Would love to get your insight here @Ashley Bryan @Quentin Aisbett @Rod Wills @Keith Rowley @Emanuel Petrescu 

1. Always have your user's best interest in mind! Try to deliver the best possible answer for their query and Google will reward you by showing your page on top of the search results. That's the most important aspect (in my opinion). 

Then, the rest:
2. Keywords - use the keywords (more specifically - the language) your prospects are using. 
3. Take care of the technical aspects of your website - speed, make sure it's up to date, plugins, functionalities - everything working?

1. Optimize your on-page SEO - use Site Audit tools.
2. Network with industry influencers, experts, partners (and ping them when you have a new article).
3. Create content that is new (new perspective on an old topic, new data, new statistics, new view, new insight, new research, new invention, more detailed content).
4. Reach out to relevant contacts about your content.
5. Find mention of your business that was not linked and a gentle nudge :)
6. Find places where they use your material but not credited (infographic, chart, statistics, video).
7. Get your business on Google My Business.
8. Hang out where your customers might be (Reddit, Facebook, online forums).

There is certainly a lot more to it. This is the surface level.

If you want to learn more and have the knowledge SEO specialists have - read up on Ahrefs, Backlinko, r/seo, r/bigseo, Search Engine Journal, SEMRush.

Start the free trial of SemRush, this is what all the SEO agencies use, it will highlight all the errors on your "on page" SEO. Fix all these and make sure your site health is in the 90s.

Once done you need to get backlinks, you can do this by adding your website to directories, but just make sure they are of high quality or Google will punish you.

We fix the website and get a few backlinks in a month or two, then any further SEO is about content (any agency still charging you after 2 months if they are not doing content you are likely getting ripped off). 

Making content that users find interesting and hopefully other people link to is the only way you are going to get ranked on page 1. Google also looks at freshness so updating old content if you are out of ideas one week.