Striking-distance keywords: the queries sitting at positions 8 to 20

A striking-distance query is one your site already ranks for, at an average position somewhere between 8 and 20: the bottom of page one or the top of page two. Google has already decided the page is relevant to the query. It just has not decided it is good enough to show prominently. That makes these the cheapest traffic on your site to go after, because you do not need new content, new links at scale or a new strategy. You need to make a page you already have a little better for a query it already appears for.

This post is how to build that list from Search Console, how to rank it so you work on the right end first, and what to do with each row.

Why 8 to 20

Click-through rate falls steeply as you move down a results page, and falls off a cliff between page one and page two. A query at position 14 is producing impressions, which is Google telling you the page is in the running, but almost no clicks. Move it to position 6 and the same impressions start converting. Nothing about the query’s demand changed; you just crossed the line where people stop scrolling.

Positions 1 to 7 are a different kind of work: holding, defending and incremental gains against pages that are already good. Positions below 20 are mostly aspiration; the page is in the index but not in contention. The band in between is where effort and reward line up.

Finding them in Search Console

In the web interface, open the Performance report, set the date range to the last 28 days (three months if the site is small and the numbers are thin), and switch to the Queries tab. Export to Google Sheets. In the sheet, filter the position column to between 8 and 20, then sort by impressions, descending.

That is the list. Two refinements make it useful.

First, add the page. A query is not actionable on its own; a query paired with the page Google shows for it is. In the Performance report, click a query and switch to the Pages tab to see which URL carries it, or export with both dimensions if you are comfortable in the API. Some queries will show two of your pages at different positions, which is its own problem and is covered in spotting cannibalisation.

Second, filter out the noise: brand queries, which you rank for regardless, and queries with a handful of impressions, which will not move anything even if they hit position one.

Ranking by what it is worth, not by position

The mistake most spreadsheets make is sorting by position, so the query at 8.2 sits at the top. Position is not opportunity. A query at position 9 with forty impressions a month is worth less than a query at position 15 with four thousand, because the second one has far more clicks waiting behind the page-one line.

The ranking that works is by what a move would be worth: roughly, impressions multiplied by the difference between the click-through rate you would expect at the target position and the rate you get now. You do not need the exact curve. Sorting by impressions within the band gets you most of the way, and if you want the extra precision, any published CTR-by-position table will do.

QueryWatch’s striking-distance view does this ranking for you, on the property’s own latest complete day, and it is on the free tier. It exists because this is the report every agency builds by hand in a spreadsheet, every quarter, for every client, and it should take one tap rather than an afternoon.

What to do with each row

Work from the top of the ranked list, one query-and-page pair at a time. The checklist is short and the order matters.

Make the page answer the query explicitly. Open the page and read it as someone who typed that query. If the answer is in paragraph six under a heading that says something else, move it to the top and give it a heading that uses the query’s words. This single change does more than everything below combined, because it is the thing Google is checking.

Rewrite the title and the snippet. The title should contain the query or its obvious variant. The meta description should promise what the page delivers. Both affect click-through rate, and click-through rate at position 9 is where the fastest gains live.

Add internal links from pages that already rank well, with the query or something close to it as the anchor text. Three links from strong pages is a meaningful signal and costs twenty minutes.

Add what is missing. Compare the page with the ones above it for the query. If they all have a table, a comparison, a worked example or an answer to a follow-up question and yours does not, that is the gap.

Check for a sibling page. If two of your pages appear for the query at positions 11 and 14, you are competing with yourself, and consolidating them usually moves the survivor further than any amount of polishing either.

Then watch it. Save the query to a watchlist, and give it four to eight weeks. In QueryWatch the watchlist holds five queries on the free tier and is unlimited on Pro, and Pro’s new-top-ten alert notifies you the day a watched query enters positions 1 to 10, which is a satisfying message to receive.

How often

For retainer work, monthly is about right: rebuild the list, see what moved, pick the next three pairs. The list changes slowly, and the point of it is to answer “what should we do next quarter”, which is a harder question to answer from a phone than “what happened yesterday”, and the one clients actually pay for.