I am trying to figure something out that I cannot understand for the life of me. We are about to start optimizing our website to sell our products, we went to google keywords and identified the best keywords that will benefit our product. Thing is, based on the theory of SEO, if I ranked on the first page of google, msn, yahoo with my keywords and they are targeted and/or highly searched words, then I should see about 1% of that traffic go to my website? And of that 1% (assuming I have an awesome landing page) 1% should convert into buyers (assuming I picked appropriate keywords). And it's that simple? So if I get a bunch of targeted keywords for my products and get my search volume up, then I can get 1% of that traffic (if I get my website on the first page of google)? I am a somewhat a skeptic, and it seems logical but I just know there is something that I am missing. I realize the challenge is getting to the first page and maintaining, but assuming we do all of that, is this the way it normally works? Is it possible to have a high ranking but low traffic? And if so, what is usually the culprit? What am I missing with all of this?
I will field one of your easier questions. Yes, it is possible to have high Google rankings, but very low traffic. One reason this could happen is that your highly-ranked term is seldom to never searched; another reason could be that your title and description tags are not clear enough, or do not match what the user has searched for as well as other sites that are ranked right around you. Try to optimize for keywords that have an adequate search volume, and for the user's benefit (and yours), create descriptive title and description tags, which aptly describe your page's content. Hope this sheds a little light. Good luck!
If you are on the first page of Google search results, I would imagine you would get more than 1% of that traffic. I believe the first spot has the most traffic, with the top 3 results being the most visited overall - but generally speaking, first page placement is very ideal. You make it sound as if it is all too easy, but getting to the front page is your first step, and then ensuring your site is useful and relevant to the users will help maintain that position. You asked if it was possible to have a high ranking but low traffic - yes sure, but this would depend on what you are ranking for, the type of niche and industry. Perhaps you meant if it was possible to have a high ranking but not get many click-thrus because of webmaster error, which can happen if you don't have descriptive title and meta description tags in your page.
WEll the difficult part is to get those rankings Is not that simple Afthr you get the rankings let's see what happns (my theory is SE traffic is th bext and even the crapy design site converts good)
Thanks guys for the input. I did say that I realized the challenge was getting to the first page, but if someone gets there with their keywords - I didn't know what to expect. About the search volume, the words that I pulling up using Google Keywords all have very good volume, monthly and globally, so when I was doing my conversions I was very conservative. I estimated that if I got on the first page of google with a high volume keyword, 1% of that traffic will visit my website and of that 1% that visits my website, 1% will convert and buy my product. Is this a good rule of thumb or am I being too conservative or not conservative enough?