Striking distance keywords: positions 11–20

Updated 2026-08-15

How to find the queries you rank just off page one for, step by step in Search Console, why they are the highest-leverage work in your account, and how to decide which ones are actually worth the afternoon.

Position 11 gets almost no clicks. Position 9 gets meaningful traffic. The gap between them is small in ranking terms and enormous in outcome, which is what makes positions 11–20 the best-value list in your account.

Why this range and not others

Moving a page from 40 to 30 changes nothing you can measure. Moving 12 to 8 crosses onto page one, where essentially all clicks are. You are also, by definition, already relevant enough to rank — the hard part is done. Compare that with a query you do not rank for at all, where you are guessing whether you can compete.

The size of the prize is worth being concrete about, because it is the whole argument. Click-through rate does not decay smoothly across positions; it falls off a cliff at the bottom of page one and then flattens into noise. A query at position 12 with 500 monthly impressions is earning you almost nothing. The same query at position 7 is a different line in your report. See what a good CTR looks like by position for the shape of that curve.

One caveat on "page one"

The 11–20 band is a useful heuristic, not a literal page boundary any more. Continuous scroll on mobile removed the hard break at result ten, and AI Overviews, People Also Ask blocks and shopping units all push the traditional results further down on the queries that have them. Position 8 on a query with a large AI Overview above it may sit below the fold.

This does not change the strategy — improving from 12 to 8 is still the cheapest win available — but it does mean you should check what the SERP for your candidate query actually looks like before predicting the gain. Two queries at identical positions can be worth very different amounts.

Finding them, step by step

1. Open Performance → Search results in Search Console.
2. Set the date range to 3 months. Shorter ranges give positions that bounce around; longer ones average over changes you have since made.
3. Tick Average position and Impressions above the chart so both columns show.
4. Open the Queries tab and sort by Impressions, descending.
5. Read down the list for rows with an average position between roughly 11 and 20. There is no position filter in the interface, which is why you sort by impressions and scan rather than the other way round.
6. Export to a spreadsheet if the list runs long, and filter properly there.

How many impressions is enough?

Impressions matter as much as position — position 11 on a query with 12 impressions a year is not worth an afternoon. As a working threshold over a three-month range, treat anything under about 50 impressions as noise, 50–200 as worth a look if the query is commercially relevant, and 200+ as a genuine candidate. Scale that to your own site: on a property with 200 clicks a month those numbers are too high, and on one with 200,000 they are far too low. The principle is that the query needs enough impressions that a position change will be visible against normal week-to-week variance.

Prioritising

Rank candidates by impressions, then sanity-check each:

• Is one page ranking, or several? Several of your pages hovering around the same query usually means you are competing with yourself. Consolidating often beats optimising.
• Does the ranking page actually target the query? Frequently the answer is no — you rank incidentally, on a page about something else. That is a case for a page that targets it properly.
• What is on page one? If the first ten results are all one format you do not have, ranking requires matching the format, not tweaking a title.

What usually moves them

• Answering the sub-questions you skipped. Open the top three results and list every question they address. The ones missing from your page are usually why you are eleventh rather than sixth.
• Internal links from your strongest relevant pages, using the query as anchor text. This is the highest-ratio work on the list: it costs ten minutes, needs nobody's approval, and you control it completely.
• Consolidating two half-pages into one complete one, then redirecting the weaker URL. Two pages at position 14 and 19 on the same query are usually one page at position 9.
• Matching the format the SERP rewards. A comparison query wants a table. A "how to" wants numbered steps. Prose competing against a table loses on a query where everyone above you used a table.
• Rewriting the title to match the query, where it honestly can. Cheap and occasionally enough on its own — but only when the page really is about the query, not as a way of pretending it is.

What does not move them

Worth saying, because these absorb a lot of time:

• Adding the keyword more often. Term frequency stopped being the lever a long time ago, and the version of your page with the phrase wedged in six more times is worse to read.
• Padding to hit a word count. Length correlates with ranking because thorough answers are longer, not because long answers rank. Padding gets you the length without the cause.
• Changing the publish date without changing the page. Nothing happens, and you have lost the ability to tell when it last actually changed.
• Requesting indexing repeatedly. It does not influence ranking. It gets the page recrawled, which matters only if you changed something.

How long to wait

Give a change two to four weeks before you judge it, and expect the position to wobble in both directions before it settles. Two complications to plan around: Search Console's data runs roughly two days behind, so the last two days of any range are incomplete — see why the data is two days behind — and average position is impression-weighted, so it can move without any ranking changing at all. If your new content pulls in a batch of additional queries you rank poorly for, the page's average position gets worse while the page is doing better. What average position actually means covers that trap; the defence is to track the specific query you targeted, not the page average.

Re-check monthly. Positions in this band are volatile, and the list refreshes itself faster than you can work through it. That is a feature — it means you rarely run out of candidates.