Uncover Long Tail Search Phrases With HitTail.com

One of the most common questions small business owners ask me is “How do I get my site listed in search engines for the good keywords?” They usually want to be listed for the difficult words everyone wants to be listed under like “personal injury attorney” or “real estate” or some other term that Google lists millions of other competitors for.

At the heart of any good search campaign is keyword selection. Most people automatically go for the keywords that will take months of hard work to get ranked for and ignore those with less traffic.

It’s a huge mistake to ignore these keywords that may get less traffic, but also have less competition. In fact, over time, you’ll find that you actually get more traffic from the combination of all these longer, less traffic key phrases (dubbed “long tail search phrases” after Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail) than you do for the coveted keywords you long for.

How do you find these keywords? You could do numerous searches on a keyword research tool like Wordtracker.com (or try out its free keyword research tool) search , but if you already have a site, I highly recommend signing up for HitTail.com.

HitTail.com is a free tool that analyzes all your search traffic for specific key phrases. It then tells you the keywords and phrases people have actually typed into search engines to find your site. HitTail.com even provides you with suggestions for optimizing your site based on people’s search patterns.

I’ve been using it for months and am extremely impressed with its data analysis. According to its results, popular search terms send me about 25% of my traffic while 75% comes from long tail search results.

And instead of painstakingly combing through my site logs, I can easily see what people used today to find my site – and then I can add those keywords to my page, or add a new page addressing those keywords (it’s especially great for inspiration for new blog posts). I’ve found that in many cases, it’s the best way to add incremental traffic that adds to significant numbers over time.

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