Top placement does not always equal increases in traffic

[strategicrankings]

Although keywords are carefully researched, although there is high competition for those keywords, although lots of PPC ads are popping up for those keywords, high traffic does not always result from top placement for some competitive keywords. :confused:

After much effort when you find yourself in such situation, what conclusion do you arrive to and what do you do to recover?

And what explanation do you give to clients?

[Anthony Parsons]

I would say the keyword selection process fell down. You have to look beyond competitiveness. Like, whats the point of heavily competing with an allintitle of 100,000 for 50 visits daily if another relevant keyword has an allintitle competition of 10,000 and delivers 30 visits daily?

I love to stay away from competitive words, (though haven't off late) as you can incorporate hundreds of non-competitive to mildly competitive terms and get more traffic and more click throughs. The way in which you structure your page and the results appear in the engine also play a major role. We all scan the headings, scan the results looking for sites that contain the words we want. If you have rubbish appearing in the results, then you can rank highly for anything and get very few click throughs for that reason. That may be a problem for you? Maybe the traffic source is their but just not tapped correctly for clickthroughs?

I think you have possibly dug yourself a little hole if you have told clients you where going to deliver them heaps of relevant traffic and conversions and haven't delivered......yuk.....good luck on that one mate.

[doppelganger]

The other point to consider is sponsored ads. On some search engines that list sponsored results in the same way as organic results, if you get top ranking organically, you may not actually show up until the 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc... page. So a top ranking may not deliver in terms of volume.

But I agree that the keywords you target are the main consideration. Target searches with enough volume to deliver, but ones that you can be competitive in, and with less "sponsored" ads...

Is it possible that this may also have something to do with how people are using search engines now? Maybe people skip over the #1 result? Sounds fishy, but I know that I'm much more suspicious of the #1 result than I used to be...

[Anthony Parsons]

Maybe people skip over the #1 result? Sounds fishy, but I know that I'm much more suspicious of the #1 result than I used to be...

Previous discussions and research from online firms have shown that users tend to prefer #3 #4 #5 results compared to #1 or #2.

[doppelganger]

Previous discussions and research from online firms have shown that users tend to prefer #3 #4 #5 results compared to #1 or #2.

Even though we've been told consistently that we have to be within the first 30 results (first 3 pages).

[doppelganger]

Oh... I'm guessing you mean results 3, 4, 5... not pages.

[doppelganger]

In relation to this, here's a small study on placement:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=635

[strategicrankings]

I think you have possibly dug yourself a little hole if you have told clients you where going to deliver them heaps of relevant traffic and conversions and haven't delivered......yuk.....good luck on that one mate.

Actually the keyword research was done upfront by the client, ie they knew what they wanted. I counter checked their work and found that it was fine. Their competitors are targetting practically the same keyword set, since they show up for almost all the keywords in the set.

We been able to compete with them on basically 2/3 of the set up till now.

The question i ask myself is that my client may not be the only one who is not seeing improvement in traffic for that specific keyword set.

[St0n3y]

It could be a simply as non-compelling title and description are coming up. Personally I don't look at descriptions, but if the title does not tell me what I'm looking for then I skip it.

[Anthony Parsons]

It could be a simply as non-compelling title and description are coming up. Personally I don't look at descriptions, but if the title does not tell me what I'm looking for then I skip it.

As above and as I state previously. It could all be in how your results are being displayed that isn't garnishing the ideal click through ratio that you would like. Have you checked how the results are being shown? Maybe the traffic just isn't their for that niche?

I work on about 20% of the total traffic for a given term between the 3 major engines, and give that to my clients as an approximate initial traffic generation if they want to know. I am more concerned on the conversion rate though than traffic generally.

[Terry Plank]

The question i ask myself is that my client may not be the only one who is not seeing improvement in traffic for that specific keyword set.

Good question to be asking. Sometimes we assume competitors are wiser than they actually are. ;)