Ranking #1 vs #2/3/4/5/etc?

You can see from this map that there is a large percentage of click rates between 5th and 1st, however only 4 clicks on 5th place ? i would kick it. If 4th place for a decent keyword isnt bringing in a couple of hundred a day it isnt worth it unless you have an extremely expensive niche product that one sale will earn a substantial amount.

Although that is my 2 cents

there is a mathematical formula / study that was done... I'm sure somebody will pop in with that data.

The bottom line is it really depends on the amount of traffic that keyword gets per day and how well that traffic converts.

If we are talking a keyword that get 10k searches a day then you're still going to get a nice chunk of traffic down at #5.

If it's 100 searches a day... well, I hope your site converts really well.

I personally like higher search volume keywords. I'll take the scraps down at the bottom of page one or page two. I'd rather get 500 or 1k hits a day that way then grinding my way to the top for a keyword that might get me 100 hits a day.

I also like topics or niches that allow for multiple keywords so my site doesn't have all of it's eggs in one keyword basket. I'd rather sit at #5 for 5 keywords then having to put all of my effort into trying to be #1 for 1 keyword.

wow thanks for that image riverwire! I think that is a really cool heatmap

how many exact searches per month does the keyword get using the Google keyword tool?

it's from SEO and Web Marketing Research

something is wrong with those numbers.

my guess is the OP is getting personalized search results and it's ranked as high as they think they are.

You are getting 4 visitors out of total 200,000 with #5 in SERP there has to be something wrong, although I cant say what the fault is.

I don't think I agree with that chart.
I think that if you're ranking above the fold there is a higher chance that your website will get clicked on..whether you're number 1 or number 4. the meta description plays a more important role than the rank.

Everyone will check the meta description of the website before clicking. if you're at number 4 and have a more targeted description you have a better chance of being clicked on than the one at number one.

What you should do is optimize your description to make it more relevant to the keyword you're ranking for.

i always double check to make sure I am not logged into my gmail account when doing searches.

Everyone has to remember that because Adwords Keyword tools says that there are 200,000 global searches per month , hight light the "global" in that saying, you could be 4th in .com or .co.uk or .in but thats only one of the 136 country sites that popluates googles searches , so it could be stupidly popular in india and not incredibly popoluar in the .com of which you are 4th.

Just think if each of googles 136 localised search sites all had equal share of the keyword , that would mean roughly 1470 searches from each of the 136 localised sites. Now 1470 across an entire month isnt very much so why would you expect more than 4 visitors ?

People always see big numbers on "global searches" and get excited , the hard part is finding where its most popular .

Granted most of the time .com is the one with most searches but how many times a day do i search google.com , once or twice if i feel like to to check my sites rank , i dont use it as a regular search , i us google.co.uk which if searched for most phrases will be completely different results.

I hope that switches a couple of light bulbs on for some

@River that switched my lightbulb on