Analytics

You're only as good as what you can measure, especially if you're a search marketing agency trying to prove ROI to your client. There are a number of high end Analytics solutions in the marketplace including Omniture. On the SEO side, it's important to be able to know exactly where you stand today, how your users behave on your website, and what changes to make next. Unlike SEM, SEO requires a significant investment of time and money, and it can take several months to see an impact. That said, hope is not a strategy, and you need to adapt in order to drive incremental traffic to your site. The best free offering is Google Analytics. Google gives this information away with the hope that you will spend money on AdWords to drive traffic to your site. Paid search works, and the more you can measure, the better off both of you will be. Implementing analytics software is not a simple process, and it has created a big market for analytics consulting. It is important to do this job right, because if your analytics is wrong, you're making decisions off of bad data. A good place to start learning is the Google Analytics Blog.