Very interesting stuff, I got one of the website which ranks pretty high (2nd page) for very popular keyword (google keyword tools showing local 3.5 million searches) and I am not getting any traffic from it. How is that possible ?
From what you say i think the keyword you are referring should be a 1 or 2 word keyword (short tail keyword). Google keyword tool gives you result something like this. Suppose the keyword your ranking for is "What is", you are also sure to have other similar keywords like "what is ding" , "what is dong", "what is ding dong"... and so on. This will prove you that no one will want to rank for "what is" but will want to rank for the complete term such as "what is dong". You get my point. Now imagine how many keywords are searched from google only using your 1st two keyword "what is", so all those complete long tail keyword will add you to 3.5M traffic per month which is not only "what is" but also your longtail keywords. Hope i did not confuse you
So does it means if people searching for "what is dong" 1 million "what is ding" 1.5 million then when I would try to estimate search traffic for "what is " than it would include searches from other long tail keywords ? so basically from previous example I would have to combine those 2 and I will get 2.5 millions but in real there are no traffic for "what is" ?
Your answer is very simple, you are on the 2nd page. Being in the 2nd page isn't good. You are high ranked whenever you start hitting the first page top 5. 90% of users never leave page 1, if they don't find what they're looking for, they will just perform another search. 80% of those 90% don't even scroll down to see the top 10 answers. They'll just look at the top 5 answers and then once again perform another search if they didn't find what they were looking for. Work harder to make your website show up in the top 5 answers.
This graph should answer your question: To further illustrate this here is a break down of clicks distribution based on positions 1 through 20 (first and second page) based on research done by Chitika Insights. Google Result Impressions Percentage 1 2,834,806 34.35% 2 1,399,502 16.96% 3 942,706 11.42% 4 638,106 7.73% 5 510,721 6.19% 6 416,887 5.05% 7 331,500 4.02% 8 286,118 3.47% 9 235,197 2.85% 10 223,320 2.71% 11 91,978 1.11% 12 69,778 0.85% 13 57,952 0.70% 14 46,822 0.57% 15 39,635 0.48% 16 32,168 0.39% 17 26,933 0.33% 18 23,131 0.28% 19 22,027 0.27% 20 23,953 0.29% Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010. This illustrates pretty clearly that in order to capitalize on traffic in SERPs you need to be in the top 5 on the first page no matter how good the keyword is. Preferably even in top 3. Good luck.
Did you try your keyword in google insight search. There you come to know whether your keyword is still searched by people or not.
Thanks for this information. This is really a good estimated traffic. So, a site with in top 3 get the best traffic.
when you say your not getting any traffic, do you mean ZERO traffic or just not as much as you like? When you say 3.5 million searches - is that with or without quotations? cause 3.5 * .29% is about 10K hits - which isnt bad