#2 on Google / Bing / Yahoo, but no traffic

I am puzzled. 2 days ago one of our new sites got to #2 on search engines for its main keyword. It has 3,000+ exact monthly searches, 10,000+ broad.
#2 position should bring at least some traffic, but so far everything I see in Statcounter comes from paid ads and industry directors.
puzzled...
any thoughts?

 

Without the keyword phrase and URL, any response you get is going to be some wild guess that someone pulls out of their butt... But I'll bite.

Could be a lot of things. The most obvious are:

1) Rankings do not guarantee traffic. Even ranking #1 doesn't mean that the majority of people won't skip right over your listing and go to #2, #3, #4 if they think their SERP listing looks more appropriate than yours.

2) Related to #1... perhaps your <title> element being displayed doesn't make people think that they will find what they are looking for at your URL.

3) Related to #1... perhaps you have a poorly optimized meta description so it is not showing and Google is constructing one instead. If your meta description is showing perhaps it does not have a call to action that makes users want to click on your link. You might want to spend some time learning how Google search snippets are chosen if you don't completely understand.

4) I'm assuming you're using the external (or internal) Adwords keyword tool for those statistics. Hopefully you're aware that those search volumes are almost always grossly overstated because they include the Adsense network. The search volume for "mortgage refinance" not only includes the count of people searching Google.com for "mortgage refinance"... but it also includes counts of every time a web site renders a page and Adsense ads for the term "mortgage refinance" are displayed. So out of the 3000 per month, their could be 100 searches on Google... and 2900 times per month that Adsense ads are being rendered on sites across the web.

These are but a few of the possibilities.

 

First of all, it is unlikely that your site will be in the same no. 2 position in all the search engines viz Google , Bing and Yahoo at the same time.

Secondly, be sure that your site is consistently in that position for a reasonable length of time, as the "Google dance" may bring a site to that position and a few days or even hours later, it is off.

Thirdly, if the position is as you indicated, then your meta description needs tweaking. It is common for visitors to jump over higher ranked sites to visit lower ranked ones based on the quality of the meta description.

 

Thank you, guys. It's helpful.
Which keyword tool do you find the most accurate, as MarketSamurai builds its data out of Google's data as well, correct?
Who to trust?

 

Edit the meta and make it attractive for the visitor. at the same time keep the KW

 

If your one main keyword is on page one then it means your site is good and very much seo friendly. Now you need to enhance your targeted keywords list and try them as well to get the page one. And then surely you will get improvement in traffic.

It is not good way to expect the traffic via only one keywords.

 

Did you check how much traffic that keyword gets on adwords?

 

Have you searched for your site with your keyword using an anonymous proxy? Are you logged into your Google account when searching? Google will save your results in a cookie or cache, and eventhough you appear at #2...you could really be #12. Try a proxy like pagewash.com