This recent post by Mike Levin at HitTail really nails why you need to be using this long tail SEO tool.
One of the amazing trends I’ve discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.
While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence –working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the “My HitTail” tab was only one of five –and actually the least-important one at that.
That’s right!
We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you’re already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!
The fact that we’re not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We’re not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We’re merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It’s not some derivative of this event that’s important. It’s the event itself–that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you–usually deep in the results.
This tells you two things:
- You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL–like surveying for new oil fields.
- There’s a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.
So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you’re simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic “oil”, and you’re verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There’s no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don’t have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail’s writing suggestions.
It’s that easy.
