Google Analytics is a great free tool for monitoring your web traffic.  Most every webmaster would probably agree that it's important to have some kind of statistical tracking on your website, but few that I know actually *use* the data for anything useful. 

So here are a couple ideas to get you thinking how Google Analytics can help you improve your site's search rankings:

The Keyword Research Problem

A big problem for many SEOs is getting accurate and reliable keyword search counts.  If you don't have accurate search counts, you may very well find yourself working hard to rank for keywords that no one is searching for!

Tools like Wordtracker are pretty good, but my experience with their data is that it is not the most accurate.  Just one of many examples:

Now am I really supposed to believe that more people are searching for 'bratz games to play' than 'games'? 

Google has also recently expanded it's AdWords keyword tool to include approximate search volumes. However, my initial look at it makes me believe that even that tool is not as accurate as something that comes directly from the search engine should be.

Using Google Analytics For Keyword Research

Google Analytics can be a great source for keyword research because it will show you actual search volumes that your site is getting for a keyword.  Of course, this is all relative to your ranking, but if you consider the actual number of visits from a keyword in relation to your ranking for that keyword, you can find many high traffic niche keywords that you may be able to quickly increase your traffic with.  The best part is that you can tell the quality of the traffic from a specific keyword before you put any effort into optimizing for it. 

Step 1: Go To The Keywords Report - Log into your Google Analytics account and go to the Keywords report (under the Traffic Sources heading in the main menu).  By default, you will be looking at all the keywords that searchers used to find your site over the last 30 days.  

Step 2: Find QUALITY Keywords - As you look at the list, pay attention to the Pages/Visit, Time on Site and Bounce Rate.  These stats are invaluable indicators of what a specific keyword is worth to you.  Different keywords bring in different kinds of visitors - you want the kind that find your site, become interested in the content and stick around a while.

Step 3: Check Rankings - Once you have a nice list of keywords that bring in quality traffic, you'll want to check your rankings for those keywords. 

Notice we haven't talked about the visits statistic at all yet.  That's because the actual number of visits received is not important - what really matters is the number of visits relative to your ranking. 

To illustrate my point, have a look at the results of a Cornell University study on how test subjects behaved across 397 different Google searches:

The #1 result gets a huge percentage of the overall clicks, while the 10th result gets just a fraction.  You can imagine how small of a percentage a listing on page two or three will get. 

That's why this technique is useful - pretty much any keyword that is bringing you measurable traffic with a ranking outside of the top 5 is probably worth optimizing for in some way.

Step 4: Optimize Your Pages - Now that you've got a keyword that looks like it may be worth targeting, start simple.  Make sure the exact keyword phrase is in the title, meta description and sprinkle it throughout the content.  Also don't be afraid to link out to good known resources on the topic, even using the keyword as the anchor text.   

There is no rocket science involved in what we're doing here, we're simply trying to make some fast and simple on-page tweaks to see if we can easily move up the ladder a bit.  Monitor your rankings for any keywords you do this with and just  see how things change. 

Every niche is a little different - you may find that it's much easier or more difficult than you thought to rank well for the keyword.  You never know, maybe there is more competition than you first thought, or perhaps your overall site is just not 'themed' for that keyword enough to compete with the top 10 results. 

The idea is to try this with many keywords quickly so you can find the gems and then focus more on optimizing for those.

By the way, can you guess how I came up with the topic for this post? ;-)