Our friends over at Affiliate World stareted a video series called "5 quick-fire tips" on their channel and there is one that I liked a lot, so let me post it here with a synopsis and a short summary of what's in it.
It's a short 6 min video and definitely worth a watch 
5 Quick-Fire SEO Affiliate Tips
There are 5 tips mentioned, 4 of them have to do with on page optimization, the 5th one is about backlinks.
1. Answer all subtopics to the query
What this means is that you need to cover all, or a lot of, subtopics that have something to do with the original query.
The tip give is to analyze sites ranking for your keywords on page 1, then analyze their source code and look at the H2 and H3 headings. Those are the subtopics you need to address in your article too.
Analyze a couple of the top rankers, compile a list of their subtopics, then cover them all in your content.
2. Entity Optimization
Entities are nouns that are frequently appearing in relation to the query. The example given is a "lawyer in NYC" query... the related entities would be words like court, hearing, attorney, judge. So basically, these are just common words that people usually use when talking about the subject that you want to target with your pages.
I guess any solid copywriter would be including these by default as it increases the readability and it's simply required to use specific topic-related vocabulary to write good content anyways.
3. Word Count Of The Content
Longest content doesnt always win, some queries do not require a wall of text to be answered properly. hat Matt suggest is to analyze the top rankers again and how long their content is. Take the top 5 or so, set the average and write a bit more than that... simple enough 
4. Backlinks
Do not hunt for links on the most known established and authority sites. Check who is already ranking for the queries you are targeting, those are the site google already believes are the best matches for your queries. Try to get a link on those. If that's not possible, check who is linking to these highly ranked websites and try to get a link there.
5. Increase Your Website Speed
This one doesn't need further commentary... as performance marketers, we are already obsessed with loading speeds, so just do the same with SEO content websites.
Simple tips, all easy to implement... except for the backlinks maybe. Worth a try for sure 
Cheers.