Hit Tail is a service for recommending you key phrases to focus on for potential topics based on what people are searching for to find your site.

Whilst I no longer use Hit Tail I was so impressed by several aspects of it I wanted to write a quick post about it.

I first found out about Hit Tail from the Techzing Live podcast, Rob Walling was being interviewed about his acquisition of the company – Actually it is a really interesting listen and I would highly recommend you check it out (the previous link takes you straight to that episode).

Essentially Hit Tail takes a note of what key words and phrases people were using when visiting your site from search engines, then I believe it takes those phrases and runs a check to see how well you would rank if you had content focused on those phrases.

I can imagine that is pretty powerful stuff for people who sell something on-line and want to focus on the long tail to get regular search traffic.  I don’t really sell on-line (My football betting site excluded) but the reason I wanted in on it was because I was always struggling for content to write on the various sites I look after – I figured why not let my traffic tell me what to write.

So I signed up for a months free trail and hooked it up to a couple of sites – almost immediately I started getting back statistics and results, which is excellent. Normally you are always looking at information that was processed 24 hours ago.

The method they use is to get you to include some JavaScript, I can’t say that I noticed any speed difference in the site whilst it was running so I didn’t mind too much.

One of the things I noticed early on was a bug were some of the tables didn’t update properly when I was using Firefox on the mac, I submitted a bug report and had an email back from Rob within hours as a recall asking for more information and basically getting back to me in a really personal way – I think it was the most positive I have felt about submitting a bug report ever, which is mental (but excellent).

During my usage of the system I found some other issues, each was either resolved quickly or I was given updates on when they would be resolved, I should mention at this time it was still having a lot of work done to it, so I didn’t take the bugs as a sign of any weakness – the main algorithm seemed to be working fine and producing actionable results.

One of the articles I wrote off the back of the results was CakePHP 2.0 Read Recursive which currently appears 5th in Google for the search phrase and I know that at least some people will find it because that is what someone searched for before to find my site.

So I was happy with the service, happy with the support, had proven results from it but I still left? Honestly it was simply part of a money saving exercise, as I already stated I don’t really have any sites that I actively try and make money off, so getting good long tail results isn’t a massive concern of mine and I figured that $9.95 a month (whilst cheap) was too much if I was just using it for occasional ideas for blog posts.

Would I go back? Yes – I intend to as soon as I launch a project I am working on that should make me money on-line.

Should you check it out? Yes.