35% increase Google traffic with #1 position.

I know some of us have wondered what the impact is between having a #1 ranking and a #2 ranking for a particular search term. One of my clients moved from #2 to the #1 position for a highly competitive term this month and so far our traffic to that landing page for that term has increased 35% with 10,000 visitors forecast for July. Hopefully this will also lead to more conversions too. We are monitoring that closely. Fun to share some good news for a change. We are going to enjoy the ride while we can too.

This tallies almost exactly with traffic increases I have seen on competitive (over 1000 visits a day) terms..

I've found that its around a 30-35% increase from position 2 to position 1

dropping to 3 from 2 drops a similar amount. I've never seen a site get the "ten times traffic at number 1 than number 2" that some people suggest.

I've not seen conversions as a percentage of traffic alter much between ranking positions on the same search term though.. that seems to be site dependent rather than volume dependent.

I have experienced the same with one of the sites I optimized. Traffic increase around 40% when we moved from number #2 to #1 position on Google for their highly competitive keyword.

The next step, I played around the page Title and Description to make it more attractive. I tracked additional 20% in traffic from that term.

My suggestion is not just the rankings, but also how you write your page Title and Description if you want to maximize your traffic.

Hope this helps.

It does however depend on the type of completion you have.

My main site will once in a while slide to #2 for my main keyword for a period of 3-5 weeks and I experience no decline in traffic.

I am sure the reason is the crappy landing page of the mega site that gets ahead of me that causes people to bounce right out and land in my site.

raz

The average visitor stays on the page 3 minutes and 11 seconds which is the second highest of our 70 entry pages so I'm sure it will result in more conversions. Enrollment season starts in August too so our Google referrals really jump for the next three months. At the end of August I can give you an update whether this increase lead to more leads and more conversions. Obviously though amount of leads and then conversions will depend on the web site as well as the sales staff not only for our site but any site. We convert very well right now so it the August numbers could provide a reasonable bench mark for others.

i wrote an article some time back about CTR's determined on ranking Positions - perhaps you might like to read it: Link

With a number 1 spot you will definitely get those percentages, though if you are on number 2 you hope that number 1 will not be so good of a site as your number 2 so you can still get that second choice do work quite well.

I would love to see statistics for above the fold.

Amazing results though. This should be the definition for when someone says, why do I need to optimize, I am already doing ok for a particular keyword.

Apparently you could be doing at 35% better.