Once you've implemented an SEO campaign for your small business, it can be a little tough to understand and measure what’s doing you good, what’s not, and the general success of it. Google certainly has a complex and ever-changing algorithm that sorts and ranks content that can be hard to grasp and anticipate.

Back in the day, Google relied heavily on text, on page content, and the number of links pointing to a website to establish the ranking for those particular keywords. Google’s penguin update back in 2012 completely changed the way that search professionals thought about website links. These days the search engine giant has continued to advance and adjust the ways it understands the content on a page to evaluate and rank.

Previously, it was the website with the most amount of links pointing back to it that ranked the highest for search engines. Whereas today, these websites with a large number of low-quality links aren't as valued as those who have backlinks coming from high-quality trusted websites. As Google has grown and evolved it has chosen to value and rank higher those who have quality links and content, as opposed to the quantity of links and content.

With all of these new changes and adjustments Google has made, their priority has remained consistent with their ambition to deliver the best possible online experience for the user. By measuring their algorithm to rank and show the best possible content to users, Google is continuing to sharpen the quality of content being accessed by users.

The ways in that SEO professionals measure success has not really changed all that much, despite the many adjustments Google has made do the algorithms. According to one popular SEO reseller company, the success of an SEO marketing campaign, and the key metrics they use to track their developments: 

• Organic website visitors
• Overall website traffic vs organic sessions
• Traffic bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Time spent on page
• Distribution of traffic amongst landing pages
• Return user rates

The metrics that are being used by search engine optimisation professionals aren’t really that different from those that were used to measure the success of a campaign in the pre-Penguin era. Despite how they are achieving this success and that the methods or ways they've used being dramatically different, the key metrics to measure the results aren't that distant.

When tracking an SEO campaign there is a large number of variables to be taken into consideration for both progress and growth. For any marketing professional, understanding the complexities of each campaign and what you might be able to adjust in order to get their best results, is one of the most difficult aspects of executing the campaign.

Given that Google is constantly changing the way they rank and show the content to users the most successful and practical SEO professionals are those that can anticipate these trends to Google algorithms before they even arrived. An SEO professional should always be ready for adjustments and know how to approach new trends with a game plan at hand.