Best Longtail Tool

If you're trying to understand how the best longtail tool for selecting keywords for new website content works, check out this flow chart. We used to promote this flowchart rather heavily on the HitTail site. Unfortunately, it's been played down. But I encourage you to check it out to see how you can begin effective longtail marketing today.

Is HitTail the Future of Marketing?

The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.

That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.

But how do you reach them in the first place?

What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.

Word of mouth only got you so far.

Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.

The time was ripe.

And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.

Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.

Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.

My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".

I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.

I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.

I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.

All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.

And we saw that the time was right.

Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.

HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.

HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.

But it's the first act.

And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.

Stay tuned.

Success in Google in 2007? HitTail Nearly Top Tool

Hey, this is something pretty cool that I just realized today.

First we made Larry Chase's list of top 50 sites for Search Engine Optimization. Then we made ProBlogger's Top-20 things to do in 2007 to market your blog. Then we made eMom's Entrepreneur.com Top-10 Free Website Tools and Services. As of mid-March, we made Search Marketing's Top 5 hot tips to turn the heat up on your AdWords campaign.

Notice a trend?

I guess we're working our way up to #1, and judging by the amazing response to our "charter member" promotion that lasted through April 30th, we're on our way.

So my question for the HitTailers of the world is this:

Does anyone want to step up and name us the single most innovative and important thing to do to your site in 2007? You'll be in good company, because BusinessWeek sort of already did. But we're looking for genuine, from the trenches quotes.

Comments welcome.

Who's Legit? HitTail, Apparently.

So these folks at Lijit appear to be a site-search tool that goes beyond Master.com, Rollyo and the usual suspects, by also allowing you to search bookmarks, blogs, blogrolls and more. I guess it's really an RSS feed search. Anyway, I blog this because they did some clever research, sending out a spider to determine the most popular widgets on the Ineternet. Imagine our surprise, barely a few weeks after releasing our HitTail widget, we show up on their radar.

I guess it's only appropriate that we start the long tail.

The Optimum Ratio in The Long Tail of Search

Recently, HitTail forum user bvadel asked an insightful question. What's a healthy site in terms of the ratio of "head" keywords to "longtail" keywords? He generously offers his site's statistics of 13% in the top-10 keyword head, and 87% in the long keyword tail.

Yes, bvadel. That's quite good. Here's how I answered...

Let's look at the life of a site.

Upon launching a brand new site, first there are zero search hits.

Then your first Google hit occurs, hopefully about 7 days in. We know that's not realistic for everybody, but stick with us, and we'll show you how.

On that first hit, your ratio is 100% head keywords, 0% tail keywords (using the Top-10 methodology that HitTail employs).

This ratio continues right up to and including your 10th unique search hit. 100% / 0%.

On the 11th unique hit, your ratio starts to change. You're 90.1% head keywords and 9% long tail keywords. It's still very skewed towards your "most popular" even though the hit count of your 11th word isn't really any different. What's in the head and what's in the tail (such as it is) is arbitrary at this point.

Time passes.

In about 3 months, considering you're publishing diligently, your tail starts to form. The traffic that resulted from your top-10 keywords starts to proportionally shrink compared to the totaling of the less popular tail keywords.

90/10 becomes 80/20 becomes 70/30 becomes 60/40, until finally they meet at 50/50.

If you're doing your job well, this is only about 6 months into a brand new site. You are blogging every day, right?

Now, the rate at which the ratio flips slows down.

You creep to 30/70. And in about a year, you settle down to what is the average of all our HitTailers, which is ironically 20/80.

That is, 20% of your traffic is resulting from your top-10 keywords, and 80% of your traffic is from everything else.

This is one of the FEW places HitTail will ever look across everyone's data--getting the head vs. tail averages, because it is of great value to the industry at large from a statistical standpoint.

Now here's the rub.

Every once in awhile, a mega-popular site signs up for HitTail. They hardly need it. They're massively popular, to the point that we either have to charge them for the heavy volume premium service, or trade service for service (which we occasionally do).

And those people have ratios like 5/95.

That's right.

Their top 10 keywords are responsible for maybe less than 5% of their overall traffic.

This spectacular fact turns a lot of blockbuster economics on its head, in which 2% of the inventory selection accounts for 80% of the revenue--even at "long-tail" retailers like Amazon.com.

It takes awhile to digest, but it's true.

The more popular your site becomes, the less you rely on any particular keywords.

Popular sites are diversified, and skew heavily towards the tail.

One Word SEO Demo

This may be a fleeting occurrence based on the rapid recent construction of links to the HitTail site as a result of some very high-profile coverage (thanks, John!).

