Measuring the success of any campaign can help make further improvements. As they say, if you can measure it, then you can improve it. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization SEO, measuring the success of the campaign is vital. 

Although every business differs in their needs, the ways to measure SEO success  is nearly universal. There are three key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of your ongoing SEO campaign. They are:

• Keyword ranking
• Amount of traffic
• Conversion rate

Information collected from these three key indicators enable a company to
accurately measure the success of the campaign. It will also provide accurate data that will
make it easier to improve campaign success over time. 

Keyword Ranking
This is one of the most obvious and common methods to check the success of SEO campaign. According to a research by Chitika, up to 92% of traffic is received by websites listed on the first page of a search engine. Therefore, tracking keyword rankings over time helps in creating a SEO strategy around the most searched keywords. Also, doing so will make it easy to attract targeted customers towards your business website.

For instance, you may be concentrating on the best 15 keywords people generally look for with. While 10 of them may appear on the first page, the remaining 5 could rank on the second or third page. Therefore, in order to get those 5 keywords on the first page, you need to invest some more time and optimization efforts.

However, after doing an analysis, you may find that these 5 keywords are highly competitive and won’t help your business attract more customers. Therefore, instead of focusing on these 5 keywords, you choose to put focus on the 10 keywords to get them on the top 3 position of SERPs. 

Without keyword data, it would be difficult to make informed strategic decisions. However, while keeping track of the keywords is important, it is not enough. You need to understand how the keywords can help increase quality traffic to your website. 

Quality of SEO Traffic
You must have heard people say that quality is subjective and you cannot really measure it. There are plenty of ways to measure the quality of SEO traffic your website is
receiving. Some of the metrics that can be used to measure traffic quality are:

1) Bounce rate
2) Pages per visit
3) Duration of visit

If you witness a high bounce rate, low average time that a visitor spends on the site and less number of pages viewed per visit, there may be some problem with the website or the type of traffic you are targeting.  Therefore, you need to focus on the set of keywords you are using and the kind of traffic your website is attracting. If the incoming traffic is not improving conversion, there are high chances that you are using the wrong keywords.

Volume of Traffic
A successful way to measure the amount of traffic is based on the number of visitors that come from organic traffic. The volume of traffic depends on the size of your targeted online users. For instance, if you are an e-commerce company shipping products all over the world, you should experience more organic search traffic as compared to a company which ships goods within their own city only. 

Conversion Rate
What defines conversions? Well, conversion is often defined based on your specific business goals. For instance, if you want to increase leads, the conversion tracking strategy will include contact request, appointment request, free quote request or a phone call.

Conclusion
It is a fact that not all online visitors come to your website want to buy your services. However, not measuring their actions is a mistake. Visitors not converting into customers can often fall into different categories. For example,  newsletter subscriber, whitepaper download and social shares. Such actions also indicate their interest in your services. These indirect conversions also serve as a measure to calculate traffic quality. 

Search Engine Marketing is performed to help your business website rank on the first page of search engines. Measuring the success of your SEO campaign helps you improve your efforts, strategies and keep track of the success of your online business.