My New(ish) Site Isn't Ranking Well And Recently Fell

[JESFamilyLaw]

I launched my site (jesfamilylaw.com) at the beginning of January. Since then, I've been trying to build high quality back links. I have a few back links with keyword targeted anchor text from some guest posts I've published (maybe 3 or so) and I have otherwise signed up for business directories and industry-specific directories. I have a few social media profiles and some likes on Facebook, both for the company page and some posts.

Despite this, I've had a lot of trouble cracking Google's top ten for any term, long or tall tail. I was starting to climb for Evanston Family Law, which is the key term I believe I am best optimized for, but took a dive yesterday. I fell from maybe the 14th result to somewhere on the 4th page. For all my other target terms, I don't know if I've gotten into the 20s yet. To further complicate matters, my Google Places listing isn't showing and is on the second page of results for Places searches, after businesses that aren't located in the same city.

The night before I fell, I resubmitted my site to Google because Webmaster tools was showing duplicate title tags when I had none. I had also made a couple changes to some internal links and title tags, but only for a small fraction of the site.

Long story short, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I fell in the rankings and why my site isn't competitive for some of my target key phrases. I've read so many horror stories about Penguin that I fear my onsite optimization may be hurting my rankings or my back links are insufficient. I've done plenty of competitor research and the sites that are beating me have very aggressive onsite optimization and few back links. In short, I am very confused. Any help would be immensely appreciated.

[TakeshiYoung]

First of all, don't panic. New sites fluctuate in rankings all the time, as Google tries to figure out where your site fits best in the SERPs. Penguin was mostly about spammy links, not on-page optimization.

Your site is relatively new and still doesn't have much content or links. Work on writing more content and building more authoritative links, and your rankings will improve over time.