Importance of rankings?
It's one of the most critical aspects of the digital marketing mix, you get traffic only when you rank high on search else you have to pay to get traffic and that's an expensive proposition ..not sustainable in the long run ..Optimizing for rankings is hard work but will pay off to get you quality traffic in the long run.
Favourite Ranking Strategies?
There is no magic to get your sites ranking high. It's 24/7 tireless work to optimize your site and keep reviewing it ....Link building is the fuel to search and that what sites should aim for, it's easy to get your pages optimized but the real value in ranking is the kind of links that you should get. Avoid black hat techniques and work hard on what google preaches on link building.
Elements to be covered in SEO site audit?
Site audit should be a comprehensive approach to finding "unfriendly gaps' in SEO, it should cover the site architecture, site navigation URL structure and site tagging.
Your Dream Feature not present in current SEO tools?
Most of the tools now are highly enriched to point out gaps from a search perspective...the real work begins once the tools tell you what's missing.