Focus on what viewers want

One thing I found over my years of working on the internet, is that SEO is of course needed, but you need to remember that the content you share needs to draw in viewers. If you can keep those viewers interested and coming back, then that will help a ton in advancing your site.

I believe this is due to social media taking a lot of said traffic. Due to that, we now need people to stick around our sites as long as they would social sites. So providing content that viewers/users want, then it will likely result in that traffic coming back for more. :)

I think that's mostly a given. Social media has changed a lot, you are correct. People now don't look at how many page visits a site has, it's how long people stick around on your site. It's how many people continue to come back, how long they read an article, whether they like it, commenting, etc.

I imagine in order for things to do good, you need to be able to draw viewers back in.