Ranking in a large city

Hello everyone! I am new to SEO and am building my website out now. I have done the keyword research using Ahrefs and there isn’t a ton of options that get volume. If I am in a large city with two big boy national SEO companies that have built out a city specific page on a site that already has really high DR and UR what do you believe is my best strategy to rank my site? I am of course working on getting in keyword content (but not stuffing!!), internal links, alt image text. Do you think I should focus on making some good articles for potential follow back links? Get my GMB? Try and land some of the same link juice they have from accessible sites (most are sites they own, found they bought other companies and now use their old pages as link juice)? Maybe all of the above? Also is there anything big I’m missing? Idk if this helps but my intent is to mainly do website builds with SEO considerations, utilizing AWS for security, serverless forms, etc…, so this is a big part of my portfolio, but eventually I’d like to transition to Lead generation sites for various small business.