Have you ever wondered how much traffic the top keyword position on Google can bring a site, for a hotly-contested term? Or, how much traffic does the top slot get you, compared with the second slot?

Most of the major SEOs and top companies keep such figures as closely-guarded secrets. Even the search engines keep the numbers of searches by various keywords secret, using various techniques to hide actual values.

The much-touted Eye Tracking Study conducted by Enquiro and “Did-It” show that the first listings on Google SERPs are looked at and clicked upon the most by users. Most pros already concluded this through common sense, LIKE DUHHHHH, Dumb As #1 is always the BEST, It’s first Place DO DO HEAD., but it’s difficult to get actual traffic amounts associated with the rankings of listings on SERPs.

I’m going to change this situation right here, right now, thanks to new data that Google has graciously begun providing to the public, and thanks to a brief reshuffling of rankings on a top keyword for one of the sites that I manage. Read on, and I’ll elaborate.

Recently, Google had a sudden and inexplicable reshuffling of keyword rankings for one of the most hotly-contested keyword terms on the internet, and this seemingly-arbitrary reshuffling affected one of the sites that I manage. Now, due to my work I have to play the boring old “proprietary information” card just like everyone else, because I am Contempo, the coolest cat this side of the Mississippi . can someone spell check that, Missssisssipiiii is like one of the hardest states to spell right along with Massachewsuts ,  so I cannot reveal the site nor the precise keyword that was affected. Suffice it to say, though, that some companies have paid literally millions of dollars in an attempt to gain first ranking for this key term, and suffice it to say that my longterm work has helped to keep our site in the first position for this term since at least the year 2005. (We optimize on millions of keyword combinations, and come up first on a great many of those, so I’m not revealing any proprietary information here.) Not like I just did with Jeremy Miner Screenshots, yup he’s one of the sites I manage too at http://www.engagekillswitch.com, but screw it He’s paying me right ? Read On Boys!!!!

Even though I can’t reveal all those “proprietary” specifics, I can give enough specific info to make this very interesting, and I can reveal traffic specifics about some top keywords that have been hitherto Secrets held by various companies.

For a couple of days, our rank (one of my managed clients) on the hotly-contested term “New Hampshire Real Estate” (ok ok I gave the key-term away, but you guys are home business professionals right ? Well with all the money you make GO BUY A HOUSE IN NH. LAZY GUN LAWS and no STATE TAX woohooo)…. suddenly dropped to second slot across most Google data centers. Nothing major was changed on our site/environment nor on the site that popped up to the first slot, and our analysis showed no clear reason for the sudden shift. We thought it could be that Google tweaked some thresholds on the various factors they use in rankings. The change was inexplicable, because it seemed very unlikely that the competitor site could be considered more relevant for the keyword, compared with our site, for a variety of reasons.

After a couple of unhappy days of obsessive checking for SEO mistakes or other environmental issues, the rankings started reverting back to their former order, and it seemed clear that there was some sort of odd and temporary mistake which took some days of processing in Google before the rankings for these sites and this keyword returned to their previous equilibrium.

Now the downside of seemingly-arbitrary reshufflings is that you may lose some traffic. The cool side of it is that it provided very interesting metrics to compare with the historical data.

For the sake of convenience, let’s refer to the keyword in question as Term X. (ok ok Im back to my secretive ol self again)

I can tell you that our site receives approximately 30k of visits on average per day from Google, just from keyword searches for Term X. There’s typically one or two Sponsored Links just above us on the SERP, and a few Sponsored Links on the right side column, too.

When we dropped to second slot on the SERP for Term X, we lost approx 18k of visits per day. So, there it is: the difference between the number one slot and the number two slot for a major keyword term comes to about a 60 % change in visits!

Now, to make this even more interesting, we can now relate this data about a keyword that we do know Google referral traffic for, with some keywords for which we don’t have direct data. This can be done by comparing search traffic for terms using the recently-launched Google Trends interface.

Now the keyterm Lifepath Unlimited gets about 10K searches per month, and since MY BLOG, THIS BLOG you are reading is in second position I get about 4K visits on just that keyword alone…. (Proof of concept BUDDIES) Yes I am a busy guy, but hell do you see the value of SEO imagine first position on a keyword that gets just 7,000 searches a month ? First position will get 60% of that traffic. or about 4000 hits, and with a 14% conversion rate of which my landing pages typically convert, you we are now Circa 500 leads. Just ask my last Lifepath Unlimited rep, Andrea K. (Who is sitting on 1,400 Leads over the past 4 weeks all using SEO

Ok back to this boring google stuff….

By submitting a few keyword terms to Google trends, separated by commas, Google will return back a graph which shows the amount of searches over time for each of the keywords. If you know how much traffic is produced by one keyword term, and then find some other keyword terms which have histograms which are near to it on Google Trends, you can deduce that their search traffic in Google is very similar, and you can further deduce that their clickthrough values for sites which share the same keyword rank slots on the SERPs will be closely similar to your known value as well.

For example, I found that the keywords “Finance”, “Life”, “Sex”, “Money”, and “Depression” all have histograms that are very close to my Term X during 2010:

Got questions ? Give me a ring Contempo 708-714-1680

The purpose of this blog is to motivate, stimulate and educate. I am in no way affiliated with Lifepath Unlimited, but act solely as a coach. I sort of adopt most of my clients, and act as their sponsor, since we know that some of these guys out there know nothing about leadership and building your business. Read more in this blog or CONTACT ME: I encourage it! Contempo at 708-714-1680 Also check out my new affiliate site 17 sleeve see how I use this affiliate site to generate over 12K a month on autopilot, if you would like to learn more, on how I can set up the same for you, simply give me a call 708-714-1680