HowTo: Use HitTail for Copywriting Suggestions

Submitted by Markus Merz on July 26, 2006 - 2:10pm in
Tools

Another great tool to enhance your copywriting productivity by using the inbound SE traffic: hittail.com from Mike Levin (miklevin brand new here on p.com).

HitTail is a program that captures the keywords in the longtail of a website's search hits and makes suggestions on which are the most important to write about.

Currently I have presented the SE traffic analysis tool 103bees: Search Engine Traffic Analysis which is great for getting single (!) top keywords and analyzing the top landing pages of your website and the SE phrases which triggered that click.

HitTail takes a different approach and offers a workflow which results in a To-Do list but also offers an immediate research help. Awesome!

Let's check the scary details and their ugly impact on your workload. Be warned!

The entry to hell ...

HitTail in demo mode

If you are willing to follow a fast speaking guy (Mike?) who presents HitTail in a nice presentation then the HitTail demo is right for you: HitTail demo on the site.

You can also directly login to check out HitTail on hittail.com in demo mode. That checkbox is great for lazy guys like me. Kudos for that detail!

But I recommend to get the real thing! This is the last chance to leave!

Welcome to hell ...

What is HitTail

First of all it's a very annoying tool which keeps you nailed at the desktop writing and writing. The good thing is that you need search engine traffic for that.

Read on, I didn't write "Awesome!" just out of a mood!

Master the register process.

That little form checks every input and spits out ugly red notes if you have done something wrong.

You are not allowed to register an email which looks like hr_merz because of the underscore. You'd better have another mail address handy.
Entering your website URL results in two nice possibilities to get "take away that stupid http:// thingy" or "You must enter a valid TLD". You'd better do so otherwise you'll be nuked. Btw a valid TLD is an URL without that boring unnecessary slash (/) at the end.

OK, after kidding around with the registration (and beating and kicking it like a real master) you get a nice little mail and a nice little piece of the well known Javascript code which you better put in your footer template if you want HitTail to do the copywrite suggestion work for you.

<script src="http://XXXX.hittail.com/mlt.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
At least that little shiny line should reside somewhere between your website body tags.

Another last chance to leave!

The HitTail vision

Well, there is a vision behind that tool like with every other tool. Like a hammer HitTail nails all incoming referrers into your eyes and forces you to start working instead of zipping that sugar-rich vanilla milk-shake all day.

The simple vision is: Start writing you dumb idiot!

HitTail - Your hunter and collector (Updated)

The tab "Your Hit Tail" gives you an overview about all the collected keyword phrases. The long tail theory implemented in HitTail is that it is not so important to have a look at the top keywords which work fine already but to digg deeper in the keywords which are not so prominent. The massive amount of keyword phrases in the long tail will bring up ideas for articles or for the SEO refinement of the site.

In marketing speech this means to widen your distribution channels. Marketing by definition opens or creates the connection between product and customer. The more connections you are able to create the better for the product.

For a blog owner who is not so much product oriented like an online shop this approach is like an automated reaction on the fresh readers coming from the search engines. But as you already know your web site also is a product and needs some marketing. The keyword phrases collected by HitTail can paint a clear picture what real people are looking for and HitTail brings you the help to create lists of article To-Dos.

Update II: New feature on the HitTail tab. Now you can switch between all tails and single search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). It allows you to view the different success of the keyword phrases on these single search engines. That's a great new feature (thanks Mike)!

Let's check how HitTail brings your workload to the red zone ...

HitTail - The workflow

Start at "Search Hits". That's the first step in the workflow. In real time the referrers start to flow past your bleeding eyes. Click on the red X for every referrer you have looked at and it starts to hide away. I have no idea if the same referrer will ever be able to show up again and I am too lazy to test it. Mike? Click on the referrer and a new window pops up and shows the reproduction of that referring page.

The second step is "Keywords". That tab shows the keyword phrase. The most important action here is to decide which phrase might be a good idea to include it in your articles (SEO b...t) or more important (for me) if it is the key phrase for a whole well thought and written article. Just klick on the line and the phrase is moved to "suggestions" and marked as seen. Delete the rest of the phrases by clicking on the red X.

"Suggestions" is senseless. I think it is there only for the optical impact. The only thing you have to do here is to move (again) the phrases to the To-Do list and delete (again) the rest. In a presentation this would be the "Excuse me, ya'know bathroom ..." part where you get up and go check for food and beverages in the lobby or try to talk some hostess into dating you later.

