How to find striking-distance keywords and rank them

Most SEOs default to chasing new keywords. That is backwards. The fastest rankings you will ever earn are the ones you have already half-earned: terms where you sit at position 8 to 20, languishing on page 2 where almost nobody clicks. Google has already decided your page is relevant. It just has not decided it is the best answer yet. Closing that gap is usually a question of a few internal links and a content tweak, not a six-month link-building campaign.

What striking-distance keywords actually are

A striking-distance keyword is a query where your site already ranks but ranks too low to get meaningful traffic. The classic definition is positions 11 to 20 (page 2). I widen it slightly to positions 8 to 20, because positions 8, 9, and 10 still get a thin trickle of clicks, and the effort to move from 8 to 3 is similar to moving from 14 to 6. Both are short hops, not new builds.

The reason this works is pure click-through-curve math. Position 1 on Google captures somewhere around 25 to 30 percent of clicks (estimates vary by SERP layout). Position 11, the top of page 2, captures roughly 1 percent or less. So a page sitting at position 12 is doing almost all the hard work of ranking and collecting almost none of the reward. Push it to position 5 and you might 10x its clicks without writing a single new article.

That is the whole pitch: you are not creating relevance from scratch, you are converting relevance Google already trusts into visibility. It is the highest-ROI activity in most SEO accounts, and almost everyone skips it because finding new keywords feels more productive than fixing old ones.

Where to find them: the exact data pull

You do not need a paid tool to find striking-distance keywords. The single best source is free and it is your own Google Search Console. GSC reports the real average position for every query your site actually surfaced for, which is far more accurate for your own pages than any third-party rank estimate.

Pulling the list from Search Console

1. Open Search Console, go to Performance > Search results, and set the date range to the last 3 months for a stable average.
2. Turn on all four metric toggles: Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Average position. That last one is off by default and it is the one that matters most here.
3. Switch to the Queries tab and export everything to a sheet (the UI caps at 1,000 rows, the export and the API give you more).
4. Filter to rows where Average position is between 8 and 20 AND Impressions is above some threshold (I use 50 to 100 per month as a floor, so you ignore noise).
5. Sort the survivors by impressions, descending. The top of that list is your priority queue: queries Google shows you for a lot, that you are not yet winning.

If you want a richer pull, the GSC API or a connector like the one in Looker Studio lets you grab the page-plus-query pair, which tells you exactly which URL is ranking for each striking-distance term. That page-level mapping is what makes the internal-linking fix possible later.

What the paid tools add

GSC tells you your positions but not the competitive picture. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs add keyword difficulty, search volume estimates, and the ability to see the SERP without re-searching it yourself. Lowfruits is purpose-built for spotting low-authority results on a SERP, which is gold for deciding whether a striking-distance term is actually winnable. For a full breakdown of which tools earn their subscription, see our rundown of the best backlink and SEO tools in 2026.

How to qualify a keyword before you spend effort

Not every page-2 keyword is worth chasing. A high-impression term where the top 10 are all DR80 publishers with 4,000-word guides is not a quick win, it is a multi-quarter project. Before you commit, qualify each candidate against four filters.

• Intent match. Open the SERP. If the top results are a different content type than your page (you have a blog post, Google ranks product pages), you are fighting the intent and no internal link will save you. Skip it or change the page type.
• Winnability. Scan the DR/DA of the results below you. If two or three results in the top 10 are weaker than your page, the slot is realistically takeable. This is exactly what Lowfruits automates.
• Commercial value. A position-12 term with 2,000 impressions and zero buying intent is worth less than a position-14 term with 300 impressions that converts. Weight by what the click is actually worth to you.
• The cannibalization check. Filter your GSC export for cases where two of your own URLs rank for the same query. That split signal is often why you are stuck on page 2. Consolidate or differentiate before doing anything else.

The internal-linking fix that does most of the work

Here is the part people miss. The reason a page sits at position 12 is rarely that it lacks external backlinks. More often it lacks internal ones. Your strongest pages (the homepage, your top guides, pages that already attract links) hold authority that never flows to the striking-distance page because nothing points to it. Fixing that is fast, free, and entirely within your control.

The mechanics are simple and they compound. Find your highest-authority, topically relevant pages and add contextual links pointing to the striking-distance URL, using descriptive anchor text that includes the target query (or a natural variant of it). This passes both PageRank and a relevance signal in one move. For the full framework on how to prioritize which links to add, read our deep dive on the internal linking strategy that actually moves rankings.

Step by step

1. In Search Console, take your target query and look at the Pages tab while the query filter is applied. Confirm exactly which URL ranks for it. That is your destination page.
2. Find 3 to 5 strong donor pages on the same topic. Use a site:yourdomain.com [topic] search, or sort your GSC pages by clicks to find your authority hubs.
3. Add one contextual, in-body link from each donor to the target, varying the anchor text so it does not look templated. Aim for a mix of exact-match and partial-match anchors, never the same phrase five times.
4. Check the target page is not an orphan page sitting with zero or one internal link. Orphans are the most common reason a relevant page is stuck deep on page 2.
5. Wait. Re-crawl is not instant. Give Google 2 to 6 weeks, then recheck the position in GSC. Resist the urge to pile on more changes before you have read the result of the first one.

The anchor text point deserves emphasis. Internal anchors are far safer than external ones, but you can still confuse Google by using identical anchor text everywhere, and you waste the relevance signal by using generic anchors like click here. Descriptive, varied anchors win. The same discipline that governs external links applies here in a lighter form, which is why understanding anchor text ratios without over-optimizing pays off internally too.

When internal links are not enough

Sometimes you do the internal work, you wait six weeks, and the page moves from 14 to 11 and stalls. That tells you something useful: the page has the internal authority it needs, and the remaining gap is competitive. At that point you have three options, in order of cost and effort.

1. Improve the page itself. Re-read the top three results for your query and find what they cover that you do not. Tools like Surfer or Frase quantify the content gap, but you can do it manually. A stalled page is often just thinner than the winners.
2. Build a few external links. If the page is genuinely competitive and commercially valuable, a small number of quality editorial links from relevant sites can be the final push. This is where you weigh cost against the value of the position.
3. Re-examine intent. If nothing works, the SERP may simply not want your content format. Better to learn that after a free internal-linking experiment than after a paid link campaign.

On that second point: a single relevant editorial link to a page already sitting at position 9 or 10 is often the most cost-effective backlink you will ever buy, because you are paying to convert near-misses into wins rather than to build relevance from zero. That is exactly the use case our editorial placements are built for.

A realistic 30-day workflow

Here is how I run this on a real account, start to finish, without it becoming a sprawling project.

Run this loop quarterly and your striking-distance list never goes stale, because as old terms graduate to page 1, new ones drift into the 8-to-20 band from the content you keep publishing. It becomes a repeatable system rather than a one-off audit.

The mistakes that waste the opportunity

• Chasing volume over intent. A 5,000-impression informational term you cannot monetize is worth less than a 200-impression term tied to a sale. Weight by value, not vanity.
• Treating average position as gospel. GSC averages across devices, locations, and SERP features. A reported 14 might be position 8 on desktop and 20 on mobile. Segment when a number looks odd.
• Doing everything at once. If you add internal links, rewrite the content, and buy a backlink in the same week, you will never know which one worked. Change one variable, then measure.
• Ignoring the SERP layout. A nominal position 8 sitting below a featured snippet, a People Also Ask block, and four ads is functionally page 2. Look at the real estate, not just the rank number.