we are doing seo for almost 3 months for our website and at the beginning we did a keywords research through market samurai and used the 4 golden rules filter to get the best keyword. in most of the keywords we got to the first page and on some keywords even to the first result but no boost in traffic from these keywords, does anyone can help and give a proven way to choose keywords that will gain traffic?
Simple, to get a real feel of how the traffic would be, setup a test adwords campaigns for a day or for some 500 clicks. Then you can know the real traffic estimates of a keyword.
As IMAdmirer said above one method would be to use PPC to assess impressions for a first page position and see how close this is to the figures shown in the search estimates. Another option to find some more realistic potential search traffic would be, when using google keyword tool, is to change the results from broad match to exact match. This will change the traffic estimates shown from results that contain your keywords in any order that could also be surrounded by other words and change the results to show search figures that only contain the exact keyword that you are researching. For example a broad search result for blue widgets might return potential search traffic of 10,000 searches on average per month. This means that the results you see would contain the word BLUE and WIDGET and potentially any number of other words before between and after the words BLUE and WIDGET. Changing this to show exact match results could reduce that figure to 1,000 search on average per month. This should give you a more accurate search volume for the keyword "BLUE WIDGET" The other thing you need to consider is that assuming you have a first place position you can expect approximately 42% of that figure which is the average number of clicks you could expect to receive assuming you have a page 1 position 1 placement for your keyword. Using the same example this would mean that you could anticipate 420 visitors on average per month assuming you could get a page 1 position 1 search listing for that keyword. Hope that helps to expalin why your seeing some differences in what you expected.
its not accurate, for example I have one keyword that i got the potential search traffic after exact match is 1000 and when i checked on analytics i have only 150 visits...
where is your ranking for that keyword? eg position 1, 2, 3 etc If you have 1000 EM search traffic on average your could anticipate 420 visitors pm on average assuming a position 1 search location. 15% might suggest your are located at position 2 or 3 which out of the potential traffic to your site for that keyword its still pretty respectable Also remember that these figures are monthly averages. 150 this month and 690 next month will still give you an average of 420 (assuming you have position 1)