Keyword Ranking & Index Issues

After doing months of link building for a few location-based keywords for one of our projects, we are still struggling to even index them in SERP. We are mostly going for the content-based strategies like web 2.0, article, etc.. So I need a little suggestion from you guys that what should we do to index them on SERP? Something that we should try other than content-based techniques? Much appreciate. Thanks 🙂