Many strategies help to ensure business growth.  SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and many more. Each of these strategies requires a budget amongst other resources to produce results. A business needs to devote time, personnel, skills, and many others during a campaign and certain metrics will be used to measure the campaign success. These metrics are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and KPIs help companies to save time and money.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most efficient digital strategies that a company can implement to attract organic traffic and increase visibility. As a business owner, here are five ways that you can track or monitor your SEO progress.

1. Organic Traffic: The first way to know if your SEO strategy has been effective so far is to check the number of organic traffic that your website is getting. By organic traffic, it means the number of curious internet users who searched for something and clicked on your website because it appeared on the search result page. Organic traffic is proof that you have been able to identify your target audience, you know what they are searching for, and you have been able to use the right keywords to provide valuable information for them. The more organic traffic that you get on your website, the more certain you are that your SEO strategy is working.
2. Keywords: A keyword could be a single word and it could be a phrase. When you search for a term on a search engine, your input is a keyword. As a business owner, you want to find specific keywords that your target audience will use to access search engines. These keywords will be used in your website optimization to make your page rank highly among search results. Research has shown that over 25% of people click on the first results when they search for a term on Google. The goal of your SEO strategy is to make sure that you rank on the first page of a search engine (possibly the first). To do this, you can search for keywords that your target audience will use and see the ranking position of your website
3. Website Scraping: Another way to track your SEO progress is to check the website of your competitors to find how and why they are doing well, or better than you. You can deploy bots to go through the website of your competitors to analyze their SEO performance. These bots will feed you information like keywords, tags, headers, and other metrics that your competitors use to rank higher on search engines. This strategy is very helpful to understand the SEO strategy of your competitors and devise a way to perform better. However, your competitors and search engines will frown at this. No business wants their secret exposed and search engines do not appreciate using stolen data to increase your performance. If either the search engine or your competitor manages to sniff your bots, the bots will be blocked immediately. But you can use residential proxies to parse any website without being caught. Residential proxies allow you to access the web using local IP addresses assigned to household users. Businesses make use of residential proxies to gather information, test their strategy against their competitors’ strategy, and perform geo-based SEO audits. You can conduct for instance an SEO audit in London with the help of tools or professional agencies. 
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your click-through rate represents the percentage of people who visited your website compared in contrast with the number of times the website appeared in a search result. If your website appears in 10 search results in a day and was visited two out of these ten times, then your click-through rate for that day would be 20%. Lower click-through rates suggest that you should make changes to the content of your website – meta descriptions, title tags, formatting, and so on. You can check your click-through rate by checking your search analytics on your Google Search Console. 
5. Bounce Rate: When internet users visit a website, they typically scroll through the website to determine if the information they need is on the website. If they find the kind of content that they are looking for, they stay on the site and if they don’t, they leave. Your bounce rate allows you to know how many people actually visited or just interacted with your website. An interaction occurs when a user does not spend time on a website. Low bounce rates signify that you should improve in metrics like your lead magnet or website layout.

Monitoring your SEO progress is very essential to know how effective your strategy is, find out what is and what is not working, and formulate better development strategies. A business can save part of its budget by monitoring its SEO progress and fixing any errors as soon as possible.