Starting 2013, we will be publishing reviews on the tools we currently use for online marketing or plan to try out.
Hope these blog posts will help some of our clients and business owners get transparent understanding, benefits and weak points in these tools.
So, let’s get started with our Tool review of Hittail.com
What is HitTail?
HitTail is primarily a web analytics tool with a focus on suggesting organic keywords to target for SEO. However, unlike Google Analytics it breaks down the complex data into actionable items for the inbound marketeer.
HitTail shows the most promising “search terms” in search engines you should target, based on your existing traffic.
Key phrases recommendations from HitTail
HitTail analyzes all keywords and the key phrases through which visitors have landed on a website.
The installation is simple; we just need to insert a code in the body tag of the website. Pretty much how one sets up Google analytics on a website.
While most of the tools focus primarily on the most popular terms, HitTail recommends popular “key phrases” or “long tail keywords” based on the target audience.
HitTail helps you to target those keyword phrases in your website what the real time audience is currently searching for. So, for an SEO it might be unmanageable to sort out the relevant and profitable keywords in a big list. Hittail.com comes in here and does the job and categorizes the traffic via real-time organic and paid searches. It also adds keywords to the suggestion tab for SEO to target for content marketing.
The working of the “suggestion” algorithm is not transparent and after watching a few videos on Hittail.com we were not able to make out how the algo actually works.
However, what counts is success of the recommendations.
SEOs need to do a bit of hit and trial with the recommendations from this tool.
Why use Long Tail Keywords?
According to seomoz.org, 70% queries searched in search engine are in the form of long tail key phrases. Only 15% of the users search short tail/mid tail keywords. From an SEO perspective it is easy to rank long tail keywords in the top position due to less “relative” competition.
SEO Implementation
Now for our website, https://newmediaguru.co.uk – Hittail.com recommends to target “web design India” as the keyword. We will post updates on this blog post in future months on how that recommendation and strategy has worked out for us with respect to our website’s ranking.
They also give an option to order an article for the same keyword at the press of a click. However, the pricing of the article is a bit on the higher side – $18 per article.
Functions in HitTail
- Key Words / Search Hits: Here you can see a full view of the key phrases that people used to find your website.
- Suggestions: Clicking on “suggestion”, the keyword moves to to-dos and to-dos can be synced with your content writers, projects base camp and gets prepared in a neat to-do list.
- Order content: This functionality allows us to order an article. You will get 400 words content in just $18-19 within two days. We find it on the expensive side.
- Our initial thoughts on HitTail: The tool looks good so far. It is very hard to promote short tail/ generic keywords for new websites and here’s a nice little tool recommending mid – long tail keywords that saves on the hours of keyword research for an SEO.
Our wish list for Hittail.com team
- Make the ordering content price a bit affordable for SMEs
- Give more transparency on the workings of the ‘suggestion’ algorithm
- Would be good if we can add a “more keyword suggestion tool” to work in conjunction with the Suggestion tab. For example – if we were recommended ‘web design India’, what are the other suitable variations of this keyword?
- Give some suggestions on better targeting of keywords for each site page after a scan of 1 month’s visitor data – basically more advanced suggestions.
However, overall the tool is very solid and for the money charged – it’s pretty good.
We will post some updates on the progress we are making with recommendations from Hittail.com for our website. Check out later for more……
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