Thousands of new websites are born or registered everyday. The sites that are optimized with latest SEO standards obviously seem to do better than the ones that are not. As a matter of fact, there is no point in starting a website if you are not planning to do SEO on that. It will be buried way back in the search results pages and no one will ever get to know about your business.
Plenty of work has to be done when a new business site is created, and some of them are quite complex too. Remember that SEO is always going to be an ongoing process, and it picks up momentum in the long run.
SEO is all about targeting the relevant audiences to your website, and keeping them interested with continuous engagements. Hence, do not optimize your sites solely for the search engines. You will have to mainly focus on your potential customers. Even the search engines give first priority to their users. In simple words, you will need to please your clients, and Google has no option but to offer you with good page rankings.
With the launch of a new site, you could simultaneously setup a few things for long term success. For this you can prepare an SEO checklist to prioritize work for optimizing new sites.