Do you think you will get the maximum traffic if your website is listed on the top 1 – 3 positions in Google?
For most of the people the answer is “yes”, while for knowledgeable SEO professionals the answer wouldn’t be straight away “yes” and the issue is debatable, I believe.
I have seen many SEO consultants, SEO Company’s, SEO Professionals selling SEO services by pitching stuffs like: “Higher Rankings = Huge Traffic = Increased Sales = Higher Profits!” I do question this kind of pitching and want to share an illustration on rank and traffic with you.
The fact is that traffic has nothing to do with ranking e.g. if your website ranks increase, it does not necessarily mean that your traffic would increase, no matter how targeted the top ranked websites are for a particular keyword.
increase more traffic not only increase Higher Google PageRank
I picked up 5 keywords (business, music, movie, food and travel) and perform keyword search volume (United States) study for each of those keywords. And for every site appearing on the top (position 1 – 3) for each keyword, I analyze their monthly visits (United States) as well. When most of the guys in SEO world even many SEO firms and SEO experts are saying and their is a general belief among most of the individuals seeking SEO services, that higher ranking means higher traffic, what could we expect:
1. The site at #1 would receive at least 80% of the keyword search volume as visits to their site.
2. The site at #2 would receive at least 70% of the keyword search volume as visits to their site.
3. The site at #2 would receive at least 60% of the keyword search volume as visits to their site.
But, I was shocked to see that those site(s) are not even receiving 50% visits of the keyword search volume. And the total monthly United States visits (which includes visits from other keywords as well) for the top ranked site(s), is even lower than 50% visits of keyword search volume of a particular keyword.
Wikipedia was the only exception though. Whereas, some site(s) appearing in bottom fold of Google page 1 is getting more traffic, and even some site(s) on page 2 is getting more monthly visits than of page 1 site(s).
It’s worth mentioning that according to compete.com wikipedia gets monthly US visits of 243,270,306 including various keywords. If Wikipedia would have received 80% visits of the keyword search volume, the figure for monthly US visits for Wikipedia should have been more, I believe.
Key takeaways from the illustration:
1. Higher Google ranking doesn’t mean it would deliver maximum traffic.
2. Ranking is not the only factor that everybody should focus on for getting traffic.
3. Site(s) on Google page 2 can also receive much traffic than site(s) on Google page 1.
4. For traffic what really matters is strategic promotion and branding, apart from ranking.
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{ 4 comments }
Nice info keep it up
i totally agree with your view that if your pr in good not necessary that your traffic will be increase ,
in my website PR is not good ,
but i have good traffic .
so pr and traffic is entirely different things
its a very good inf that every browser need to know
What information / research are you basing this on? Sites at the top of search results get more traffic. I have found this to be true across a very broad range of keywords and audiences on both organic and paid search results.
You can have high traffic from offline public relations campaigns and back-links, but this does not mean that websites at the top don't get more traffic.
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