So, three days ago, I told you about HitTail, which I thought would be a must-have seo tool. 3 days later - I still think that, and I'll explain why in more detail.
The tool looks at the search terms that people use to find your site. It then analyzes how deep in the SERPs those terms were. If someone gets to my site via a phrase they found on page one, great, but if they come to my site via a phrase that is found on page eight, for example, of the SERPs, then that's where this tool really kicks in. It highlights those types of terms, via the Suggestions tab, as potential keywords for you to focus on. After all, these are terms you are NOT ranking well for, but perhaps should be.
As for my particular case, there is one phrase (and variations of the phrase) that people are consistently using to reach my site, even though my site does not rank well for the phrase. People have really dug down deep into the SERPs before clicking on my listing. This phrase (and variations thereof of the phrase) appears in the SERPs on pages 4, 6, 7, 8, and 24. Yes, someone actually went to page 24 of the search engine listings. I assume they weren't happy with the results on the first 23 pages.
In any case, this is a phrase that people are obviously interested in, and obviously having a hard time finding relevant results. I should definitely work on getting better placement for this phrase. However, without this tool, I doubt I would have ever noticed the pattern. Sure, maybe I might have noticed it in the log files, but not likely.
If you try this tool, give it a few days before making a decision about it. It takes a while for enough data to stockpile before the Suggestions tab starts to fill up (or at least it does in some cases, depending upon your traffic).
This is also an attempt to see if an SEO tool has any hope of going mainstream the way AdWords and GoTo/Overture/YSM did. Their journey to success was stellar, because it was such a clear deal to marketers. You pay, you appear. Natural search, no matter how much sense it makes, is still voodoo to most, and will therefore never mainstream.
We try to take the voodoo out of it, and give a very clear path to at least moderate success. Anyway, if you want to help me mainstream this thing, help me test whether or not it’s digg-worthy with a vote to give it some initial visibility. And again, a tremendous thanks to SEO-Scoop, the first to recognize what we were building!
OK, having finally viewed the movie I am totally sold. It is such a great product, well-packaged. I’m posting about the site at SEO Refugee now. Great job!
It’s amazing to me how packaging data in different ways can illuminate aspects of a site you may not have been aware of. Very interesting to see which searches brought which traffic. Yahoo searches are bringing visitors for a certain length tail, while Google is bringing searches of a different length.
I have quite a few static pages that I have yet to add the code snippet to because of the time involved to do it, but will likely add them soon.
Very nice tool that puts a spotlight on some worthwhile data.
As usual, SEO-Scoop is first with the news.
I have just signed up with MyLongTail and will be reporting on my progress.
Thanks for the “Scoop”!
Now that we’ve had a few weeks worth of data compiled, I have to say this tool is really beneficial. First, I was floored to see that our most popular phrase (for the sections of the site included in this experiment) only netted us 25 visitors to this point. However, we have nearly 3,600 keyword phrases we got traffic from, the vast majority on page 1 (big toot of own horn, I admit it).
The suggestions tool is great, giving you an opportunity to see phrases where there might be more traffic to tap into. But even more useful for me is the Keywords tab, showing me the keywords people used to get to our site – it gives a nice glimpse into the psyche of our visitors and how they got there, and how we might create other content optimized for people hardwired to search that way. Very cool.
And that it provides so much long tail data, more than I can seem to get from my own stats proggie, is great.
Thanks for the find, DD.
Thanks so much for the kind feedback and support. We are 4 weeks into the beta program, and both the HitTail system and HitTailing premise seem to be holding up and going strong. We put some time into a new demo that explains the concept for the non-SEO crowd http://www.hittail.com/demo