Striking distance keywords: positions 11–20

Updated 2026-08-04

How to find the queries you rank just off page one for, why they are the highest-leverage work in Search Console, and how to prioritise them.

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.

Finding them

In the performance report: set a long date range (three months gives stable positions), open the Queries tab, and look for rows with meaningful impressions and an average position between 11 and 20. Impressions matter as much as position — position 11 on a query with 12 impressions a year is not worth an afternoon.

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

• Covering the sub-questions the top results answer and you skip.
• Internal links from your strongest relevant pages, with the query as anchor text.
• Consolidating two half-pages into one complete one.
• Matching format — a comparison query wants a table, not prose.

Re-check monthly. Positions in this band are volatile, and the list refreshes itself faster than you can work through it.