There are three pillars of SEO:
Content: the pages you create, including articles, tools, and landing pages.
Links: backlinks from other websites back to yours.
Technical: ensuring that there are no technical problems limiting your ability to appear in search engines.
They all matter, but to get started, I recommend prioritizing like this:
1. Content
Content matters the most. The more search-optimized content you create, the more chances you create for Google to show your company to relevant people. Content is both your biggest growth lever and your greatest bottleneck.
Great content can earn great links, almost passively. Inversely, it’s very hard to earn links without great content. Content can help explain the benefits of your product, and nudge people towards a purchase. Every physicians email list new content page you create provides another “doorway” from the wilds of the internet into your website.
Further reading
SEO Content: The Beginner’s Guide
2. Links
Links play a big role in SEO. Google and other search engines use links as a vouch of confidence for your site (Google’s system is known as PageRank). Sites with more, higher-quality links, generally rank better in search.
As a general rule, links that are easy to get (like adding your website to a free startup directory) will have less of an impact than links that are difficult to get (like a relevant product mention in a well-respected industry blog).
There are exceptions to these rules, but generally speaking, you want to build links:
On websites which are relevant to your business
With descriptive anchor text (your brand name or company description, not “click here”)
That are dofollow
Further reading
Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide
3. Technical
No amount of content or links will help if Google’s crawlers can’t visit your pages or your website is hidden from search.
For most new or small websites, technical SEO is not a problem. Most popular CMSs (like WordPress, Wix, or Webflow) have decent technical SEO out of the box. This might not be the case if you’re running a custom CMS and compiling a bunch of static pages.
Think of technical SEO as removing barriers to good search performance. Technical problems can hinder your SEO, but good technical SEO alone isn’t enough for your website to actively grow its search presence.
Further reading
The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO