By Rebecca Wicks
SOHO News

Don’t you love it when you find a twenty in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn for awhile? Well, you may have one in there, and just haven’t looked. I am, now talking about a marketing “find” – specifically the information you need to get your Website found and to improve your products and services.

Practically all Websites are armed with a statistics package of some kind that collects information about viewers to your site. What people don’t know is that simply by virtue of the traffic to your site you are equipped to build a marketing plan to attract more customers and even to improve your products or services to better suit them.

Let’s use search terms as an example. Today, the average length of a search term is four words long. No longer do people simply type in “cell phone.” They probably type something more in tune with “California picture cell phone” or “cell phone with PDA.” Understanding how your customers are finding you and what they are looking for can result in a number of advantages. Once you determine these patterns you are essentially unveiling your customers mindset and can tweak your marketing materials, organic and paid Web search marketing program and even your offering itself to be more attractive.

And, this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can conclude when they prefer to come to your site – for example, the beginning of spring and fall – and implement timely marketing promotions. Or, you can identify how they travel through your site harvesting the information needed to make your site more user-friendly.

The beauty is of course, you most likely already have free access to this information – with no need to purchase data or additional research. You can look to specialists to help you analyze the data and give you recommendations on areas of your business such as optimizing your Website, or you can delve into the statistics and figures yourself. The point is, it’s an accessible, available and free way to understand your customers, drive more of them to your site, figure out what’s working and ultimately, to sell to them.