I recently had the opportunity to conduct a phone interview of Avinash Kaushik. Avinash provides his usual clear focus on using web analytics as a tool to grow your business.
From an SEO perspective, getting clear data about what’s happening on your site can be a very powerful way to focus your efforts. For example, I worked on one site that knew that they were getting half of their business from one set of pages, and drew the conclusion that they should continue to focus on the search terms that were driving the most traffic to those pages.
Using Web Analytics, I was able to show them that the most common search terms for those pages were not the terms that were driving the business. The had, in fact, been trying to improve their results on search terms that were not growing their business.
Avinash is extremely knowledgeable about using web analytics as a tool, and offers a bunch of great tips to use those tools more effectily. He also has a great blog on the topic of analytics.