One way in which this helped was by looking at pages that were ranking with the not correct keywords and rectifying the mistake rather than creating new content. at times, the page was not bad, but it was trying to target something else than what the person searching for wanted.
An example of change which really had an impact on my rankings is the gap between the intent for which the page is ranking and the answer the page gives to it. In other words, the content is gud enough, however, it only discussess one aspect of the query rather than the other which the search engine wants to see. once i switched my focus to this issue, things got easier.