Could longtail keywords really produce up to 80% more organic traffic long-term?

[whitbycottages]

I was listening to a podcast on site visibility's website and they were discussing www.hittail.com which is a piece of software which analyzes lists your
visitor stream in real-time and provides actionable list of precisely which
keywords the website should be targeting to dramatically grow your organic
search traffic using long tail key words.

The say they can come up with a list of long tail keywords which the
website could easily rank for hopefully straightaway in the top five positions
on Google and other search engines by creating a blog post are some relevant
content. Or you could use the information to form some anchor text links etc

They say it's possible to produce up to 80% more traffic organically
once you are aware of which keywords are being overlooked by the website and
then produce the relevant content.

The theory is that most people focus on the high traffic short tail
keywords and overlook the long tail keywords and I got to admit I actually fall
into that category unfortunately.

Anybody uses particular website? And what is your experience of targeting the
longtail keywords have they produce good results ?

[KevinBudzynski]

Hi Alan. We don't use that particular website but close to 80% of our traffic is coming from long-tail keywords. Furthermore, the conversion for the long-tails is significantly higher than of the competitive keywords. I believe this to be true for most people out there.

[CleverPhD]

I would second what Kevin B. stated. Do not ignore the long tail.    That said, we had to put in a lot of work with the production of content to reflect the long tail keywords. You don't want to produce a bunch of spammy junk, but real content pages.

Identifying the keywords is fairly straight forward.  You should be able to look in your Google Analytics reports to get you started.

FYI - the long tail is not just an SEO term/concept.  Chris Anderson over at Wired wrote and article and a book on it.  Interesting read if you want a broader perspective.

http://www.longtail.com/about.html

[whitbycottages]

Hello Kevin

I should have invested in longtail keywords I did know there are useful but I didn't think that useful for traffic.

Yes I can see your point longtail keywords are more specific and so far more likely to get the conversion

I'll have to start writing some blog posts quickly thanks for the information.

[whitbycottages]

I think I've fallen into the trap of staring at the powerhouse short tail keywords and chasing the top positions on Google and forgetting about the long tail friends, time to read and rethink I think. Thank you for the link and the suggestion of the book I'll certainly take a look.

[Plorex]

I agree with Kevin here, as web users get more search savvy, long-tail keywords conversions are dramatically higher than of the shorter competitive keywords, and I experience that every day,

However, I don't see what value Hittail.com provides you more then good ole Google Webmaster Tools. Just as hittail, WT tracks your visitors and provides you with a huge list of long tail search queries that brought users to your site and I'd say its safe to say that 80% of it is from all sorts of long tail keyword combinations.