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Interesting -- so serps that have held steady for a while then dropped by that much?  It's strange to think penguin could have such a huge effect.

Curious, if you don't mind answering, the rankings that dropped, were they steady for a time and how long?

I agree with everyone here -- going through a similar situation with a client where a few competitors outrank because of domain and page authority...mostly from low quality links.  My goal is to build up my client's link bait with good content, capture the good links his competitors have and let the rest work itself out over time.

Best thing you can do is show the client and explain in detail why it is happening.

I agree that the description is very important to entice users to click -- if a keyword searched on shows in your title and again in the description it is bolded creating impact.

One thing that gets me though is all these tools that promote "unique" title tags, meta descriptions and use it as a page grader -- you get an F if you don't have a unique meta description.

So I try to make it unique.  It may be .005% of an overall page score but at least your paying attention to it.

I've noticed similar happenings with sites I monitor and I too have been searching for an answer.  I know Google is working to improve the "real time" results to show more on topic, on date events so you can't always be sure daily of a certain spot.  Also, tools we use to run these reports are databases and only get updated so often, they are not truly "real time"

I've also noticed differences in ranking reports across several tools so which is the best?  I use seomoz, webceo, ahrefs and semrush and I rarely get an agreement amongst these.

In the long run, my opinion is that "ranking" for a certain keyword is not as important as seeing relevant traffic for a keyword coming through your seo campaigns.  So, if your ranking drops, does your traffic drop for that keyword?  If yes, then it may be an optimization thing and you need to look at link authority, competitors that are now ahead,...or maybe it was just a fluctuation in real time results.

Interested to hear what the experts have to say.

I like all of the answers here and I would definitely focus on how the user is searching for the lawyers.  If you have a site with millions of lawyers, they would each have an area of practice so it would make sense to develop a structure around this first:

lawyerz.com/practice-area/state/city/attorney-name

WIth this structure, a searcher that types in "estate planning lawyer" would be sent to the estate planning lawyers page and allowed to search further for their city and then lawyer names.  I would attach the contact info, reviews directly on that lawyer's page.

Since your higher volume keywords are going be found within the "practice areas", this would seem the next step after the main domain target of "attorney" or "lawyers".  Then, location can come third, attorney name is most likely a lesser searched keyword but using a url structure such as "attorney-john-doe" reinforces.

I would LOVE to hear all the expert opinions about this as I am a newbie to seomoz but am finding some great experts and advice over here.