The first thing to understand is that all traffic to a website is not equal.

I realise you may already know that, but how many people pick a high traffic keyword, get it ranked and find none of it converts?

So before we start, here is the fastest route to picking a keyword that will do you some good:

1. Use Google’s keyword tool and enter in a few keywords you think may do you some good
2. Now enter those into Google search
3. How many ads show up?

If no ads show up, there isn’t a market. That’s the number one rule. Of course if you are just providing a free information service, then brilliant, but we are here to do business.

Look at the screenshots below. I am going to share with you some important data and proof of numbers very rarely shared by any online marketers.

At the time of writing (July 2012), one of the keywords this site is successful with is: “How many backlinks do I have?”. In fact we are number #1 for this keyword on Google.

Look at the figures. Google estimates that there are 320 monthly global searches for it.

And it is 100% accurate as the screenshot shows. Google brought up the relevant page on my site precisely 320 times.

Now here’s the best bit that you can take away and have some confidence about. Of the 320 times it was shown, 150 people clicked on the link. That’s a CTR for a #1 position of 46.88%

I have just checked another keyword, that is at #2 and it has a CTR of 22.73%

So you can now see the sort of traffic you can get based on your position in the search engines and the amount of traffic the search engines are sending for that keyword.

Let’s take a look at some numbers here:

• If the monthly traffic was 100,000 and you were at #1 on Google, you could expect to get 46,880 clicks. Not bad eh!
• If you were at #2 then it would be around 22,730. Still great.
• I just checked another keyword that is at #4 and it gets 10% of the traffic. So that would return 10,000 clicks.
• One more check here was for a kw at #7. It got 2.5% of the market. That’s 2,500 clicks.

Now, getting to #1 for a keyword with 100,000 impressions is a very tall order indeed (unless you are lucky enough to find that magic keyword that no one else has thought of).

The reality for 99.9% of us is that we manage to rank for a keyword with, say, 1,000 impressions. That means you can expect around 468 clicks  for the month, or around 15 a day (and that’s if you get to #1).

And if we now return to the beginning, about the value of traffic, you can see that unless the keyword you are ranking for has buying intent, then all you are is an information service.

So always check if other people are willing to pay for adverts in the search engines if you want to convert not only the impressions into clicks, but also the clicks into sales.