UPDATE:We no longer use this tool. It was sold to a new company. We no longer recommend using this tool. Instead, try using SEMRush or Ahrefs for better results.
Anyone with a successful blog or online presence can agree that search engine marketing is important. After the Google Panda and Penguin updates, everyone is trying to find ways to increase their organic search traffic the right way. A while back, we came across a tool called HitTail through a friend's recommendation. Although we were impressed by your HitTail review, like most people we are skeptical when it comes to anything SEO related. After using HitTail to facilitate our long tail SEO strategy on WPBeginner, we found that we increased our organic search traffic by 20% in less than 2 months. .
Some of you would be like 20%, that's all? There are other bloggers who boast of a 500% increase. The problem is that those other bloggers don't have much traffic to begin with. Increasing 500% is easy when you only have 500 visitors a month from Google. It's almost impossible to do on an established site that gets over 250,000 visitors a month from Google. In this article, we will show you how we increase our organic search traffic using HitTail in WordPress by leveraging long tail keywords.
Before we cover the topic of how we increase our organic search traffic, it's crucial for everyone to understand what long-tail SEO is. And most importantly, we want everyone to understand the value of long-tail SEO and the reasons why most SEO-savvy people use long-tail SEO.
Seo long tail refers to niche-specific search keywords that are typically 2 words or more in length. An example of this would be:"custom fields in WordPress". Most people who don't know better try to rank for keywords like "WordPress" or "WordPress Tutorials." While there is value in those top keywords, there is a ton of competition. There is no easy way to use white hat for you to see an immediate impact on your search engine rankings for those top keywords. However, people searching for those top keywords are likely to be less likely to convert compared to someone who visited your site looking for something very specific.
If you ever look at your site analytics, you'll get the insight that the most important keywords usually get the most traffic. Most people don't bother going after the first few pages of their keyword results because they start seeing a bunch of keywords that generate 5-10 hits a month. Anyone who doesn't know better would say that it's best to focus on the keywords that bring you the most traffic. However, anyone who can do a little arithmetic can add up the number of hits on long-tail keywords to show you where you should really focus.
Looking at the chart above, the value of long-tail SEO should be apparent. It is clear that there is more search value in long-tail keywords as a whole than popular keywords (70% of all search queries involve long-tail terms). The biggest benefit of going after long-tail keywords is that you can start seeing an immediate increase in traffic because long-tail keywords are typically less competitive. This was the main reason why long-tail SEO has always been part of our strategy.
So where does HitTail come into play in all of this? Well, for the longest time, we used Google Analytics to collect as much long-tail keyword data as we could. Overtime as our site grew, keyword analysis through Google Analytics became increasingly difficult. Downloading the long list of tables was also not an option because, like most people, we are not addicted to data. This is when we start looking for a new method to find the long tail data and capitalize it.
HitTail is tracking software that tracks your website search data for low-performing long-tail keywords. Once you place your tracking code on your site, it runs silently in the background to record search results and keyword information. HitTail then analyzes all of those keywords using its algorithm to provide you with a list of suggested long-tail keywords that you should be able to rank well for. Using the keyword suggestions, you should be able to increase your search traffic quite easily.
Before we go ahead and show screenshots of how things work, it's best to cover how to set up HitTail in WordPress. The first thing you need to do is sign up with HitTail. It is a paid service that starts at $9.95 per month. Plans are based on the amount of traffic you get, so for larger sites you have to pay accordingly. They have a free trial period of 21 days that you can use the product and try to see if you like it or not. The data is real-time, so you should have a good idea whether or not HitTail is for you within the trial period.
After registration, you will be given a tracking code to paste on your site. There are two ways to integrate HitTail into your WordPress site.
Method 1: Copy the tracking code and paste it into your footer.php file. You can also use our Insert Headers and Footers plugin to add that code to your WordPress site.
Method 2: You can use the official HitTail plugin for WordPress. Just install and activate the plugin. Login to your HitTail account and go to Account » Sites.
Copy the site ID and paste it into the plugin settings page.
Once you do that, you are done with the setup. Give it some time and you will start to see keyword suggestions. We have it set up to email us daily keyword suggestions. You can have it set weekly if you want.
Once you have set up HitTail, log in to your HitTail dashboard and go to Tips tongue. You will see a list of keywords along with the search engines where the traffic is coming from.
Go through the list of keywords and see if your content is related. You can easily modify/optimize your article or landing page to improve your ranking position for a specific keyword. Sometimes, even if you rank for a specific term, the article you have is not the most accurate. You can use that data to create a new post on your site so you can provide relevant material to your audience. This will often allow you to move from position 8 to position 1 in a matter of days.
Here at WPBeginner, we use HitTail's keyword suggestions to improve our existing articles and also to get new post ideas. HitTail has an option to mark the keyword in the to-do list. Once completed, you can mark it as done.
They also have the option of paying you $19 to write a 400-word article related to your keyword. We have not tested this part of your service. We honestly believe that anything limited by word count is not quality material. But that's just our opinion. You are more than welcome to try their article writing service if you wish.
Another thing we've started to do with these long-tail keyword suggestions is we use them as anchors in our internal links. If you don't already know, internal linking is great for increasing pageviews in WordPress. It also helps you combat content scrapers. Using those long-tail keyword suggestions as part of your internal linking strategy can go a long way.
You can easily use long-tail keyword suggestions to run your PPC (pay per click) campaigns, but we haven't. Mainly because we do not do PPC advertising.
If you can't tell already, we love HitTail. The functionality it offers is amazing, and it's really helping us grow our blog. You can never run out of ideas if you are using HitTail. There are some usability things that we hope will improve in the future.
One of the most annoying parts of using HitTail is keyword pagination. Currently, you can only see 15 keywords on each page. This means you have to do a lot of clicking. To add to that, they only have the previous/next arrows. We really wish they had an option to easily sort the number of keywords we want to display on the page. For example, we would display 100 keywords on each page. Since there is an export to Excel option available, it is not feasible if you want to use your to-do list.
The other thing they can improve on is a neat way to add keywords to your to-do list. Currently you can only add keywords from the suggestions tab on your to-do list. If you are going to the full keyword list, you must first move the keywords to suggestions before you can move them to the to-do list.
Considering we have a design background, those minor UI issues really seemed to bother us. However, the overall functionality of the tool outweighs the minor UI issues that we don't like. We love using HitTail to get new post ideas (over 30 new posts are ready to go). HitTail is a great tool for bloggers, internet marketers, SEOs, and anyone who wants to increase their organic search traffic.
If you want to increase your organic search traffic, then you need to start working on your long-tail keyword strategy. Your audience is getting smarter every day, and they know how to search. Most users search for relevant things and want relevant results. When someone wants to buy a pair of Nike shoes, they don't go looking for shoes. They will search for a specific type of shoe like "nike running shoes" or more specifically "nike free run + reviews". This is the type of user who is most likely to purchase the product. If you want to increase your organic search traffic using long tail, we recommend you start using HitTail.
If you have used HitTail in the past or are using HitTail now, please let us know your feedback in the comments below.
