Benchmarking Current Traffic Sources and Volume
The most fundamental objective of any SEO project should be to drive the bottom line. For a business this means delivering more revenue with favorable ROI. As a predecessor to determining the level of ROI impact, the SEO practitioner must focus on increasing the volume of relevant traffic to the site. This is a more important objective than anything related to rankings or number of links obtained. More relevant traffic should mean more revenue for the business (or more conversions for those whose websites are not specifically selling something).
Today’s web analytics tools make the gathering of such data incredibly easy. Two high-quality solutions are available that are completely free: Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) and Yahoo! Web Analytics (http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/). Figure 4-14 shows a sample of basic “unique visitors” data from Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Figure 4-14. “Unique visitors” report from Yahoo! Web Analytics
Digging a little deeper, you can see the sources of the traffic as well, as you can see in Figure 4-15, which shows a Google Analytics report.
As an SEO practitioner, it will be natural to want to delve into more detail—specifically, to break down the search engine traffic and understand that better as well. Once again, this is easy to do in both tools (and in most of the commercially available tools ...