I've talked about the importance of site testing in the past.  I've talked about the value of analytics in the past.  And I've talked about the importance of using analytics data to drive the testing and changes you make at your site.  But I haven't shared a success story dealing with analytics data in a while.

That's why an article over at Search Engine Watch today caught my eye:  "Weather.com's SEO Efforts Rest Heavily on Analytics".

The story, by Kevin Newcomb, examines several changes made at Weather.com in the past two years and the influence that analytics data had on those decisions.  Weather.com, the online extension of The Weather Channel, is a leader of weather information for consumers as well as other services that pull data from the site.

Using analytics data from Coremetrics, the marketing team at Weather.com started on a site-wide SEO campaign that included the following key elements:

• Site-wide keyword optimization
• Natural-search optimization, including seasonal keywords that were driving traffic to the site
• Lifestyle sections of the site were individually optimized to rank well in natural results for non-weather related searches
• Using analytics data, the marketing department optimized several sections for more targeted traffic, and although overall traffic decreased, page views increased because of the more specific traffic being delivered to the site
• Although the site performed well with Yahoo paid search as well, the marketing team optimized for Google to capitalize on the search company's higher traffic numbers
• The company hired a full-time manager to handle search management and created a team comprised of that manager, the marketing manager, and a technical manager to handle the website's SEO efforts
• The marketing director of the site told Search Engine Watch that analytics data drove 95% of the decisions he makes

Weather.com is not only using analytics data to optimize their site,  but also to gauge the success (or lack thereof) of various changes and initiatives the company launches.  The article is a great read and I highly recommend reading over the entire thing.

Which analytics package do you use and how does it influence your site design and SEO decisions?