UPDATE: HitTail was sold to a new company and we no longer use this tool. So, we no longer recommend this tool. We suggest you to use Ahrefs and SEMrush tool for better results.
Long tail Keywords were once the talking point in SEO town before Google trends came along and webmasters started to focus on what was Trending and this was a big mistake on their part as they might have observed. The reason for this is, if suppose you want to rank for a Top Ranking Keyword that’s spreading like wildfire and you want traffic (Read Organic Traffic) for your site, but most probably users won’t even see your link, let alone click on it in SERPs.
Now let me elaborate what went wrong with that strategy. First thing that you have a small site and authority sites, even if they were not aiming for that keyword, are sure to get eyeballs more than your Link. Second thing is that you tried to focus on a keyword with almost half the Websites in the world vying for that, your post never stood half a chance, let alone get you organic traffic.
What Keywords should Small Websites Target ?
Long tail keywords should be targeted by small sites. The same top keywords you were targeting earlier become the center of that long tail keyword and see the difference, traffic flows specifically now to your site and you are again getting the Traffic you wanted ranking using the same keyword, but in a different way.
What is Long Tail Keyword?
In the simplest of terms, they are keywords between 3 to as many words referring to a specific query based on an another keyword. They have less queries so less searches but they Include that “Hot” Keyword you aimed for and less competition combined with a well written post puts you on first page on SERPs and traffic flows freely (I know, Cheesy but True).
How do i Make Long Tail Keywords ?
Let me give you a quick example, think of that hot selling gadget you were going to write about, then think up of some tutorial or some problem that users may be facing with that gadget and make a post about it. This will take some perfecting but we found something that makes it even easier than writing your name, a Long Tail Keyword suggestion tool called HitTail.
Here i will start with a small review on HitTail and give instructions on how you can use it to get more Organic Traffic to your site.
What is HitTail and what it does for you?
HitTail is a long tail keyword suggestion tool for your websites and posts. It gives you suggestion based on the keywords that bring you hits from search engines. It provides you with statistics on how much of your traffic is long tail and how much of your traffic is top search terms. You can reproduce the search and see on which position you are being ranked on and what you can do to Improve it.
When you are low on creative juices, you can always check up on HitTail suggestions and write or improve upon your existing articles or write new articles to gauge new audience for your site. You come to know what users are searching and what you can do to get them to come to your site.
We actually don’t believe on what we hear until we actually test it. So I actually tested it out and tried some searches for the same articles with both long Tail (3 and more words) and small (Top Keywords), and arranged the results in a small Info-graphic comparing long tail and small keywords for you.
How Can HitTail help you ?
Small keywords have huge competition and have a whole lot of websites vying for the same keywords as you can see from the above Infograph. Having long tail keyword boosts your Rank for a smiliar partial match keyword. This way you are actually targeting a small audience but have more CTR percentage and not just Impressions like in the case of small tail Keywords (Top keywords).
Increase you Organic Traffic with HitTail
First step after logging in to HitTail would be to get your tracking code and add it to the <Head> of the website you want to get suggestions about. When you would be finished, you will start getting suggestions about long tail keywords when around 150 visits have been logged.
Now use the suggestions page wisely to get some suggestions from HitTail. Most of these suggestions would seem like repetitive and most of them would have been applied already and ranking already. But you may need to sort out them to get that Golden Keyword for that next Article in your blog. The only hitch i encountered with it was that almost 70% of the suggestions are already the search hits being used to land on my article. It can however be used to rank higher actually than what are you ranking right now.
You can add these keywords to your ‘to do list’ and when you have finished up the article, you can remove it from the list and analyze others for your next article.
Export these keywords in a spreadsheet file for research later or use on plugins like scrappers.
Using these features are pretty much easy and definitely so much easier than Google Analytics where you are browsing through the keywords pages of your analytics account. With HitTail, your daily keywords are neatly arranged with time and referring search Engine to your site.
Final Words on HitTail
HitTail works best for small sites. It can actually boost traffic by upto 80%, for bigger sites the difference might seem smaller like 10-20%, which is also a big deal when you are talking about traffic in millions.
It seems useful and Organic Traffic is one thing that works wonders for any website. HitTail overcomes some chinks in its armor like duplicate keyword filtering, more keywords and suggestions per page. We liked the HitTail service and are using it on our sites for a better future.