SEO: Estimate the traffic of a #1 Google position

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How much traffic can I get from a #1 ranking in Google?

A question that people always want to know is how much is a google #1 ranking worth. The answer is obviously going to be pretty different based on the keyword’s popularity among human beings who search for it. Obviously, you have some insight into this if you have a site ranking well already. But, suppose you don’t. People will give you BS advice like running test campaigns in adsense, which will tell you many things, but it won’t tell you how popular the top organic result is going to be. Let’s break it down to what we can know about Google results in a general fashion.

We can tell how popular each position on the front page of Google is going to be.

h/t to Marketing Hub

Now google mucks around with the page composition at the top of their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) constantly. And this chart may predate OneBox

but, this is still prety much what most Google SERPs look like at my house. Note that among other things, it confirm the belief that #10 is worth more than #9 in terms of traffic. Anyway, now we know the percentage clickthrough share that a Google position has. But that means nothing unless we know something about traffic volume, which means we are flailing around helplessly like a bird wthout feathers. “Help, Uncle Joe!” We would need traffic data for a site that holds a position on the search term we are interested in – and we can’t get that. Should we use Alexa?

Luckily there is a site that ranks well on a bazillion search terms, and makes their traffic stats public.

It’s Wikipedia! Yes, Wikipedia, the vaguely accurate behemoth beloved by lazy high-school students and their mature form, the lazy blogger. Wikipedia makes their stats public! Here’s a handy little tool to query Wikipedia traffic stats

So if we have a term in wikipedia we can get a rough estimate of its traffic. Now, a lot of that traffic isn’t from Google, but I bet you a whole lot of it is. Estimates of Google’s market share in search are easy to come by but differ widely, between about 40% and 75%. I’m going to peg it at 50% because I think the lowest estimate takes an overly negative view of the effectiveness of individual google searches, and 10% roughly matches my statistics on how many Google referrals are repeats from the same user in a quick period of time.

Case Study For Estimating Traffic From a Google #1 – monkey

Let’s say you wanted to be #1 for monkey. Wikipedia received 130656 visits to that page in February 2008. I’m going to pretend that all of its traffic came from search, and I think an awful lot of it does come from search but certainly not all of it. Monkey happens to be #1 on Google, on Yahoo and on MSN, which means it should get optimal traffic from everyone, and then based on our earlier assumption, Google is going to get half of that or 65328 a month. #1 on the google serps page is going to get 56% of the available traffic or 36583. #2 is going to get about 8800 visits. That’s plenty to optimize for.

Anyway, this back of the napkin stuff is fun, and I think that if you worked hard on the fudge factors like what share of wkipedia traffic comes from Google, you have a method for doing this that is more accurate than using a PPC keyword service or Hitwise to estimate this.

The site with the wikipedia traffic stats also has a cool list of the top Wiki pages by traffic, which is a good read if you’re geeking out on SEO or you are developing your very own spam blog.