Update: As Mike is pointing out below they are working on some Voodoo Guru formulas to bring up suggestions automatically. Let's wait and see. In my case I have seen one suggestion "tattoo conventie". I am really not sure if I did not suggest that phrase by accident manually but it is pretty funny as I have no tattoo oriented site at all but yes around the corner there is a tattoo convention held once a year. I might write about that :-)

"To Do" is absolutely the most annoying part. This tab will always remind you in a very personal manner that you have marked some SE phrases because you urgently needed to write some great Pulitzer Prize style article about that subject which is now staring at you like a crying baby "feed me, hold me ... put away that drink and don't smoke ... or I die". That list is definitely the end of the funny part of HotTails.

Did I mention before how much I love the "suggestions"- that place is like the friendly bar in the hotel lobby. I even love to stare at my "Hit Tail" now but the To-Do list is burning hell to me!

Thanks Mark Levine! The SEO-devil stealing my Freizeit (spare time).

HitTail compared with 103bees

HitTail has:

No landing pages
No multiple projects
No single keywords

HitTail is the hammer-like tool for the hard hearted and disciplined people who urgently want to get their work done. Thirsty for work might be the right manner to approach HitTail. This tool literally throws work at you like that mafia meat ball yelling "I never want to see that guy again! Do something! Now!".

103bees is more like a friendly dust brush (does that exist?). That service blows some positive SE analysis at you like a fresh breeze but never ever reminds you about the impact of these phrases on your workload.

Be warned! My metaphors might be hard to take and more cruel then Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer but unlike Mickey Spillane HitTail is alive and lurking right around the corner waiting for victims.

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, HitTail, review, tool, analysis, To-Do, lists

Markus Merz's blog

@Mike: Before I forget it

Submitted by Markus Merz on July 26, 2006 - 4:48pm.

@Mike: Before I forget it ... HitTail does not show German special characters.

I have no idea what is so difficult about coding them into a web 2.n application but this disease is spreading. Some parts of PMetrics also has problems in some parts, tssst.

Following up

Submitted by miklevin on July 26, 2006 - 5:04pm.

I LOVE your review. Thanks. Your comparison between us and the competition is very fair. We don't want to throw another analytics package into the fray. Instead, we want to tell people exactly what to do, gently but firm. As you pointed out, sort of like a protection racket! Hmmmmm. Thanks for the colorful analogies!

I'll put the special German character item at the top of our list. There's a lot of baton passing of data, and each needs to encode and decode properly. As long as WE get the German characters, we should be able to preserve and display them correctly. We're on it! Thanks for the review.

Oh, I also wanted to point out that we actually are algorithmically figuring out which terms are right on the edge of performing for you, and putting those in the suggestion tab. It's more than looks. In fact, pretty much anyone can pull a long tail keyword list. Our unique offering is in eliminating the vast majority of stuff that you don't need to optimize for, because you're already doing well on the terms, and zeroing right in on the lowest hanging fruit.

So, while you CAN move terms from the keywords tab to suggestions, there's not much point in strengthening a term where you're already on the first page of results. Your time is much more efficiently spent pulling things onto those first few pages of results that were previously teetering on the edge (the suggestions tab).

Ok, so lets have some other

Submitted by Administrator on July 26, 2006 - 5:28pm.

Ok, so lets have some other performancing members give their take....

good post markus

HowTo:

Submitted by Brian Clark on July 26, 2006 - 6:46pm.

I know it's a geek convention made popular by BoingBoingers and Slashdotters, but you really might try using regular old "How to.." to start your headline.

In my opinion, Performancing runs the risk of losing the people that need help the most, and they are *not* geeks. Blogging makes publishing easy for regular people who have no technology background, and yet often you see "how to blog" content that is incomprehensible to regular people.

That's why Nick's SEO post today was so refreshing, and the most important aspect of copywriting is knowing your target audience. From what I've found with my own blog, the people that read a blog like Performancing are often non-techies (not always of course, but probably more than you think).

Now, this is a rather advanced post, so maybe it doesn't matter in this case. But it's something to keep in mind for the future.

Just my two cents. :)

I edited the title in the

Submitted by Administrator on July 26, 2006 - 6:55pm.

I edited the title in the first place, guilty as charged -- but i like the format, and it's generally how we do things here so hopefully people can manage to work out that it's actually How To mashed together :)

You're the boss!

Submitted by Brian Clark on July 26, 2006 - 7:02pm.

Of course they can work it out if so motivated (and regular readers may even find it comforting), but to a new reader it messes with the normal eye flow, which can impact absorption of the rest of the title content.

But I defer to your judgment as always. :)