Statistics and data are incredibly powerful tools in any environment. As anyone giving a speech is taught, the inclusion of data and facts is a sure fire way to win over an audience and get them to believe your point of view, and as any computer game fanatic will tell you (or anyone who plays golf) they are incredibly addictive and fascinating to watch and improve. Nowhere is data more important however than in business and specifically online where businesses work based on numbers and statistics gathered from market research, advertising campaigns and other sources in order to learn the habits, likes and behaviours of their audience/customers.

            This makes Google Analytics an incredibly powerful tool for anyone with a website, and one that will help the owners to greatly improve their internet marketing campaigns, their products and their understanding of how they are viewed by the general public. Google Analytics is a great web service offered for free by Google that can help you to discover many important statistics about your own websites in terms of the nature, source and amount of traffic you're generating. This can then be used to greatly improve your site and to try and increase those numbers. This is achieved in many ways, by looking at which pages are popular, who your key demographic are, how long visitors stay on your pages and more. Where it really comes into it's own though is in advising the direction for your keyword campaigns and SEO.

            Keywords for those who are not in the know are the terms that people search into Google or other search engines in order to find a website. Those who understand SEO and web marketing then try to make their site more likely to list highly for that search term in order to bring future visitors to your site. The great thing about Google Analytics then is that it tells you both which pages are successful, and also how the visitors got to your website - including which keywords or search terms they put into their search engine in order to do so.

            This of course then means that you can see which key words have been successful in the past. If you created a page to rank for 'best-oranges' and you see that this is successful then you might choose to make a page called 'best-apples'. On the other hand, if you have tried to rank for 'very-greatest-oranges' and found this to be less successful then you should avoid using similar terms in future. Already you've used Google Analytics to identify successful keywords and to emulate that success.

            Another way this can help you though is by showing you the keywords people are using to find your  site that you didn't intend to rank for. For example you might find that people are searching 'juiciest oranges' and that this is sending them to your site. Here you have a 'head start' as it were and by targeting that key word on purpose you can drive a lot more traffic to your site besides. There are many more ways to use Google Analytics to choose keywords and to direct a lot more of your marketing and content creation.