If I had to pick one thing: make every page on your site answer a specific question that your customers actually ask, clearly and completely. That's the engine that drives everything else. When your content directly matches a real search query, Google has a reason to show it. When the answer is thorough and trustworthy, AI assistants have a reason to cite it. When a visitor lands on it and finds exactly what they needed, they stay, and that behavior signal reinforces your ranking. Everything else in SEO, including technical speed, backlinks, schema markup, and review management, exists to amplify or protect that core asset. A perfectly optimized site with nothing useful to say doesn't rank. A useful page on a mediocre site can. Obviously you want both. But if you're starting from zero, start with content that matches real intent. The rest follows from there.
SEO FAQ