If you want to drive as much traffic as possible to your website, you need to make your website attractive to search engines. The good news is, you can meet the needs of search engines while still speaking to the humans - your customers - who are searching for what you have to offer. Without SEO, it is really difficult to get the attention of search engines, and if you aren't on their radar, they aren't showing you in the best light (or worst case, they aren't bubbling you up at all) to your customers.

SEO must be buttoned up in order for your content to take advantage of it. While content creation can be a fruitful endeavor that drives traffic and ultimately business to your site, if you haven't established good authority with search engines, getting your content in front of your customers will be much more difficult, if not impossible.