I signed up to HitTail today and it inspired a blog entry on how I intend to use it to increase traffic to my websites. Click here to read why I believe using HitTail is better than other analytics packagse when it comes to increasing your traffic using keywords. Hope it gives a few people some ideas. Pete
So far I have two sites with HitTail and while it's still too early to tell how useful the product will be, it sure is interesting to click around watch it work.
The more I dig into it, the more it seems like it doesn't do anything for you directly, but rather helps you see how people are finding your site. Based upon the "long tail" keyword combinations that it finds, it appears that you're supposed to write content that targets them, thereby ensuring you're more likely to get future traffic targeting that keyword combo, which would in theory click around to other parts of your site. If anyone else has figured out a different way to use it, please jump in and let me know.
You got it right (this is the creator of HitTail). While we've developed something that feeds people's keyword addiction and desire for viewing of the real-time dataflow with the Search Hits tab, the real value is just in how it feeds you writing suggestions that are nearly assured to be effective in driving new traffic. Our algorithms analyze your existing traffic to pick out things that have led to your site, but which are under-performing, and are excellent grounds for improvement. So, what do you do with a writing suggestion? Once you've decided that the suggestion is good, and is something that you would like to write about, just work it into the headline of your next piece of content. We highly recommend blogging platforms, such as WordPress, TypePad, Blogger or SquareSpace. They take care of most of the mechanics of search engine optimization, so you can focus instead on writing well. Kept up over time, you can drive a lot of traffic, growing it consistently and incrementally. It's a gradual build, designed to eventually result in the snowball effect, once you reach critical mass.
What's better about HitTail? Actually using the same concept, you can just look your built-in AWStat to find out the what keywords brings visitor to your site.
How do you tell which terms are underperforming for you? Do you spend your time optimizing for things which are already leading to you on page 1 of Google results? Do you re-check every keyword you find by doing a subsequent search for it in Google to see if it needs help? Or do you zero in on things where the visitor was very determined in digging you up deep in the results? One way, you're wasting your time "re-optimizing" for things that should have been filtered out in the first place. The other way, you're spending your time in the "fringe" traffic, which is only fringe because of your lack-of-relevancy, and a very good candidate for further optimization. See? It's a long tail keyword mining time saver. Systematically bring yourself from, say, page 10 of search results to page 1.