Did you know that 50% of mobile searches are conducted to find local results and that 61% of those searches result in a purchase? This statistic comes from Quicksprout.
Or that content marketing generates 300% more leads than traditional outbound marketing, yet costs 62% less? That's a statistic from Demand Metric.
My point is that there's no way around content marketing and SEO if you're representing your business online, or running it purely online.
Luckily, there are many cheap and free services that help online business owners with SEO and driving organic traffic to their website.
As we'll see later in this post, Google Webmaster Tools is one of them. I see it as one of the most undervalued services by online business owners.
Another tool that simplifies SEO for online business owners is Hittail, and in this post I'd like to share my review for Hittail and an interview with Rob Walling, the guy behind Hittail.
First of all, I want to thank Rob for taking the time to do this interview! And for holding nothing back.
In the interview, we cover some interesting topics:
Here's the interview:
The interview is audio-only, which is unusual for my interviews. But nevertheless it's full of amazing advice that adhere to all online business owners, bloggers, and anyone interested in getting organic traffic.
Resources and links mentioned:
Yes, the market of tools that claim to have the magic SEO sauce is quite crowded. It's impossible to stay on top of it, especially if your most important task is to grow your business, and not to worry about SEO.
I feel you, I'm with you on this point:
SEO needs to be simple, and any tool for SEO should make finding the right keywords easy managing them seamless.
My reason to test Hittail was their unusual approach to SEO.
Instead of having you come up with keywords you can possibly rank for, they use data of keywords you already are ranking for.
The more I thought about this approach, the more I liked it. I'm not an SEO guy by any means (at least not at the level of Brian Dean or Neil Patel), but I understand the basic principles of SEO.
And I know that online business owners don't have time to worry about SEO metrics, finding the right keywords and all that stuff. I don't have that time on most days either.
Hittail isn't a software you install on your PC or Mac; it's a Software-as-a-Service. That means you can use it directly on their website after you created your account.
After I had signed up for Hittail, it connected to me Google Webmaster Tools account.
Establishing that connection required very few steps and Hittail describes this process extremely well.
After the connection was made, Hittail got to work right away:
The software started to load the keywords that my website already ranks for and displayed them in a nice graphic.
Now, that graphic already shows the structure of my organic traffic.
And I see that I've got a lot of work to do for my case study, as most keywords don't show a huge buying intention. If you're wondering what buying intention means, please keep reading. Rob and I talk about that in our interview.
Seeing that graphic got me curious and I couldn't wait to explore Hittail.
Hittails main benefit is the keyword suggestions:
Those are keywords that make sense for you to target in your keyword strategy, to rank your online business in Google.
Hittail generates these suggestions on the keywords you already rank for and almost rank for.
As you can see in the following graphic, Hittail suggests valid keywords for my online business, given that my focus is to help others grow their online business.
Since I'm repositioning my business slightly with the $10k/month case study and I feel ready to talk about more than just online business ideas, I'm curious to see the suggestions Hittail comes up with in the future!
I like how Hittail saves me the time of thinking about new keywords for my posts. It just shows me what topics could make sense to write about.
However, there's a caveat:
Hittail can't analyze the competition of those keyword suggestions.
Meaning, it might show keywords that you will have a very hard time to rank for.
Usually, it's enough to enter the suggested keyword in Google and to have a look at the sites already ranking.
If you see big sites like Wikipedia, big magazines, or the big players in your field you'll know that you probably shouldn't target that keyword.
Once you found a keyword you like, you can easily push it to your to-do list inside Hittail:
I LOVE this feature, as it makes it very easy to stay on top of your content marketing plan.
Sometimes, as an online business owner you probably don't have the bandwidth to write the article yourself.
Hittail offers to write those articles for you, for just $19.
I haven't tested their articles yet, but I like that they offer this complimentary service. It shows that they think outside the box to provide a good customer experience.
I like Hittails approach to SEO, and I'm confident that using Hittail will allow me to drive more organic traffic to my online business.
I feel that online business owners need a tool that saves them time doing keyword research, and Hittail does exactly that.
I'm using it for two weeks now, and it's already a part of my content marketing plan. I will, of course, keep you posted on the results the content focusing on Hittail's recommendations drives.
The interview also includes interesting takeaways:
After all, SEO is changing all the time, and we need to keep up with it.
Tools like Hittail can save us time and make keyword research much less time-consuming. They give us more time to work on our online businesses.
I'll continue using Hittail, and I'm sure some readers of this post should try it as well.
