Best strategy for starting over? Newb looking to learn earn by blogging adsense income

I have been in business for over 13 years now. When I first started in 2003 I spent about 2 weeks just obsessively learning and trying things that I read on the web and was able to get my webpage to page 1 Google for my terms with my geographic qualifiers, and based on that I have been in business ever since.

Now I find myself wanting to grow my business, and in the last few weeks my lust for learning and getting my page back up there has come back. Right now I am not ranking well at all for my terms, due to years of neglect. I have spent the last couple weeks doing the following:

-Getting features on my site to work properly. Some links to external icon services were broken, some scripts that were no longer needed were removed etc.

-I have 2 sites and one was completely broken and delisted 6 weeks ago due to an issue with my hosting company, got that fixed.

-I used the pagespeed tool and was able to follow all but 1 of the suggestions and correct the errors and in doing so went from 55 DT, 40 Mobile, to 96 DT, 70 mobile

-Added an SSL cert to my site and updated all the external links so that my site is now secure, and did all the 301 redirects etc from non ssl to ssl.

-Used Textbroker to buy an article for my blog. I am somewhat happy with it but I had to tweak it a bit.

Now I am at the point where all the easy low hanging fruit has been taken care of (at least to the best of my knowledge) and I want to go to the next level. I am thinking that involves keyword selection and link building, but I have very little knowledge of either. In the beggining (2003) I found it east to just update my title tags and bam, 1st page. The algo has changed alot since then.

So I have a couple specific questions and am also open to suggestions. I don't want to post my url here in case it is seen as spam but let me know if it is ok and if anyone wants to look over my page.

-My KW strategy thus far has been to focus on 5 variations of my service offering, with 5 or 6 geographic areas that I serve, which means I am trying to rank for 30 terms or so. Too much? Would it be better to pick the most populous of my geo and the most popular of my terms and focus on that?

-Link building I just have no clue. Is it better to try to hire that out? But I have heard that there are penalties for doing it wrong? I have no interest in trying to break Google TOS. I know the master I serve.

I welcome all feedback, and thanks for taking the time.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, the only SEO tool I am using presently is CuteRank which just tells me where I am in Google for my terms. As far as I know that is the only functionality it has.

submitted by /u/nothingtoseehere999
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