How to find and use Google ranking opportunities

There are two ways to find ranking opportunities in your own Search Console data, and both work for keywords as well as for pages. I'll explain both in detail here. If you'd rather skip the manual filtering, our free low-hanging fruit finder surfaces these ranking opportunities straight from your Search Console data automatically.

What are ranking opportunities and how to find them

Ranking opportunities are pages or keywords that already rank moderately on Google. Usually these rankings can be pushed onto the first page with a little on-page optimization.

Find ranking opportunities with a single filter

Open Google Search Console and go to Performance → Search results. Turn on the Average position metric toggle above the chart, then open the Queries tab (or the Pages tab, depending on whether you want keyword or page opportunities). Export the table to Google Sheets or CSV and keep only the rows ranking on the second page of Google — roughly positions 11 to 20. Those are your headline opportunities: Google already ranks them, just one page too low.

Find ranking opportunities more granular in the table

If you feel like there should be more opportunities, sort through the export yourself. Widen the position filter to roughly 7–15 to catch page-one stragglers alongside page-two contenders. Then sort by impressions so the queries real users actually see rise to the top — a page-two keyword with thousands of impressions is worth far more of your time than one with a handful, and it's well worth optimizing first.

The fast path: doing this by hand across a whole site means exporting, filtering, and eyeballing hundreds of rows. The low-hanging fruit finder runs the exact same pull for you — it reads your Search Console data, filters to the ranking opportunities, and ranks them by how much traffic each one is leaving on the table, so you start optimizing instead of filtering.

How to improve your rankings and push into the top 10

The great thing about these opportunities is that Google already knows about them and is ranking them fairly well. This is why it is usually possible to push these rankings into the top 10 or even top 5 with just a little bit of work. Of course this also depends on how strong your competition is.

Optimize meta title, description and H1

First check your meta title, description and H1 – especially if you should have a CTR below average – and optimize them to feature the keyword you like to improve your ranking for.

Optimize or add more content

Next check your pages content and make sure the keyword pops up in your <h1>-tag and in the first paragraph of text. Try to use it a few more times in various places in the content but don’t spam – make it natural. Also make sure that your content is up-to-date and update it if necessary.

Add great content to the page. Make sure you cover the topic on a deep level better than the websites who rank higher than you. Research and answer questions that people want to know about that subject.

Add supporting pages

Add other pages to your website about similar or related subjects. Point internal links from these new, supporting pages to the main page that you already rank for. Use variations of the main keyword(s) as anchor texts.

Get external links

Real, earned external links are still probably the most powerful single ranking factor - yet they are hard to get. If you have the ability to get a link pointing to your page from another website because they like your page, or because they like your company, that would be great. Don't ever pay for or acquire spammy links.

Check for technical problems

Does your site have a high page load time? Do you have faulty code or broken links? Is your site responsive? Check for common technical SEO problems and fix them.

Track your changes

In most cases you only need to work on a few of the above for each ranking. Note the date you made the change so you can see how your improvements affected the ranking. Also try to make the improvements one by one (if you don't have very obvious faults) to see which one actually made the difference.

Always give Google a few days to adjust to your changes – they will not be visible instantly. You can speed things up a little by pasting the page's URL into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and clicking Request indexing, which asks Google to recrawl the page.

If you don’t see changes after about two weeks try to add some internal links using the keyword as anchor text. Again don’t overdo it. Start with 3-5 links, mark your changes and see how things work out.