I usually gain traffic by small amounts like 1-10 percent, but there have been times I lost traffic because someone else's website is outranking me in Google for a popular keyword which I used to rank high, or Google made a change to its search engine which make other websites rank higher then my website which rank lower after a change to the rankings.
Bing, Yahoo, and Ask never really brought in much traffic to any of my sites in my experience.
Refferal traffic is usually the same unless sites I post on with my signature links are also got lower or higher search rankings from Google, or a lot of traffic from social networks like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
As long as you don’t get to page two or lower with the keyword you are ranking, you’d probably not lose that much traffic. It also has to do with the time of the year. I mean there are seasonal niches that get a lot of traffic on a certain time of the year. For example Christmas toys, outdoor equipments, fishing and etc.
Generally speaking there are other factors that you should consider, not just your SERP.
Over the last 2 years since I started TMF traffic has climbed steadily. When we first started it was me and three others keeping the place alive, now we have 30+ members visiting every day. 🙂 I see good things in the future.
Having said that, activity is currently down. We often go through dry spells like this, but over time traffic has increased significantly. 🙂
