Links and Anchor SEO issus

I have a city-based landing page where local craftsmen are listed. Below the listings, I generate links to nearby cities and to related trades. This helps interlink my 2,000+ pages. However, since the anchor texts are often identical, SEO tools flag this as an issue due to duplicate link texts. My competitors are doing the exact same thing, but I want to improve the structure and avoid these SEO warnings. I’m looking for someone who can help me optimize the internal linking strategy and make the anchor texts more diverse and effective.