I think your advice to start building more inbound channels is definitely the right approach.

I was chatting with a marketing exec in the real estate business and he said something I found chilling: "Google is transitioning to a pay for placement model."

You can see this in things like:

The move to 4 ads on top of SERPs - https://moz.com/blog/four-ads-on-top-the-wait-is-over

Making the Ad designation more subtle - http://blog.eyequant.com/blog/2014/03/20/why-the-new-google-...

Deep ad integration on mobile - http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/24/google-mobile-f...