tedster - 6:04 am on Oct 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

Some comments about the specifics:

1) The joy of focusing on your visitors is that it is a direct, customer-facing action, rather than being a kind of indirect SEO, focusing on merely technical actions. And now that user metrics are also known as a set of search metrics, it also becomes important for SEO. Even if your rankings do tank at some point, you've still got something going with real people that can see your through.

1.a) One important thing about your analytics package is learning how to segment your visitors appropriately. How do search keywords and page views match up? Landing pages and conversions?

1.b) It seems clear that search engines are using some kinds of browser signals for a ranking metric - no matter how they are getting them. And so should we. In fact, we can get metrics from ALL of our visitors who have JavaScript active rather than just a subset.

1.c) Offline marketers know that acquiring new business requires investing much more investment in resources (about 10X) than holding on to those who have already found you. It's called "Retention Marketing" versus "Acquisition Marketing." There are so many ways to focus on existing visitors and customers that just doing a few of them well can bring about a big boost to your business. I also have think that repeat visitors and navigational queries are both important ranking signals.

[edited by: tedster at 8:36 am (utc) on Oct 4, 2012]