Discovering Long Tail Keywords For Low Cost Keywords
Its been a little while since I last posted here, mainly because I’ve been busy studying Drupal an excellent open source content management system. I have also been playing with Goals and Filters in Analytics and I’m waiting on some data to build up before I report on that, but for now I thought I would reveal some information on a recent experiment with a tool called Hittail.
What is Hittail?
Well to quote their website.
“HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as writing suggestions that, when used as the topic of new site content or blog posts, can boost the natural search results of your site. It’s that simple.”
Perhaps a more clear explanation would be, that Hittail helps you discover unique search queries that are generally less competitive, but almost always more targeted to your product or service. This is important because less competitive terms are far cheaper to bid on from a Pay Per Click perspective, but also easier to rank highly for in terms of search engine optimisation.
What are long tail keywords?
The main difference between normal keywords and long tail keywords is that long tail often appears more like a sentance. Here are some examples of long tail keywords:
- Where to buy sunglasses in Dublin?
- What are the bus times in New York?
- Cool places to visit in Dubai
- Are long tail keywords cheaper to bid on?
As you can see they are quite long, but they are often in the form of a question. Obviously people like to ask Google questions as if it were a oracle of knowledge (which it is, lets face it).
How are these different from normal keywords?
Well if you haven’t done any search engine marketing before, most people often try to achieve top status in the search engines for terms that are one, two or three words long at most. This is because there is often a larger amount of traffic to be obtained from these sources. The problem is, most of your competitors are often seeking to be found under the same term making it harder to achieve a top 10 ranking on the desired search engine.
How do I discover long tail keywords?
There are a few ways you can do this. Traditionally many scoure their Analytics (like Google Analytics) package for unique keywords. Often this involves a manual process of exporting these keywords and then reimporting them into your Google Adwords account.
Hittail, helps make the transition easier by allowing you to directly import them from your Hittail account, directly into your Adwords account. This can help you reduce duplicated keywords in your account. Which is important as this can cause issues with relation to your ranking and visibility.
How do I use Hittail?
Just like any analytics package you need to install a small Javascript snippet at the bottom of your HTML page source. Unlike an analytics package however, the weight (or size in kb) of the file is quite small so it shouldn’t be an issue from a page load time performance perspective.
Full instructions can be found on their website, so I won’t go into that here.
Another nice feature I found was the ability to easily see what keywords you were found for and from what search engine. If you are bidding on terms internationally, say in different countries this could be really useful. In the attached screen shot you can see google with different domain GTLD (Global Top Level Domains).
You can also see the long list of keywords obtained over a short period of time in this view.
Summary
In summary, Hittail is probably most useful for those in the search engine marketing industry. Particularly those in the Adwords management field as this will save you a load of time discovering and optimising accounts. If anything, I have discovered that many people are searching for travel related phrases, which has inspired me to continue blogging about my travel and I have also found a lot of people arrived on my site, while searching for content management system related questions. Again something else I’ll try and focus on in future.
So if your looking to expand your keyword list or find more targeted traffic to drive to your website. Hittail could be a useful tool for you. Anything that can save you a few dollars in online advertising spend is a good thing to me.
Hittail is very very much needed in the SEO and marketing industry. Adwords management and optimizing is very important otherwise your just loosing time and money.