What is LongTail?
No it’s not an animal with the longest tail ;) You probably have heard about the importance of LontTail traffic and the graph that follows it all the time. Today I will be talking about LongTail too in this short post, and I too will show you a graph. Hopefully you will find it a lot easier to grasp.

Basically LongTail traffic is, non targeted (i.e not advertised) traffic that your blog or site gets from search engine. Sometimes if you do not track properly, you won’t even notice them. In many cases, combination of these LongTail traffic can make up the majority of the total traffic your site gets.

Paid VS LongTail Traffic
Look at the graph below. Let’s say you are chasing these keywords “Make Money Online“, “Make Money Blog” and “Publisher Programs” - the keywords that are highlighted in red.

As an informed marketer you will integrate these keywords in your website’s meta tags and content. You also go and get some links from high ranking sites with those keywords as the anchor text. And lastly you advertise your site with these keywords in search engines, using services like google adwords.

You spend hundreds of dollars in advertising, sometimes your campaigns are success and other times they are just a waste of money.

longtail.png

Let’s say, you have targeted those keywords and spend few hundred dollars. And let’s say you got 241 clicks. On the other, during this time your site got 2850 clicks from non-targeted keywords from search engines. If you want to save some money on your advertising, you should look into the details of that 2850 clicks. Where did they come from, what keywords were used to find your site, on which page of Google it appeared, etc.

By looking at the stats, you will notice that some LongTail keywords appear on first or second page of SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Working on those keywords little bit, and optimizing those pages, can easily land you on the Top 5 spot in SERP, if not no.1. That means you get even more free traffic. All you need to do is, spend some time analyzing your stats and optimizing some pages.

When analyzing your stats, you might also have some new ideas. For example in the graph above you see that Wii2 got 11 clicks, also it appears on the second page of the search engine. This means you can optimize the page to make it appear on the first page, and if possible on first spot. You could also write a new page/article that talks about in detail about Wii2. You could also put some affiliate products on that page and make some money selling Wii2. (Possibilities are endless).

The difficulty
Usually the difficulty comes when you want to analyze your statistics. Either you are too lazy to go through your stats, or the tools on the market are not that usable for LongTail analysis.

The Solution?
Today I have found one such tool that specifically addresses this issue. It offers you to track the LongTail traffic on your site, and gives you some recommendations. It is not a full fledged statistics tool like Google Analytics or extremetracking.com. It just deals with referral urls and keywords, it’s a LontTail stats tool. It’s called HitTail.

Thanks to adesblog.com 

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