What you have are not whitelink backlinks. Those are pure spam backlinks in google eyes.
Whitehat is when you dont do any manual linkbuilding. Ofc in 99% you can have the best content and you still wont rank. Simple as that
Forget all those whitehat-Blackhat crap. SEO is Blackhat simple as that. And dont believe all this (moz) content marketing bullshit. This works in some niches but in many you will never succeed without manual linkbuilding.
Learn SEO first and no you cant learn this from reading only but you have to do trial and error and it is not as easy as it used to be. Build many websites use different approches.
And dont believe anything until you tried it. (and never believe anything google tells you they are full of shit and only tell you how they would like it to be)
Most people in SEO Forums and Blogs just repeating what they read somewhere but mostly its just outdated rehashed crap.
In the End it all comes down to:
- strong backlinks mostly out of content with natural anchors
- better user signals as your competitors
- conversion rate for the $$$
Todo: Buy majestic. Find 10 non commercial websites. Study their backlinks. Find 10 subpages on those websites that have many links and good rankings. Study their anchors and backlinks in detail again. Now you know more about how to make a natural link profile then 90% of the people in most seo forums

You can also learn alot from analyzing you competition but beware. Many people hide their pbn from backlink checkers so you only see bullshit links. (super secret tipp: google Website Name, url and url with main keywords to find the pbn domains on google)
For the next website: Make an exel spreadsheed and write down all link types with anchors in the order you want to build them. It should start with some anchors like that:
http://www.mywebsite.com
www.mywebsite.com
mywebsite.com
My Website Name
...
Start with non spammy unique web 2.0 (like 15 to 20 and only Brand links like above)
You can boost them with some links but dont use pure spam. Use a cheap pbn service or something like that ofc also with natural anchors.
Link Homepage and Subpages with those. This way you can use hard anchors with the quality links. Nerver use a hard keyword anchor more then 1 time...
Use a brand domain and fuck emd. If you keyword is "Coffee review" use something like coffeworld.com, coffify.com or whatever looks legit and is NOT a real word or website name already ....
And now because i have a good day: You build brand links to the homepage but you dont try to rank the homepage for real. (you still need some good brand links and ofc you can rank it but not for your main key if you build a small website ofc....)
What you really rank are your subpages. Fuck the homepage. Subpages are more easy to rank as for now.
I know most people will disagree with me. If you take a closer look at how the serps changed in the last year you will get it.
Google wants the people directly at the information not some page that only lists the pages where you can find those informations.
And to finish it. Dont overoptimize onpage. Have a different titel tag and heading! Dont use 1 word keyword alt tags on pictures. Describe them. Underoptimized onpage is the new onpage optimization.
You dont even need your keyword in the url. It does not matter and if you have it 2 times it does more bad then good.
Have fun and remember thats only one way how to do it but it works as for now.