Have not seen anyone talk about this for a long time but it is incredibly important, do you want to know what difference it makes if you move up just that extra place in the rankings?

Well it may shock you to realise that you could get over 3 times more traffic just by moving up one place from 2nd to 1st.

Last year when the AOL search data was released there was a post on earnersforum where the number of searches were calculated and from that you could work out the exact difference from a data set large enough to be pretty accurate to work with.

Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100
Click Rank3: 418,643
Click Rank4: 298,532
Click Rank5: 242,169
Click Rank6: 199,541
Click Rank7: 168,080
Click Rank8: 148,489
Click Rank9: 140,356
Click Rank10: 147,551

This data can then be interpreted and presented another way which was done a few posts down.

Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs’.
Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs’.
Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs’
Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs’.
Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs’.
Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs’.
Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs’.
Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs’.
Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs’.
Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs’.

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less than ^
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 1.1x less than ^
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 1.05x less than ^
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 1.05x more than ^

One thing of note here is that position 10 is pretty nice, better than position 9!
Other conclusions from the data were to be expected, like the top 10 is king and position 9 and 10 outperform being top of page 2.

Nothing new but it is important that rather than chasing new terms constantly or trying to be viral you stop, look at what your main keywords are, how you rank and devote a bit of energy into trying to move up one place, I did this recently and am a few thousand visitors per day better off for focusing on it.