Higher rankings - but how many more visitors?

Looking for figures on how number of visits "should" increase with ranking.

[Onders]

Hi! Was wondering if any of you learned people could point me in the direction of research done on how much extra traffic I can expect as I climb up the pages on Google. Am trying to get more of an idea as to how cost effective certain campaigns will be.

Have heard that 85% of people searching for a specific term will not look further than the first page, but is there any research showing the estimated click throughs (on organic searches) for the different positions. Am 17th at the moment for a fairly competitive, but highly relevant term.. If I can get to 2nd position lets say, whats the general concensus as to extra traffic?

[treeline]

You'd get a lot more traffic for 2nd than 17th. Many people will click a couple links to check out options, but very few bother to check page 2. How many more is hard to say - it depends on what the term is and how popular it is.

[irishaff]

My experience in my niche from tracking my visitors ( If i see keywords I dont know my ranking for I check it ) is that its first page only that counts.

When starting out I focussed my SEO on specific keywords , what i have done with susequent redesigns and tweaks is targetted a broader range. If your gonna get stuck in , " think beyond the box ". Use the adwords key suggestion tool , and other variuos tools to give you an idea. For example people looking for skydiving might use the words sky jumping ..

The traffic increase will all depend on " what " you rank for.

David

[Voyteck]

I have an expierience with one word search term. For a long time I was ranking around 20th place, then I moved into 8-10 position, for the last year I have 1st-2nd place for the same search.

Having position 20 I was getting 5-10 visits a day. Reaching position 8-10 I was getting 40-50 visits a day, having position 1st-2nd I get around 200-230 visits a day.

[dickbaker]

I have two sites with pages devoted to "Acme widgets." One is older, the other is very new. The older site ranks #3 for a search on "Acme widgets." The new site ranks #32.

Last month, 36 times more visitors came to the older site by searching for "Acme widgets" than came to the new site.

When I compare the two sites for traffic based on other brands of widgets in search terms, I've reached the conclusion that I could be drawing in at least twenty times the number of visitors to the new site if I could get it on the first page for those terms.

Thanks for the sandbox, G. :(

[Onders]

Thanks a lot for all your replies! This makes it sound like link building is going to be top of my list of things to do for the rest of my life.. as well as getting better content etc.

Have just found out that Atlas are conducting some research on how search engine rank impacts traffic. Although it is more concerned with paid listings, the principle applies to natural searches as well.

Don't suppose anyone has more idea of when MSN are launching their new engine? And are they really going to spend millions in marketing to try and rival G? Hope its soon as the beta version is giving me great rankings..

[dickbaker]

Onders, the older site that I mentioned--the one that ranks at the top for all of my keywords--has very, very few incoming links. Less than 100, maybe even less than 50.

For the new site, I've had to go out and get as many links as possible. Yahoo shows that the new site has nearly 800 incoming links, but Google only shows about 175 of them.

It's been a very frustrating year.

[treeline]

things to do for the rest of my life...

Don't worry, they'll change the rules when you get really good at it!