Stopping slow steady decline

[smcmark]

I work for an ecommerce company and I have been tasked with trying to understand our lack of organic traffic.  For the past two years our organic traffic is in free fall.  We have 80% drop in organic visits since summer 2011.  I can't put my finger on what is causing it.  Here are a few hypothesis I've tried.

Penalty - I don't think it is a penalty because we still have some first page results.

Penguin- I know in the past (10 years), we haven't used gray hat (paying for blogging) strategies.  But I don't see a steep decline that would lead me to think its a penguin update.

Panda - For the past two years we have been re-writing content  for our 10,000 products and creating videos.  But even though our content is better than every, we haven't had any uptick in organic traffic.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where / how to investigate these issues further?

I've attached our organic traffic graph.  October 2011 we launched a new site, saw a large dip in traffic.  It slightly rebounded, and then has slowly suffocated ever since.

organic-graph.jpg

[Francisco_Meza]

You should get an Advanced Google Analytics Consultant to figure out what is happening. I know if I were in this problem, I would be running a lot of Advanced Segments. Every business is different so there's no canned responses. Also the reason I say to hire someone for an analysis is if what you say is true and you don't believe the site has a penalty, then you can be losing traffic for many other reasons.

You need to find out "why" conversions are lower.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Did a new competitor enter your vertical?  You usually don't see a slow death like that unless you are slowly losing your ranking to someone else.  I'd look at your webmaster tools to see where you are ranking for specific keywords.  It has it broken down by position in there, as well as just average ranking.

For example, every time I checked a specific phrase with a tool I ranked #1.  Yet, I was only getting 10% of the traffic from that word.  So, I dug deeper, and it turns out I was popping up #1 50% of the time, but the rest of the time I was somewhere in the top 5.