Really need advice. Ranking local keywords for Web Designer.

So, I have been working a few week now on ranking my web design business locally on a 7 year old domain and while I'm ranking Top 5 for anything without volume, everything I want to rank for doesn't seem to be breaking the top 100.

Every time Semrush checks, my rankings move up a bit, great, but its taking a while. I still dont have an ahrefs account which I plan to get soon as money frees up and I REALLY want to get a copy of SEO Powersuite but thats $600 I dont have to spare at the moment.

My problem is, my competitors backlinks are primarily made up of their client sites or sites that no longer accept links because they are old directories and such.

Should I just run a moz check on the domains and try to get a link from a site of equal metrics to compete?

It really stinks having been able to rank sites to Top 10 with relative ease and then struggling nowadays. I'm so afraid of doing something that will get penalized. Maybe I'm paranoid, maybe not.

i'm in gaming niche and i feel close to your niche coz i'm creating memes and relay on infographics to get peoples attention and keep my facebook page active, just go create your facebook page/youtube channel right now, cause once you make a valuable content (like creating a sample) and ask people to order what they want through your website they will definitely do, i'm not saying SEO is bad, but it takes so much time to rank, so create your small empire and diverse your traffic, good luck op (i can promote your page in my 5k fans page if you want)

If you want quick result and you are ok with blackhat (ready to dump your site and start again if penalized) you can use sape and mix it up with web 2.0 links.

arpitagarwal82 said:

If you want quick result and you are ok with blackhat (ready to dump your site and start again if penalized) you can use sape and mix it up with web 2.0 links.

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If you're talking about ranking locally, then you need NAP (Name, Address, Phone) listings. I haven't done local SEO in a long time, probably since 2010, but back then you just submitted your site/business to places that listed the NAP and used some services that auto submitted them and that did the trick. A long with some basic link building SEO. I ranked someones business back then in a few months and haven't touched it since and it still ranks high for its keywords. Wish I could remember the name of the service that auto submitted them, it was pricey, probably like $300 back then, but it worked like a charm. Was able to rank in a competitive niche using 90% white hat with a tad of gray hat mixed in.