Here are some of the best features of Google Analytics which you could utilize to optimize your website.

1) Setting Goals – If you don’t set goals, Google Analytics is not going to take you very far. If you have an e-commerce site your goal would probably be a sale or if your business is newsletters your goal would be a registration. After your business goals are setup in Analytics, you can analyze a large amount of data about what’s working and what’s not in your marketing efforts.

2) Historical Data Comparison – In old Analytics there was no facility to compare how your site is doing relative to a different point in time. However, now we have new capabilities that allow you to compare two different time periods and chart them immediately. This feature helps tremendously in analyzing the performance of your website.

3) Geographic Data - You can also see how your website is performing for a variety of metrics like traffic, revenue etc. in different countries / cities etc. So you know where exactly is your traffic coming from.

4)Funnel Visualization - This is an awesome feature which helps you to figure out what exactly is scaring your users away as it gives you a proper analysis of the path taken by your users and where exactly your users drop and leave the process.

So go ahead and make the best use of the above features of Google Analytics for improving the search engine rankings of your website!