you should obviously prioritize the pages with the highest potential for making money because - assuming that you do intend to make money with that website - making money is the end goal for every website, that's why we're all here wasting time with SEO
For a normal (content / affiliate) site, this means prioritizing these pages (in this order)....
1) pages with
commercial intent (ie. pages that target keywords / topics that contain words like "review", "comparison", "buy", "purchase", "best", "guide", "top", "tutorial", etc...)
Pages that contain one or more of these words in the title usually target keywords that people are interesting in engaging with (financially, of course), so if you have such pages on your website you should focus most of your attention towards these pages regardless of whether they rank, almost rank, don't rank at all, etc... These pages are your 1st priority
2) if you don't have pages with commercial intent, the nest best thing in my opinion (but feel free to disagree) are the pages that target keywords / topics with
lots of search volume, even if they're only informational keywords in nature.
And the reason for this is that - after money - the next best thing is traffic, so you want to get as much traffic as possible.
Let's assume that you have 6-7 pages that are ranking on page 1 of google for keywords that have no commercial intent but also not a lot of traffic (let's say that the monthly searches of these 6-7 pages - combined - is 1000 searches in total), and that you also have 2 pages whose total monthly searches is 500k, but these 2 pages are ranking in positions 20-30 of google.
Which one of these 2 types of pages do you think are worth spending more time on if neither has commercial intent? Obviously the pages with more traffic potential
With lots of traffic (especially organic traffic) you can always slap an opt-in form or a 3rd party ad in front of it and monetize it like that, but if the traffic is low (few 100s visitors a month) and it's not even commercial, I would not prioritize those pages over the ones with high traffic potential
3) all things being equal in terms of monetary value and / or traffic (or you not even having money pages on your site) the next type of pages that you should focus on are the ones that are
almost ranking (in top 10 I assume you mean)
And the logic behind this (well, MY logic, if you have a different logic feel free to disagree / adapt to your own needs) is that the more pages and keywords you have that are ranking in google the more trust your website is perceived to have, which is a good thing.
And having lots of pages ranking in top 10 does tend to translate into more traffic overall, so it's smart to have many pages ranking in top 10.
That's how I'd prioritize, but like I said, this strategy pertains to content / affiliate sites (because those sites tend to have money pages). If your site is different (wiki for example... or maybe classified ads / local directory type of website) the strategy will most likely change, so you gotta know your stuff (site, industry, goals, etc) before choosing the right strategy...
I hope this helps...
