How much traffic does each rank on Google's top page gives you?

I always wanted to know how much traffic does Google gives you if you are ranked on the first page on a certain keyword. While I couldn't find the exact percentage, I pull together information from different sites to derive a rough percentage.

The first piece of crucial information is what percentage of traffic does the top link on a Google page gives you. From different online marketers, the general assumption is that around 40-50% of the monthly traffic will click on the first link.

The second thing to know is the percentage differences between different rankings on the same top page. This article gives us exactly that information. It is found, for example, that the top link gets 3.5 times more clicks than the second link.

Based on these two pieces of information, I derive a rough estimate of the percentage of traffic you are likely to get based on your ranking:

Percentage of monthly traffic that goes to a keyword
if you are number 1 on your keyword, use 50%,
number 2, use 14%
number 3, use 10%
number 4, use 7%
number 5, use 6%
number 6, use 5%
number 7-10, use 3-4%

This squares well with my niche blog experience. If you targeting a keyword that has only 1000 monthly searches and you are ranked number 6, you are likely to get only 50 clicks per month, which is not going to make me any money. Hence, if you are into keyword research, do take the above into consideration.

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