40% Traffic difference between position 1 and position 2 in Google search results

I have been targeting the most highly competitive keyword of my carrier, unfortanatly I’m unable to tell you what the keyword is due to my client wanting to keep this private. What I can tell you is that it has over 100 million competing pages and 4,000 search per 24 hours across the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN, which account for 98% of search engine traffic in the UK and US). It’s been a long process of tweaking, analysing, monitoring, viral marketing, content creation and link building over the last year.

We had been in position 2 in Google’s search results for nearly 2 months (with fluxing results from time to time… this is normal), then 4 days ago we moved to the first position.

What’s interesting looking at the analytics is the difference between the first and 2nd positions… a 40% increase! Over the last 4 days we have gained an extra 40% traffic from Google. Wow!

I did similar analayse on another site that moved from 4th position to the 1st (the keyword didn’t produce no where near as much traffic) and only saw a slight increase of 10% - maybe it’s the product or the power of high searched keywords? I’m going to keep an eye on it and dig further to find out