No traffic from 2nd page ranking on competitive keywords

[mola4ever]

I've been spending the last 2-3 months working on a pretty competitive set of keywords and managed to pull 2-nd page for some decent phrases. The problem is that i'm gaining little or no traffic for a (est.)40k a month search phrase.

What's your opinion on this ? being ranked #12-20 should mean something right ? I tried to go for as many keyw. descriptors i can but it seems i'm going nowhere fast... any help is appreciated.

[kidder]

Good topic, I don't think a ranking that you see means that your site is getting served for all of those 40k per month searches. Just because you see your site rank even in the top 10 does not mean the person down the street sees the same set of results. I think organic search rotates a lot more like adsense does, to some extent google is sharing the love based on a lot of different varialbes, location, search history might be a couple of examples to consider. I'm happy to be shouted down on this as it's based on what I think not what I know to be fact.

[wanna_learn]

For a ceratin phrase with approx 6000 searches every month (as per adwords data)I rank #8 organic and do not get more then 25 hits in whole month.

Mola4ever,
May be there are certain very powerful and informative sites on page #1 which do not let users to look around anymore even at 2nd page. Also compare your Title and snippet shown in SERP with other sites ranked under 20.

[mola4ever]

All sites ranking top 10 do have the keyword at least 2 times in title/url/descript. but there are those pesky info/news sites like wikipedia or any XYZ.techcrunch.com or whatever subdomains supported by a decent 6-8 PR so it's pretty hard to steal the pos.
I know you can beat the competition if you do you're job right but when it comes to old/authority 1-5k alexa sites you're in for a lot of trouble. I'm thinking more and more about going for longer phrases or diversif. my descriptors... seems i have to leave the 2 keyword phrases for another time...