Based on an analysis he made, Chris Smith shares something that probably all marketers who focus on driving traffic natural search engines should pay attention to. I mean, there is nothing new with his study, but nonetheless affect your optimization strategy.

Smith found out that when he dropped to the second slot on the SERP for the term X, he lost approximately 60 percent of his daily visitors.

Precisely, he had a very popular term that ranked the first until a few days ago. The keyword itself brought as much as 30k of visits on average per day from Google.

When the page dropped to the second in SERP for the sane term, he lost 18k of visits per day, which translate into 60 percent change in visits.

Later he pointed out based on the graphs from Google Trends, which keywords that have approximately the same traffic potential to term X. But that is not my point. If you are eager to know how you can do so albeit Google’s obfuscation of the number, you can read on his blog about his method.

What comes to my mind is how this will affect our natural search engine strategy. You may not be that lucky to rank on such a popular keywords, but let’s say that your most popular keyword brings in 500 visits a day, which ranks the first on Google.

On the safe side, if we can assume as much as 60 percent lost of traffic if the page dropped to the second, suddenly your site had only 200 visits a day. Imagine how much revenue you lost just by that incident.

What should you do? As a small business owner, probably not much of your budgets are allocate for search. But don’t despair if this happened. I’ve seen solo web publishers, who write a page of content at a time and promote their site by getting one link at a time.

They are still able to rank quite well in search.

As a marketer who advocates search as one of the best way to gain traffic, I am first to say that you should not put all of your eggs in one basket.

If you have 10 keywords which are getting 100-500 visits a day, I think all you should do is keep writing, keep getting those inbound links by promoting your site properly.

Only those who are applying any blackhat SEO techniques, which are worst SEO practices anyway, should worry about being up-to-date on search engine algorithms change.

In fact, if you are diligently churning out quality content and promote them properly, chances are you won’t have that problem. The ranking shuffles, but it evens out on the long run by applying only whitehat techniques.

But if the very keyword comprises half of your traffic, you might want to make an assessment about how you are going to proceed. It certainly takes time to find out the culprit. You have to choose which is more cost effective either to find out the problem — which could easily translate into tens of hours, probably more — or you keep writing content, optimize and promote it to get more traffic from other keywords as well.