“Link Velocity”
If your website rankings have declined, it may be due to what I call “link velocity”. In other words, like many attorneys, you may be losing more links than you are gaining. This often happens because you are losing bad links you had acquired in the past that were considered at least “decent” before the last Penguin updates.
Here is an example of a New York Personal Injury Law Firm, with fewer links than their competitors who also rank for the search term “new york personal injury lawyer”. How do they out rank all but one of their competitors for this most difficult term?
Do they have a huge quantity of content on their site?
No-they only have about 30 pages and a just a few blog posts.
Do they have hundreds of links?
No, however, they are gaining links, and they are gaining links that are considered higher quality than their competitors overall. This is enabling them to compete in one of the most competitive local search markets in the US.
Of course their are many other factors that affect rankings, but link velocity is still one of them, despite those SEOs who like to say “Link Building is Dead”.
Achieving these types of results is by no means easy. You probably cannot do it on your own. Make sure if you hire a company to do link building for you they can show you these types of results. I only know of a few companies who can do quality link building for attorneys.