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When I was on page 2 for most of my search terms, my site was getting maybe 30,000 visitors a month. Now that I'm on the first page for nearly all of my search terms, I'm at 150,000 to 250,000 visitors per month (depending upon which stats program I use).
Just moving up a couple of spots on the first page made a significant difference.
Getting to the first page was much easier than moving from the #7 position to the #5 position.
do you have to be on the first page top 10 to get serious traffic?
It certainly helps, if it's for a search term people actually use.
But, depending on your topic, chasing the top 10 for your homepage may be a huge excercise in frustration.
It's often easier, and a lot faster, to get good rankings for related sub-pages. Then once you've got enough traffic you can work on ranking for the tougher terms.
Last month, visitors found my site using over 33,000 different keyphrases. The overwhelming majority of visitors use keyphrases for which my subpages rank very high.
My home page actually ranks very high for the very generic term "widget stores," but very few people use that phrase.
Diversification seems to help a lot. It also helps when a search engine temporarily drops one of my subpages for a particular search phrase (just noticed today that one subpage I ranked #5 for on Google is nowhere to be found). I still have another thousand or so subpages that rank well.