But yes, we come up very high right now on the single word "demo".

I only know this because someone clicked through on it about 5 minutes ago, and HitTail issued it as a suggestion.

We debated over whether to allow single-words to ever reach the suggestion tab on their own. And after long deliberation, we've decided to call them out under the Keywords tab, but not move them to suggestions, because of the futility of working them up.

But now having HitTail appear for the word "demo" in Google 4 pages in, I am sorely tested. It is at least worth HitTailing one post. I particularly liked the double-entendre of the headline I got to use.

But the rub is that Google is particularly sensitive to the RATE at which links are being constructed. So if a whole bunch of links just got created to us on the term "demo", it pushes us up short-term for the word demo.

This is a warning we always give to our clients. Don't get too excited with brand-new eerily cool results. The elation is premature. Premature Googlelation?

WOW, I would have loved to have used THAT as the headline. But the idea here is to get into the path of pre-existing traffic patterns with the headline alone. So, the headline is really where you need to make as few compromises as possible on word choice and arrangement from the HitTail suggestion.

There are a few things to point out.

The process of discovering where we position on a word we're not yet monitoring, is sometimes known as Passive Rank Analysis. Some competitors make a big deal of this as a feature, because it reduces the need to proactively spider the search results, and therefore violate the terms of use of most search engines, or alternatively, use their API, where the results are not necessarily the same as a genuine search.

Well, we've never made a big deal of passive rank analysis. We just figured that's how HitTail should work. It's not about tracking positions of your known keywords (benchmarks). Instead, it's about reporting on the activity of ACTUAL keyword hits (actuals). HitTail lives in the actuals.

The next point here is that Connors regularly gets the coveted one-word keywords for our clients. We thought long and hard before making this statement, but yes, we have several hard-and-fast cases. The downside is that one-word keywords, as cool as they are, are actually less significant than one may think, as they are excessively general, and don't necessarily produce the targeted traffic you desire. But none-the-less, it's desirable, because you're in a much better position on that word plus any other word.

A third point to make here is that I thought our one-word "root" for which we ascended was going to be "long" or "tail" or the made-up "longtail". And indeed, we're rising on all three (page 3 for just tail). But picking up a strong position on the term "demo" is just a logical bonus.

I had locked myself in a room for a week to make the long tail demo of which they speak. And it was apparently a very worthwhile endeavor, and worth the effort, as we are referred to as the way to understand long tail thinking (aside from Chris' book, of course). Or perhaps as the fastest pitch evah. It could be that the YouTube version has thousands of views, and is joining the ranks of viral video in terms of pure reach. Or maybe, people recognize it as one of the most creative demos and websites they ever came across.

And finally, it's really unrealistic to take the steps one would have to take from an SEO standpoint at this point to fortify HitTail on the term, demo. We're just not in the business of demos (though we're repeatedly asked). The work it would take to truly fortify a one-word term is ridiculous; landing page 4 is one thing, but the increased resistance encountered as you creep up the SERPs is enormous.

I'd be spending all my time doing that instead of doing it for paying Clients, or blogging for the HitTail community.

Findability

HitTail is about findability in light of enormous competition. In the old world, where finite shelf space, finite broadcast channels, finite column inches, the mega-hits pretty much shut out small business. But even in those days, small business still thrived on a local level.

The Internet changes things in allowing you to collect the disparate and desperate, condensing and concentrating it into some decent business, where there was no business before. And even such a viable business, no matter how lucrative it is on a personal small business level, doesn't even show up on the radar of big business.

This is why Chris Anderson's opinions about the long tail hold true, just as the opposing voices of Lee Gomes and Dave Taylor. The opinion that the top 2.7% of Amazon's products produce 75% of the revenue is completely consistent with long tail teachings. Why? Because the long tail demand curve is 1/X. That means that the popularity of products at the head of the curve are ENORMOUSLY popular. Indeed, it approaches infinite.

It's just that the equally infinite diversity of non-popular products/services are not denied their markets. No matter how tiny the business in the long tail seems in comparison to mega-hits, it's nice business nonetheless. And it's all about findability. That's how the Internet has changed things. That's how Google has changed things. Finite shelf space, broadcast channels, and column inches have been replaced by infinite product supply and infinite findability.

And the best way to ensure your findability is to put yourself in the path of existing search patterns with some predictable keywords, then watch what happens. What you'll discover is countless additional keyword variations. The collective guessing power of the wisdom of the crowd dwarfs any single person or group's ability to guess. Therefore, with the right tools, you can start with simple, competitive findability, and spiral outwards with less competitive, but more diverse keyword phrases, and "flesh out" the mesh of your findability net.