About two months ago, I posted about HitTail (here and here). I think it's time for another followup on this tool.
Looking at my HitTail stats today, it shows:
Top Ten keywords are 23.4% of all your search traffic.
Long Tail keywords are 76.6% of all your search traffic.
Total unique keywords collected: 2099
Wow, those numbers totally amaze me. I've concentrated on optimizing for about 20 or so phrases. But my visitors are largely finding my site from anything but those phrases! And in many cases, they've had to dig deep into the SERPs to find the link to my site. What if I had optimized for many of those phrases and they had appeared on the first page instead? How many more visitors would have come to the site? All those people who didn't dig deep into the SERPs? Hmmmm...
This is what HitTail is all about, and it's why I still recommend it as being something you should utilize. Whether you use HitTail, or your own log files, or whatever method you choose, target that Long Tail! It's that important.
Now, back to HitTail. There have been some enhancements since the last time I discussed the tool.
1. You can now export the data to Excel, which is great for massaging the data any way you want.
2. You can now sort the terms by search engine. Now, you can see exactly what the long tail looks like for your visitors coming just from Google, Yahoo! or MSN. Way cool.
3. The report now uses a Score (on a scale of 1-10), which indicates which terms are the best candidates for optimization. A score of 1 is the best candidate, and a score of 10 needs no further optimization.
Well, that's my followup for today. I'll report back if I think there is a need later on.
About the Author: Donna Fontenot
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