penguin updates, SEO or search engine optimization has become a new kind of game. Or maybe not? You will find these days a lot tweets about content marketing or other “new” ways to get (back) into the top of the search results. Reaching the top of Google for popular keywords has become more difficult and it’s maybe impossible for new websites.
How to get search traffic without to pay for Google Adwords?
If the most popular keywords are “reserved” for websites with the biggest authority, than we need to look for less popular keywords with less traffic. But what if the competition is still strong even for these keywords? If this is the case you need to look for the long tail keywords. There is a little side-effect for many of them: They have less competition and often they give your site less traffic. Wait a minute less traffic? How do I get enough traffic for my site? The answer is easy, you need to work harder: We have to create more content to match multiple long tail keyword searches.
Find great long tail keywords with HitTail
Eight weeks ago we started to use HitTail a keyword selection tool that’s able to provide you some great keyword ideas.
How does it work?
After you have installed the code snippet (or the WordPress plugin), HitTail will collect all known keywords from your website’s search traffic. They store these keywords in a database and they use their own logarithm to select the best long tail keywords as “suggestions”. The relation between the suggested keywords and the existing content (based on the searches from your organic traffic) makes them so valuable. Now you have to write new articles for these keywords, which are related to your current content. After some time HitTail will select other long tail keyword ideas for this new content, too. If you keep writing content this way your site will get more and more traffic for these long tail keywords (they call it a snowball effect). Your website becomes more relevant and will rank higher for maybe even “shorter” keyword phrases. Based on your site’s search traffic you will get statistics about: The search keywords from the organic traffic and of course keyword suggestions. The system provides a TODO list for the suggestions you like to work on (later).
Long tail keyword content creation
Beside the keyword analysis you can use the HitTail content creation service. They write keyword optimized articles with a length of 400 words for only $19. The turnaround is 2-3 days and they write currently articles in English language only. I ordered an article and the quality was very well, you get a good copy for your money. I think the content creation service is a good alternative if you need some “easy” article between the other articles you write by yourself.
The results after 6-8 weeks
I’ve used HitTail long tail keyword tool for three websites: My web development blog, some website about outdoor toys and also my company website in Dutch language. If your site gets a lot of search traffic, you get several suggestions every day. Some of them are good and some of them are not useful or the competition is too big. I used 5 suggestions for writing an article and the results are different. In most of the cases the existing article where the long tail keyword is related too, has got a better position in Google. Most images I used for the new articles rank in the Top10 for the Google image search. None of the new articles has reached a Top20 position, but as mentioned before this is not the strategy behind the HitTail long tail keyword tool.
I’m very surprised about the overall experience for my Dutch site. I didn’t got a lot of suggestions, but more than a half of them were pretty good.
The offer four different plans starting from $19.95 for the “PRO” plan which is good for 7.500 keyword ideas a month. You can start with a full featured trial of 3 weeks before your credit-card get charged.
Some tips for better results
Before you write an article for the some long tail keyword, you should check the keywords phrase using the Google keyword tool. In many cases the information is not what you like to see, but it will give you some insights and maybe it’s also a confirmation for the keyword suggestion you got from HitTail. Search also on Google for the long tail keyword you like to write about. You can find competing websites using the following search query:
intitle:"long tail keyword tool" inurl:"long tail keyword tool"
Check also your older articles for related keywords, use them to interlink the new articles with the old ones. If you like to share some of your own tips, you’re welcome to post them using the comment form below.
Published in: Search Engine Optimization
Nice article, thanks for sharing!
To get great long tail keyword ideas, you can use the query report from Google Webmaster tools as well. Look for the 2-3 word keyword phrases, they must be related to your content of course.
Don’t forget to monitor your keyword experiments, I use SheerSEO to track my listings in Google.
Neat little tool. I find that considering all the different things people would search for when writing titles for articles helps. The inclusion of an extra keyword, or laying the keywords in a certain order can have a surprisingly positive impact.
Of course, we’re talking maybe 1 visitor per day. But that’s 365 extra visitors per year when you scale it up. So it’s easy to demonstrate the value.