backlinks are very much important for ranking and for increasing ranking
There are many thing that can be done to improve your website rankings.
1) are you listed with all the search engines (many have free submission)
2) make sure you have key words included for your site that similar sites are using (the hidden header of your page should include these as part of your "meta" tags)
3) are other sites listing your URL, do you link into other use full sites for xyz city?
4) check the search engines to see what they use to determine their rankings (this may be difficult to discover as they like to keep it secret so sites cannot inappropriately abuse the search criteria)
5) there are various sites that talk about improving your rankings
6 GO for paid services of some professional , you can find many at SEOClerks.