Building an extensive presence online that is capable of reaching search engine results and people through a variety of ways is a major goal of any brand. While several forms of marketing like social media and email provide additional outlets for attracting attention and traffic, search engines remain a primary focus for blogs, businesses and brands of all sizes.

In order to rank prominently in search engine results, a strong SEO strategy must be in place. Cultivating SEO takes months – even years – but knowing whether or not tangible progress is being made can keep the less patient among us on the right track.

As such, let’s look at some metrics you can analyze that will show just how much SEO potential your website (or your competitor’s) possesses.

Page Load Speeds

Before assessing your own website or another for its SEO potential, consider this: search engines care about user experience. A website that doesn’t perform well or is irrelevant is akin to pinging noise at audiences, which is why search engines such a variety of ranking signals to minimize their inclusion in search results.

Page speed is one of the more significant indicators of SEO potential, as there is a direct correlation between page loading speeds and ranking in search results. A very slow website is likely to have little to no meaningful SEO potential as-is, while a fast-loading page may prove promising.

Mobile Friendliness

A majority of search engine users conduct searches via their mobile devices. As such and given search engine changes in recent years to prioritize mobile friendly pages, a presence (or lack) of mobile responsive design can indicate many things about a website.

Most notably, however, websites that do not offer responsive design and UI solutions to mobile users won’t likely ascend the rankings of many SERPs. As such, a competitor in such a situation may not be as big of a threat as they may seem; your own website being in such a situation likely means it will not be able to take advantage of true long-term growth.

Content Length and Relevance

A general rule of thumb is that quality content tends to rank well. While this is true, it is also constrained by two other factors: content length and content relevance. Most users searching for content want in-depth coverage, which is why longer posts and pages tend to rank more prominently in search.

Additionally, content must be relevant to the topics, keywords and audiences you’re targeting with your site broadly speaking. Otherwise, even the best content will be seen by search engines as irrelevant.

Link Structure

The internal link structure of a particular website can definitely shed light on whether it is a viable contender or competitor in one or more SEO niches. How web pages are linked ultimately determines how easily both search engines and users can navigate; search engines love to be able to easily flow from one page to another when indexing.

If a website has a poor link structure that doesn’t feel intuitive or otherwise fails to interconnect a variety of different pages, then that site’s content may just be pinging noise at one or more niches rather than actually ranking in them.

While there are many metrics one can consider when assessing the SEO potential of a particular website, looking at these four characteristics can give people a good initial idea. If you only have a few moments to inspect a website, then look at these characteristics before proceeding any further.