Well, good content is always important for a variety of reasons. Links are and will always be a major factor for why a site ranks. Technical SEO is what I recom

Well, good content is always important for a variety of reasons. Links are and will always be a major factor for why a site ranks. Technical SEO is what I recommend to most people...basically doing site audits to make sure you don't have any duplicate content, all your links work, proper content siloing, page speed is good, etc. You can also use tools like SEMRush to still kind of find out where sites are ranking but obviously their data can only be so good as they're just crawling Google SERPs. But it's the best we've got now unfortunately.