Patience paid off for my niche site

Yup.

Good post with a really important reminder.

This is a long term business. Don't fret if you are on page 5 for weeks, or even months. (As long as the kw is worth it...)

Evita

In the majority of cases though the pages might be from authority sites, they are easy-ish to outrank. The exception is where the product is a hot seller in which case Amazon and co the go the extra mile to SEO the hell out of it.

I have been reading the number 1 result gets about 40% of the traffic. That might have been the case 4/5 years ago but not now. Sponsored sites are at the top and they get most of the traffic and Google makes a nice healthy profit. People apparently give sponsored links a wide berth I read, not if they are searching for a product I would say. I reckon the number 1 organic result gets about 10% at the most, its effectively on position 4 or 5 on google.

Daftest thing I've read on here in months.

I think too often the focus can be on a single keyword. It is always icing on the cake to rank well for a prime keyword, but success should never be based on that. For me, on my larger sites I get hundreds of searches leading to my site and the prime keywords are just a small part.

any tips you can share aside from patience?

I think patience and persistance are the two biggest factors of IM.

My first real content rich site, it is three weeks old now, averages 20 uniques a day. And I am getting an average conversion of 5 percent which is damn site better than the start where it was 200 uniques 0 clicks. I think if I keep adding quality content.. in theory it should keep rising and not decline.

The site that is #1 on Google got 50 hits to the site today, which will be roughly 1500 per month on that one keyword alone. Gurus will tell you that you will get roughly 40-60% of the exact search volume. The exact is 8100 and 1500 is definitely no where near 40-60%!

I also noticed that when my site got to #1 I am also ranking pretty well on long-tail keywords related to that main keyword.

Now if I can have similar success with the rest of my other niche sites, then I will be one happy man

Congratulations on your victory with patience.

I also think that this is very funny that person who waits 3 WHOLE MONTHS to get to the first page of google is considered patient.

This is not a comment about the author or anybody else who posted but a general comment about how lucky we are to be in a business that allows us to see success in 30 days.

In what was formerly known as "traditional" business, people who were patient had to wait 5 years, 10 years and sometimes more.

One thing to note: When your websites aren't ranking in your favor, continue to make new websites (or rather, Butcher sites) and never give up. You just have to be consistent and you'll see results.

-Shaun

P.S The No.1 position DOES get 40-60% of the traffic but the No.2 position gets less than 20% of the traffic. It has been statistically proven (I forgot where I read this). So it's important to aim for the No.1 position and not the No.2 position.

Ok I see many people are still struggling to understand accuracy of Google Keyword Tool. First, it's not a perfect tool so % of clicks are not the same for every keywords and the estimates of % clicks are average not exact number. I hope people understand how average number can have it's max and min values. Next thing is understanding what Google Keyword Tool numbers are. People often complain and in 90% they don't even know how to use it, they don't understand difference between broad, phrase and exact match. You should concentrate only on exact match, because broad is totaly unaccurate for SEO use and phase match requires some knowledge and experience before you can use it and understand it. But anyway most people use broad match and difference between broad and exact can be 10 000 vs 100 searches. Second thing, if you read little ? icon just right of the column names you will see that this number Adwords Tool gives us is for number of searches on Googles AND ITS PARTNERS. So that includes AOL and some other search engines. So even if you take all 10 places on page 1 of Google for that keyword you will not get 100% of those clicks because number is not just Google searches but Google and its partners.
Third thing. What about Adwords? Google is always trying to optimize its search engine to get more clicks on Ads because they make money from ads. I ran some Adwords campaigns and I was getting huge CTR but there were also 7 other advertisers that got clicked. In my estimate I think 50% of US searches (it was US specific keyword) for that keywords clicked on Adwords Ads. I also read some info how people are incrisingly clicking on other types of results like video, google news, images etc. Yes that also decreseas the number of clicks we get from these searches we see in Google adwords tool. Consider also that not all periods of the year have same number of searches.
When you take into account all these factors plus difference between 1,2,3,10 positions are enormous than I would say that keywords toold is very unaccurate you just need to understand what these numbers represent. Percentage of clicks that each position on search engines gets was presented by AOL few years ago but since than Google has made many changes so it's probably a bit different situation now.
My point always when I talk about SEO and Keywords is to use this info as indicator and not exact data.

To get ranked high for your Main words is a beneficial but thing, but you should also try and get ranked for other keywords too.