If you were running a bricks-and-mortar store, as its manager, you would be keeping a close eye on all its customers. This means that you would check who comes in, where they go, what they look at first and what they go on to buy.

Should they exit the store without buying you would be keeping a close tab on their behavior and perhaps, if the pattern persists, strike up a conversation or two trying to see what it is exactly that customers want which you may not have or you may not present to them in the right way.

SEO for your website is not much different. You need to really understand what is happening on the site you optimize and understand this as part of your daily SEO routine. I know it’s self-evident but the very fact that I am being forced to mention it here indicates that not everybody realizes this and I have seen many webmasters use the analytics on their website simply to gauge visitor numbers.

So, the moment you start your day and hit that analytics account you should be looking at who, where and why rather than simply how many people visited your website. Check out to see which were your most popular pages and how long they stayed and, most importantly, what did they do next. Once you start to combine this daily inflow of website intel with pure visitor numbers and the keywords which brought them there you will begin to form a clear picture of what it is that attracts visitors to your website (your online shop in other words).

This will also allow you to start fine-tuning your content creation strategy and any changes you plan to make on your website.

David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as  Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to work on one of your SEO projects drop us a line with your request.