New to Backlinks, looking for low hanging fruit.

Me currently DR = 0 Backlinks 27 (19% dofollow) Linking websites 18 (22% dofollow) Site is at least 16+ years old. It has had pics and text explaining my services and such, updated a few times. Honestly not a horrible looking site anyway. But it has never been optimized for SEO until I am working on that now. So Google hasn’t done much for indexing all these years, again, until recently. Checking ahrefs for the stats of my competitors that rank on the first two pages for the key words I want to rank for. These are the median numbers: DR = 14 Backlinks = 410 (61% Dofollow) Linking websites = 104 (63% dofollow)   Looking at the linking websites, very few have anything to do with the niche specifically. Those linking websites with high DR, with only a few exceptions, its all mostly sites like directories, seo builder sites, wiki, etc. (If I am allowed to post links here, I can link them if it helps?)   Of the pages these backlinks link too of my competitors, they are usually just the companies landing page, or possibly another page describing one of their services. Almost never any blog or high value content. Just describing their service. Not much real value to anyone to want to link too.   Considering the context of what my competitors have. I’m looking for advice on the first things to do to improve my backlinks. I’m talking, before I jump in and paying a service. Happy to do that after I get the low hanging fruit to at least have learned something first. And have shown that it even matters at all, for my niche. Doesn't seam like my competitors take it too terribly seriously, but I could be missreading it.