Analytics is truly a godsend for search engine optimization professionals. Unfortunately it is often not utilized to its utmost potential.  There is tons of great information that marketers can use by delving in deeper to their analytical data.

Obviously there are many great programs out there for gathering your website traffic information. If you prefer to go the free route, Google Analytics is probably the premiere choice. From ease of use  and implementation to the sheer amount of data it provides it is a must use for any internet marketer on a budget.

If you are looking for a more enterprise solution there are also some great tools on the market. Omniture, Web Trends and Piwik are amazing choices that are certainly worth checking out if they fit in your budget.

With all the data a SEO could possibly need right at his or her fingertips, it is a shame to think that most are only unlocking a miniscule amount of the true marketing potential of web traffic data. Knowing where your traffic comes from, how long it stays on a certain pages and what your top performing pages are you can see what works and what doesn’t. Here a few quick tweak you can make just from looking at your analytics:

Review Your Top Pages – Most likely your home page is going to your most trafficked page but what are the top 5 after it? Looking at these pages can give you insight into why these pages are performing as well as they are. Look at their titles, descriptions and where people are finding that page.

You can then try to implement some of those strategies by copying them to your more poorly performing pages to try to get more traffic flowing to them. Also, you can base new articles or sections of your site off of the topics that you notice are performing the best. This is a great way to get article ideas for your blog or website.

Check the Bounce Rates – take a look at the bounce rates for your specific pages. Are some of the pages not as ‘sticky’ as others? Visit these pages and try to see what would cause a new visitor to instantly leave your site. Remember, repeat traffic is the key to any successful website and a high bounce rate is not conducive to repeat traffic.

Look at Regional Data – See where your traffic is primarily coming from. Even if you are mainly targeting English countries, be aware that some English dialects differ greatly from one region to the next. Queen’s English is vastly different than some regional versions of American English.

Regional data is a great metric to look at for A/B split testing as well. Test different pages using different versions of the language and see which best captures your target audience.

Look at Repeat Traffic – Absolute unique views are great in all but if you are trying to gain a large reader base repeat traffic is key. Most of the time low repeat traffic is due to low quality content. Why would a user come back if there is nothing of value on your site?  This could be the kick in the butt that you need to re-write some of your content to keep people coming back.

Imagine trying to build a skyscraper and having your progress knocked down every night only to have to start from scratch every morning. This is basically what you are trying to do if you are not getting repeat traffic. Using the unique views to build upon your existing traffic through quality content is key if you want to get the skyscraper of traffic that you envision for your website.

There are some more in-depth ways to use analytics to adjust your site to get more readers but these tips above are actionable moves that can help any website owner improve on their traffic. Next time you open your analytics look a little deeper and start to see what the numbers are really telling you about your site.

Corey Rab is the co-founder of Orlando internet marketing company SEOhatch. Along with SEO Corey and his firm also handle PPC and social media managemen