Hi All,

I'd just like to hear some opinions on what rank keyword result that you would need on certain phrases to get some meaningful traffic.

I've just rolled the dice trying to get a bit more traffic by rewriting some of my Titles and as you may expect it's easier to get higher in rankings on keywords that are not so frequently used.

I've read that you need to be on page 1 to be able to get a good amount of traffic for your site but that has to be in relation to the keyword itself.

So here are the keywords and about where I rank in Google for those words and the supposed monthly amount of hits from a reverse search engine for those words.

online travel magazine Rank 19 Hits 2932
independent travellers Rank 63 Hits 823
Travel Club Rank 121 Hits 81,717
Cheap Travel Rank 411 Hits 5,542,711

So as you can see I don't rank very high for any of the keywords and consequently traffic is low (not that it bothers me but that's another story).

Now what I'm asking is that if you get to Rank 100 under "Cheap Travel" and that gets 1% of the traffic that's 55,000 hits per month, now that would be better than ranking Number 1 in any of the other keyword searches. What type of Ranking do you think that you need before you really get any traffic and in this case I'm talking about 1% of the traffic?

Any other advice or information would also be welcome.

I've read that you need to be on page 1 to be able to get a good amount of traffic for your site but that has to be in relation to the keyword itself.

Nope, if it's a phrase that real people don't use when searching, you could be #1 from millions of pages and not see a single visitor, and on the other hand you could be 5th page for a phrase that real people do you use and lots of useful traffic.

Using "ranking" as a measure of success is a pointless exercise, use conversions. After all, conversions are what earns the money.

See: marketing to the search engine tail

If you're competing to bring people searching for cheap travel to your site, you're probably selling some type of travel service. Like Chris said, what you should be concerned with is your bottom line ... the search stuff is just a tool to get more black ink.

But most of traditional seo is aimed at getting people to your site, mainly though search engines, and not turning them into customers. There's no formula to predict how many people who see your page will turn into paying customers.