Find Striking-Distance Keywords in Google Search Console

Somewhere in your Google Search Console account is a list of searches your Shopify store nearly ranks for. Page two, maybe the bottom of page one, getting impressions but almost no clicks. These are striking-distance keywords, and they are the closest thing SEO has to free money. Google already decided your page is relevant. You just have not finished the job.

This is the most reliable content workflow we know, because it starts from what Google is already telling you instead of a keyword tool's guess about what might work.

What "striking distance" means

When Search Console reports an average position of 12 for a query, it means your page typically shows up near the top of page two. Almost nobody clicks page two. But the gap between position 12 and position 6 is usually small in effort and enormous in clicks, because click-through rate falls off a cliff after the first few results.

The standard striking-distance band is average position 8 to 20. A page in that range has already cleared the hard part. Google understands the topic, trusts the domain enough to show it, and is one nudge away from putting it where people look. Targeting these beats chasing brand-new keywords, where you start from zero and fight the whole first page.

Pulling the list out of Search Console

Here is the exact path. It takes about ten minutes the first time.

1. Open Performance and set the date range to the last 3 months. A longer window smooths out noise; a shorter one misses queries that only appear some weeks.
2. Turn on all four metrics at the top: Total Clicks, Total Impressions, Average CTR, and Average Position. Position is off by default and it is the one that matters here.
3. Click the Queries tab. You now have every search your store appears for, with its position and click count.
4. Sort or mentally filter for rows where position is between 8 and 20 and impressions are healthy but clicks are low or zero. Those are your striking-distance queries.
5. Export the table and drop it in a sheet so you can prioritize.

Two filters sharpen the list. Set a position filter (greater than 7.9 and less than 20.1) and an impressions threshold so you ignore queries nobody actually searches. What remains is a ranked backlog of winnable searches, sorted by the demand behind them.

Prioritize by intent, not just volume

Not every striking-distance keyword deserves work. Before you act on a row, ask two questions.

Does this match what I sell? A craft-coffee store ranking at position 11 for "how to descale a kettle" is technically in striking distance, but the click will not buy anything. Weight your effort toward queries where the searcher is a plausible customer.

Is the intent a fit for the page that ranks? Sometimes the wrong page is ranking for a query, in which case the fix is to either point the right page at it or clarify the existing one. Always note which URL is ranking for each query. Search Console shows this when you click a query and switch to the Pages tab.

Turn a striking-distance query into a page-one result

Once you have a prioritized query and the page that ranks for it, the work is surgical, not a rewrite.

• Put the exact phrasing in the title and an H2. If you rank for "wide toe box trail shoes" with a page titled "Our Trail Running Collection," the page is succeeding despite its title. Make the match explicit.
• Answer the query in the first sentence of that section. Models and skim-readers both reward a clean lead. State the answer, then elaborate.
• Expand the thin part. If the ranking section is two sentences, give it the depth a position-six result has. Add the specifics, the numbers, the edge cases.
• Pass internal authority to it. Link to the page from two or three related posts using the target phrasing as anchor text. This is the single most overlooked lever, and it costs nothing. Our build topical authority with pillar and cluster content guide explains the internal-linking side in depth.
• Refresh the date if the page earns it. A genuine update signals freshness, which both Google and AI engines weigh.

Then leave it for a few weeks and re-check the position. This is a measurement loop, not a one-shot, which is the whole point of working from Search Console data: you can see whether the move worked.

The same data finds your content gaps

Striking-distance analysis tells you which existing pages to sharpen. The flip side of the same export tells you what to write next: queries you get impressions for but have no dedicated page answering. Those are content gaps, and they are evidence-based, not invented. Proving which content actually moved a query is the subject of how to prove your content drives traffic.

Make it a routine, not a one-off

The reason most stores never do this is that it is fiddly to pull, easy to forget, and the payoff lags by a few weeks. That is exactly the kind of work worth systematizing. AgentReady Reach was built around this loop: it connects to your Search Console, harvests the striking-distance queries and content gaps from your real data, drafts posts grounded in your catalog and voice, and then measures the lift back in the same Search Console so you can see what actually worked. If you want to see the foundation it builds on first, our free Shopify AI readiness checker shows where your store stands today. Either way, the data you need is already sitting in your account, waiting.