Low (and volatile) rankings but good TF - what is wrong?

[RosaB]

Hi everyone,

I run a couple of Magento webstores in Europe. One of them is a French website, focused on castor oil products (huiledericin.fr). Since the beginning of this year we've put some effort in linkbuilding, adding new products, creating new content and rewriting content. Next to this, we tried to look the website more natural and less keyword stuffed. Finally, we changed from a product list view to a grid view, so there is less duplicate content on category pages (all pages in the main menu).

Except for a few big players (marieclaire, wikipedia, amazon), we have a decent Trust Flow and number of domains linking. None of the websites is very active when it comes to content freshness (as far as I noticed).

Despite all this, we rank 3rd or 4th page or beyond page 5 even on the main keywords (i.e. "huile de ricin"). Also (especially since September) the rankings are highly volatile.

At this point we can only think of launching a whole new (responsive) website, but maybe there is something we are missing and a new website isn't the solution.

One remark: the high number of backlinks from only a few domains are footer links form our own websites.

I'm desperate for some insights, so help is very much appreciated!

Thanks