So I write this with a whole lot less hair than I used to. 



I'm Working on a Personal Injury Lawyer Site based in Philadelphia. It’s basically disappeared almost completely over the course of a couple of years from organic search for all relevant main terms. 



Within a few blocks of zip codes where we have satellite offices, the local pack ranking is 1 or 2 for pretty much all terms we want to rank for and we have organic results as well. 

The main downtown office no longer displays in the local pack, nor do we get any organic results outside of those two satellite locales.

The Site currently has

• GMB - posting regularly(3 offices)
• Citations on all major law sites and business directories.
• Regular on-topic posts (2-3 per week)
• EDU links (via scholarships).
• Internal linking to primary pages.
• 500+ linking domains (mostly clean).
• 6.5k backlinks (57% dofollow)
• 300 pages of content - there is some overlap on blog posts. 
90% of traffic only hits the homepage and 3 primary pages currently.
• Alot of content was removed and/or consolidated over the past year.


Technical: 


• Page Speed - higher than all current competition
 78/92
• DA/DR 51/50 - higher than most
• Schema / FAQ’s / TOC’s throughout
• No-index on categories.
• No dupe content.

So 
a bit of history. 


The site had been spammed out with backlinks a 5 or 6 years ago and slapped with a manual penalty. 

During this Time we moved everything to a secondary domain (never had the same impact). Once the penalty was lifted 6 months later citations were changed back, the secondary site pages were 301’d to the primary domain and secondary domain removed from index. Everything appeared fine.

The site did came back but it never completely recovered and obviously there were a ton of links that were outside our control to remove which were disavowed. We do try to maintain the disavow of obvious link spam or completely irrelevant sites that still pop up (Links sometimes from 10 years ago).

The Business name was changed 6+ months ago and GMB and the majority of citations changed to match, domain remained the same. No drastic change + or - for local or organic. The business name was not a key search term.

Basically, on paper the site should be doing pretty well. In reality there’s no organic traffic to speak of outside of a couple of words with extremely low search volume or relevance.

It’s been suggested to us that the domain may simply have had so many bad days during its history, that Google had simply decided that due to its past it simply doesn’t have a good enough reputation to rank organically anymore. In other words start again with a fresh domain and go from there.

Penny for your thoughts ?