According the latest research on chitika publish network, the page which achieve number one rank gets double traffic of the second ranked webpage and triple traffic of the third ranked webpage.
Chitika research director Daniel Ruby explains that they did this analyze by research on the traffic come to their advertising network from google and got that the page on number one rank received 34% of all traffic, the second number ranked page received 17% and third number ranked page received 11% of all traffic.
Ruby also explain that the biggest traffic difference occurs between the top of the page 2 and bottom of the page 1. When a keyword jump from 11th to 10th position the page receives 143% more traffic.
This is the reason why every SEO want to be achieve the first position on google. The SEO firm where I am working works in Pay Per Performance model. That means we charge only when keyword jump occurs. The condition for which we charge from the client like below
1. Only we take charge for the keyword which is within 30th position.
2. The charge amount increase according to the page. Keyword jumping on the first page give us more revenue than the keyword jump on the second page and keyword jumping on the second page give more revenue than keyword jumping on the third page.
When we get any new project the client give us the base link ranking report and we take charge after the improvement of keyword ranking of that report. We get the highest revenue when we pushed a keyword to number 1 position and this amount is much more than other ranking improvement.
Obviously the number one ranking matters for SEO as long as for the web marketers. They receive more traffic after achieving the number one rank and hence they get more sales of their products.