The success of an SEO strategy for a company or a website is evaluated using 3 key performance indicators(KPI) namely Ranking, Traffic, and Conversion. These factors are not only used to evaluate the performance of your SEO strategy, but it can also give you a brief idea of the areas of SEO that needs planning and improvement. Additionally, you can check the effectiveness by using SEO tools which can measure the Domain Authority, Page Authority, Quality of Traffic, Organic searches etc.

1. Ranking: Ranking or to be more specific, keyword ranking is one of the most common KPI used to define where your page stands on search engines for specific keywords. Various studies suggest that the first result on a search engine receives a traffic share of around 33% whereas the second position gets only 15% of the traffic share. Any result on the first page receives a minimum of 75% of the clicks. This being said, now the question is how to check the ranking of your page for the keyword. The simplest way would be by entering the search term on google and checking where your page stands, but this is too tedious since you don’t want your page to rank for just one keyword. In this case, you can use Google Search console to perform SEO related tasks to see where your page stands for various keywords. There are plenty of options within the tool to check various SEO related things such as phrase match, competitor analysis, content gap analysis, etc. Alternatively, you can also use Google analytics which serves a similar purpose.
2. Traffic: Traffic is defined as the flow of data across the internet. In the world of SEO, traffic is categorized into 3 major units - Direct Traffic, Paid Traffic, and Organic Traffic. Direct traffic is the traffic generated when someone enters the website URL directly into the address bar. Paid traffic is generated when someone clicks on a PPC(Pay-Per-Click) ads or any other advertisement on either search engines or any other partner website. Organic traffic is a result of someone entering a keyword on a search engine and clicking on your page. SEO mainly aims to increase Organic traffic. SEO companies mostly check traffic using tools like Similarweb or AHREFS or any other tool available on the internet. The quality of traffic is measured using these parameters - Pages per visit, Average visit duration, and bounce rate. So it is important to generate the right kind of traffic to your website.
3. Conversions: Conversion is defined on the basis of the action taken by a visitor on your website to perform a particular task which may range from clicking on a link to purchasing a product. Conversion is directly related to the amount of time you spend on a particular website. Conversions can be indicated if a visitor subscribes for a newsletter, shares an article on social media or downloads some resource from the website. The type of conversion indicates the quality of your website. The more the number of conversions, the better quality of traffic your website gets. It is also important to note that not all visitors on your website have the intent of purchasing an item or subscribing to a newsletter or signing up to create an account.

It turns out to be really helpful if you maintain a dashboard of all the metrics related to your webpage. This will not only help you track the progress and improvements on your website, but also help you devise a plan for the upcoming months and come up with an SEO strategy.