Craven_de_Kere - 7:50 pm on Sep 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

Analytics only tells you what you are already getting traffic for, not what progress you have made. I agree that it's more important than rank checking (I spend over 100 times the amount of time and effort on traffic analysis than rank checking) but they are also not the same thing.

For example, let's say that you already know from analytics that "widgets in location" is a great keyword. So you want to build additional sites to capture slight variations of the traffic, you can use rank checking to see how your efforts progress before you'll see the results in traffic analysis.