I thought i might write a few words on why i bother to use tracking software and why i feel its so very important for developing your website, especially if the site is a business.
There is no doubt, fresh, custom written content is the best way to lure new visitors into your site, but how do they arrive at your site from the search engines? Well, keywords ofc, people type their keywords into a search engine and hopefully will find your site among the listings, they will then show up on your site and the keywords they used to find you will be logging in your tracewatch. So how is this helpful?
Well lets imagine your running a flower delivery business, and your site is optimized for the keywords "Freshly delivered flowers", lets say as an example, you are #1 in google for this term and you are getting some 50 unique visitors per day. One day, you noticed on your tracking stats that you are getting 5 users a day from the keywords "red rose deliveries", this is not a term you have purposely optimized for, however, because you have a well written unique site you have picked up a little extra traffic on this keyword via google. So, what next, well you visit google and enter the kewords red rose deliveries and find you are ranking #10 for that term. If you are getting 5 uniques per day from 10th spot, then imagine what you could get from #1 spot. Definatly worth exploring.
Take some time to optimize for the new term, add it to your page title, and then go for some link exchanges with this new term as the anchor text, also consider writing some articles on roses and submit these to some article sites. After a few months of link exchanges, you find you are now ranking #1 for the new term and pulling 100 uniques per day!
Congratulations, you just discovered why monitoring your sites traffic is important! You CAN and almost certainly will find traffic from keywords you would have never considered.
How can i be so sure of this? Well, this senario happened to me on one of my main business sites, i responded by added some more content and products aimed at the keywords i was seeing traffic on. The result of this action saw an additional £9,000 of turnover for the company in the last quarter of 2007. Needless to say, i try and keep an eye on stats for me sites and where possible, i adapt and make some small changes here and there to try to develop the traffic further!
