The Search Console Trick That Finds Your Best Opportunities

Most people use Search Console wrong, and by wrong I mean they pull it up, stare lovingly at their top queries, feel a warm glow of validation about the keywords that are already working, and then completely ignore the goldmine of opportunity sitting right in front of them, which is particularly absurd when you consider that this is free data from Google itself, no need to shell out for expensive tools that are mostly just repackaging what you already have access to.

The real opportunity isn't what's already ranking #1, because those pages are already doing their job, but rather what's ranking #8, or #12, or #15, pages that are so tantalizingly close to the first page that they're practically waving at you from the other side of a fence you could easily hop over if you'd just notice them.

The Striking Distance Filter

Here's the exact process, and I mean exact, because the beauty of this technique is that it's mechanical and repeatable, not some vague "go look at your data" advice that sounds helpful but leaves you staring at spreadsheets with no idea what to do next:

Step 1: Go to Search Console, navigate to Performance, and then to Search results, which is where all the good stuff lives and where you should probably be spending more time than you currently are.

Step 2: Click the filter row and add a filter for Position, which is the metric that most people glance at but few people actually use strategically.

Step 3: Set it to "Greater than 3" and "Smaller than 21," because positions 4 through 20 represent that magical sweet spot where you're close enough to matter but not so far away that improving would require a herculean effort.

Step 4: Sort by Impressions in descending order, which surfaces the queries that are getting the most eyeballs, the ones where your current mediocre ranking is costing you the most potential traffic.

What you're looking at now is pure leverage, the closest thing SEO has to found money, because these are queries where Google has already decided you're relevant enough to show, you've already done the hard work of proving you belong in the conversation, and all you need to do is be slightly better than you currently are to dramatically increase your click share.

Why This Works

Getting from position 50 to position 10 is genuinely hard, the kind of hard that involves months of effort and significant investment, because you're competing against established pages that Google already trusts, pages with years of accumulated authority and backlinks and all the other signals that tell search engines "this content has been vetted by the internet and found worthy."

Getting from position 8 to position 3, by contrast, is much easier than most people realize, because you've already proven relevance, Google is already showing you for this query to thousands or tens of thousands of searchers, and all you need to do is be slightly better than the handful of pages currently above you, which is a fundamentally different problem than convincing Google you deserve to be in the conversation at all.

The click-through rate difference between these positions is so massive that it almost feels unfair:

• Position 1: ~30% CTR
• Position 3: ~10% CTR
• Position 8: ~2% CTR

Moving from position 8 to position 3 can 5x your traffic from that query, which sounds like marketing hyperbole until you actually do the math on impressions times CTR, and the truly beautiful thing is that these are queries you're already ranking for, which means the hardest part of the SEO work is already done.

What To Do With The List

Once you have your list of high-impression striking distance queries, the work becomes surprisingly methodical, almost mechanical, which is exactly the kind of SEO work I love because it removes the guesswork and replaces it with a clear decision tree:

1. Check the current page. Click the query, then click "Pages" to see which URL is ranking, because sometimes the wrong page ranks for a query and you've got an internal competition problem rather than an optimization problem, where two pages on your site are fighting each other instead of fighting the competition.

2. Analyze the gap. Search the query incognito and actually look at what the top 3 results have that you don't, whether that's more depth, better formatting, fresher information, original data, or some combination of all of the above that makes their content genuinely more useful to someone searching for that term.

3. Close the gap. Don't rewrite everything in a panic, just make targeted improvements that address what's actually missing, and for pages with declining traffic that used to rank better, apply the content refresh formula to bring them back to life.

4. Wait and measure. Give it 2-4 weeks because SEO doesn't operate in real-time, then check if position improved, and if it did, move to the next opportunity on your list, working through them systematically rather than trying to fix everything at once.

The Priority Formula

Not all striking distance queries are equal, which seems obvious once you think about it but is easy to forget when you're staring at a spreadsheet with 200 rows all screaming for attention, so you need a way to prioritize that accounts for both the size of the opportunity and the likelihood of improvement:

Impressions × (20 - Position) = Opportunity Score

A query with 10,000 impressions at position 15 has more potential than a query with 10,000 impressions at position 5, because there's simply more room to improve, more positions to climb, and each position gained at the lower end of the spectrum brings you closer to that magical threshold where CTR starts to really matter.

Work through your list in priority order, tackling the highest opportunity scores first, and you'll often find that the first few optimizations drive more traffic than months of creating new content from scratch, which is both deeply satisfying and a little frustrating when you realize how long you've been ignoring this goldmine.

Stop chasing new keywords when you haven't finished harvesting the ones you've already planted, start improving what's already close to working, and recognize that the opportunity cost of ignoring these striking distance queries is massive, representing traffic you've essentially already earned but are failing to collect because you're too busy looking for the next shiny keyword instead of optimizing the ones right in front of you.