How to find low-hanging fruit keywords

A low-hanging fruit keyword, or a striking distance keyword, is a search where your page already ranks, but just off the part of the page people click: roughly position 8 to 20. Google has already decided your page is about the topic. It has not decided it is one of the best pages about it. Closing that gap is the fastest traffic a small site can win, because the page exists, the indexing is done, and the fix is usually an afternoon’s edit rather than a new post.

Why position 8 to 20 is the range

Clicks fall off steeply down page one and almost to nothing on page two. A page at position 12 gets a fraction of the clicks of the same page at position 5, for the same searches. So a move from 12 to 5 is worth more than a move from 40 to 12, and it is also far more likely: the page is already close enough for Google to have tested it on page one, and a small improvement is enough to keep it there.

Below position 20, the page is usually the wrong page for the query, and the fix is a rewrite or a new post. Above position 8, the page is already collecting most of what it will collect. The band between is where a heading, a paragraph, and an internal link move the number.

How to find them in Search Console

Search Console has the data, and hides it behind an average.

Open Performance, then Search results.
Set the date range to the last 28 days.
Turn on Average position and Impressions, and turn off the others.
Sort by impressions, descending.
Read down the list for queries with an average position between 8 and 20 and enough impressions to matter. Twenty a month is a reasonable floor for a small site.

Export the table when the list is long. The queries with the most impressions in that band are the ones to edit first, because impressions are the searches you are already being shown for and not winning.

Two things to keep in mind while reading:

Average position is an average. A query at 9.5 might be a page at 4 on desktop and 15 on mobile, or a page at 6 last week and 13 this week. Filter by device, and compare two periods, before you decide what the number means.
Several pages can share a query. If two of your pages both appear for the same query, Google is splitting them. Pick one, make it the better page, and link the other to it.

What edit moves each one

Open the page and the query side by side, then the pages that rank above you. The edit almost always falls into one of these:

The query isn’t in a heading. The page covers the topic but never says the phrase where Google reads it first. Add a heading that uses the query, and answer it in the first paragraph under it.
The answer is late. The page gets to the point after 600 words of introduction. Move the answer up.
The page is missing a section the top results have. Compare the headings. The section three of the top five pages share and yours lacks is the one to add.
No internal links point at it. Link to the page from your two or three most-visited posts on related topics, with the query as the link text.
The page is old. Update the facts, the year, and the screenshots, and set the modified date honestly.

Change one thing, wait two to three weeks, and read the position again. A daily rank tracker shows the move sooner than Search Console’s average will, and tells you which day it happened so you can match it to the edit.

Doing it every week

Pulling the list is five minutes. Remembering to pull it is the part that fails. GapDigest connects to a site’s Search Console, and each week’s report lists the queries at position 8 to 20 with 20 or more impressions, sorted by impressions, under the heading “Within striking distance.” The same email carries the content gap analysis against your competitors and a post plan for each gap worth writing, so the week’s list has both kinds of work on it: the pages to fix and the pages to write. It is on the free plan.