I enjoy exploring various blogging and SEO tools to see if they can help boost my traffic beyond analyzing Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.  Some of the better tools on the market are extremely complicated and geared to those who are more into Technical SEO and really are too cumbersome for the basic blogger to understand.

When I say basic blogger I mean those who cringe at the idea of learning Google Analytics or
Google Search Console. Often these kinds of bloggers asks me about tools I recommend and I am at a loss because I love data dumps from tools like Screaming Frog, Xenu Link Sleuth, Ahrefs and a few others. Secondly even if some of the top SEO tools are invaluable to learn and use the cost is often something unaffordable for the basic blogger who is getting off the ground. Except for Xenu Link Sleuth that has been around forever which is free  and any good Blogger or SEO uses most the other high quality tools the experts use start at $70 a month, some even ranging up to $1400 a month. The biggest issue for me with most of these tools they limit how many website you can use it on.

Recently trying to find a SEO keyword tool that is affordable I came across HitTail and tried it out for a month. This tool in my opinion is geared for the basic blogger to use, especially for those who run many sites and are looking for a easy to use keyword suggestion tool, especially if they are looking to find long tail keyword/key phrases that will help them rank better.

HitTail can by used on unlimited amount of sites which is excellent. Their monthly subscription fee is affordable for just about anyone, their starter plan only costing $9.95 and their most popular plan costing only $19.95. This is pretty inexpensive and HitTail is much easier to use then other products on the market to research long tail keywords like SEMrush and Adword Keyword Planner. Comparing it to other products it is especially affordable for someone like myself who maintains many blogs / online publications.

Signing up with HitTail and setup was super easy, they didn’t ask for much personal data and only requirement was to connect to my Google Search Console. It  wasn’t complicated at all since I already had Google Search Console setup. Once I followed the easy instructions and connected HitTail to my Google Search Console account it shot out long tail keywords to use in upcoming blog posts that will get better search results and kept on updating the results once a week. It eliminated the painful time consuming analyzing process of
Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Search Analytics section and Adword Keyword Tool to come up with long tail keyword phrases.

For those who do a lot of research in Adword Keywords Tools will know how slow it is and sometimes times out, with HitTail I didn’t find it timing out or being slow. The one thing that HitTail didn’t give is the search volume per a keyword, however they do have a star rating system that shows which keywords to focus on.

I did notice HitTail worked really well with sites that already had a medium to strong history of organic search traffic. For those site that have very little to no organic search it was pretty much useless, this isn’t HitTail’s fault, in these cases I just had to address why there was no organic search and then HitTail started working.

I also decided to test HitTails support to see how responsive they were, to my surprise they contacted me in a timely matter and answered my questions in detail.

For those who love technical data and can’t afford to waste money and can afford only one tool I think HitTail would disappoint you and it be the best you look at a monthly subscription to Ahref. Currently I feel Ahref is one of the best Technical SEO tools on the market. However be warned if you go for Ahref you do you need some Technical SEO knowledge to use it. However for those basic bloggers who are scared of Google Analytics and Google Search Console because it is overwhelming HitTail is ideal. It simply spits out what keywords you should be writing your blog posts around to gain more traffic.

Screenshots of HitTail Long Tail Keyword Tool