Perfect Keyword Tool for the Recession

You'd think that after four years, the incredibly actionable HitTail keyword tool would start losing it's appeal, but as it turns out, the tough economic conditions are actually just opening Marketers' eyes to the wisdom of targeting the long tail. It's an easy and systematic method of bringing in well qualified prospective customers and audience to your website without spending a dime.

Well, technically it's $10/mo and your time writing.

But that's the perfect way to spend your money right now. Dig in and fortify by producing copious perfectly optimized content. It will likely produce some new customers today, but when economic conditions improve, you will have performed the content-build already, and be positioned for a real take-off!

Our competitors know this, and are bidding in AdWords on our keywords. Ha Ha Ha! It's nice to be acknowledged as the leader. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can't find pricing on their website. I bet THEY'RE not $10/mo.

So stick with the actionable keyword tool leader, who is also the best priced. We want to be your best friend during this recession.

Keyword Tool

The biggest change in the industry lately has been the dramatic rolling out of new features in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, where they added monthly traffic volume estimates, the Google Trends tool, where they report website traffic numbers in uniques-per-day in an Alexa-like graph (log in for absolute numbers), and most recently with their Google Search Insights tool, which is like an interative Zeitgeist. To a lesser extent, some new features are rolling out in Webmaster Central. And contrary to popular wisdom, Microsoft has some of the best keyword research tools in the industry wrapped into Ad Center--but it's a pretty big learning committment to get to the point where you can use them. SpyFu remains the best tool, albeit expensive, for spying on your client's AdWords campaigns. And of course, HitTail, with it's new features including the rockin' feature where you can add new content to your blog directly from your To Do list (which I'm doing now) is hands-down the best way to identify the content-challenged sweet spots in your website, and the actual mechanism to publish the content. Of course, I'm biased.

Long Tail Keyword

At yesterday's SEO Super Power Meetup, one of the original beta testers simultaneously praised us for how well HitTail worked, and challenged me on why it works, and why he should trust the suggestions.

The answer needs to be qualified: don't take HitTail suggestions blindly! They have to make sense in the context of your site. But they pretty much always do work. In other words, if you take a suggestion issued by HitTail and put it into the Title field of a new blog post, you're pretty much assured to grab the first page on that term, and generate new qualified traffic.

And it takes something of a leap of faith to understand why--and how we're able to do this at such a low-cost and in real time. We understand that there are other products that give you thousands, or tens-of-thousands of keywords at a single go. But they're much more expensive, and such long lists are mostly suitable for pay-per-click campaigns. But as far as getting writing ideas, lists like that just aren't as good as HitTail.

Why?

A suggestion issued by HitTail means that someone JUST found you on that term, but not on the first couple of pages of results.

So, what does this tell you?

1. You CAN be found on this term.
2. There is at least SOME traffic there.
3. There's a bunch of results ahead of you on that term which for some reason didn't satisfy the searcher.

And these three truths make a HitTail suggestion the best sort of long tail keyword. It's active. You're already associated with it. And sites higher in the results are not satisfying users.

BAM! You have the top position on that term.

It might only amount to 50 visits on that term in the course of an entire year. But that's 50 visits you would probably not have gotten otherwise. And it's traffic on fairly specific, and therefore, uniquely pre-qualified potential customers (prospects).

And of course, if you keep this up over time with many HitTail suggestions, the effect accumulates, and results in compounding returns. The idea is that you're going for complete dominance in your particular market niche, following the most logical, and immediately rewarding path, from a quality-content-expansion point-of-view.

Spread the word!

Writing Topics

The essence of HitTail is writing topics — something to write about. Deal with writer's block. Have your own writer's muse.

Perhaps we're doing ourselves a disservice making it look too much like a keyword tool or analytics software. Comments welcome.

Keyword Tool

It's undeniable. Keyword tools are everywhere, and everyone's spinning their own version and working them into their pay-per-click campaign marketing dashboards. Third party tools harvest keywords from second-tier search sites, such as InfoSpace's WebCrawler. First-party tools incorporate Yahoo results into Panama and Google results into the AdSense fetures--known as keyword inventory tools, with the added bonus of reporting keyword traffic stats and monetary value. And some keyword tools even do their own crawls, harvesting keywords off of competitor's sites, search results, APIs, or yank them right out of the datastream, in cooperation with participating ISPs.

Yes, there are unlimited numbers of ways to come up with keyword lists to help with your natural and paid search campaigns.

But we like ours.

It's simplistic in its conception, to the point of strange.

Yet it's effective in practice, to the point of unfair.

And that technique is harvesting keywords right from your website's own logfiles. But instead of merely pulling "the long keyword list" as so many analytics products allow, we pair down the list with at least two passes, so you don't have to.

And for anyone whose done serious keyword research, you can appreciate how much time this saves you. You get YOUR BEST LIST of keywords to target before you even export anything to Excel.

Think about that for a minute.

If you don't get it, forward the link to this article to someone in online marketing who you trust, who you think might get it. Ask them how creative and time-saving they thing this is. Ask them how it might improve your online marketing campaigns, and indeed, your life--by giving you time back for your families, hobbies and friends. Think how it could make your boss love you, those around you admire you, and take you one tiny step closer to being indispensable.

Exactly HOW does this radically different keyword research work flow happen?

We take the precious time that keyword geeks are flushing down the toilet by saving all their log files forever, running complex Regular Expression matches against them, ensuring that the work it suggests isn't duplicating work you've already done--and we distill it all down to one little Suggestions tab.

That's a long way of saying: "We tell you what to write about."

When the story of HitTail first broke, co-founder of Wired Magazine, John Battelle, was a little dubious about this "telling you what to write about stuff". And what good editor and writer wouldn't be? It sounds like one more spam-promoting tool to shift even more power into the hands of disingenuous bloggers just making a traffic-grab to increase their AdSense beer money.

But we held firm, by not creating an API that would allow spam-mash-ups. We held firm, by teaching our users about quality and distinctive online voices resulting in long-term reputations. We held firm by practicing HitTailing ourselves, demonstrating how just because you know you're going to get the traffic by mere virtue of smart headline selection, doesn't mean you can fill a page with garbage. We held firm by positioning it as a tool for reputable bloggers and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) striving to get and keep customers directly, instead of yet-another-SEO-tool for AdSensers.

So here we are, as the one tool that consistently gets mentioned side-by-side with Google Analytics as the one must-have piece of tracking code. If you're only going to run two things to help improve your website, then those two things should be Google Analytics and HitTail. And that only makes sense, because would Google ever provide you a keyword tool that would increase your natural search performance, and bring down the cost of your AdWords campaigns?

Of course not.