- Google Search Console is free and shows exactly which keywords trigger your website to appear on Google — including hundreds you’ve never intentionally targeted.
- Pages sitting in positions 5–20 are your fastest path to more traffic. Google already considers them relevant; they just need to rank higher.
- The Performance report’s Queries filter (impressions > 100 and position > 4) surfaces your best quick wins in about 15 minutes.
- Update an existing page — don’t create a new one. Two pages competing for the same keyword split your authority and cancel each other out.
- Most businesses running GSC have never run this filter. The keywords are already there; you just haven’t looked.
If your website is showing up on page 2 for “roof replacement Denver” and you don’t know it, you’re handing customers to a competitor every single day. According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, 98% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses — and the vast majority of that traffic goes to page 1 results. Page 2 doesn’t get a participation trophy.
Google Search Console tells you exactly which searches you’re showing up for and where. Specifically, it shows you which keywords rank you at positions 5 through 20 — close enough that Google already considers your content a legitimate result, but not close enough to get the clicks. That’s the gap this guide closes.
No paid tools. No guesswork. Just a filter inside a free Google product you probably already have connected to your site.
What Google Search Console Actually Tells You
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows website owners how their pages perform in search results. It tracks which queries triggered your pages to appear, how many times they appeared (impressions), how many times someone clicked (clicks), your average position for each query, and whether Google has any technical issues crawling your site.
GSC is not a traffic tool — that’s Google Analytics. What GSC tracks is everything that happens before the click: what people searched, whether your page appeared, where it appeared, and whether the searcher bothered to click through. The Performance report is where all of this lives, and the Queries tab inside it is the specific view that makes this strategy work.
The most useful pairing in that report is impressions versus clicks. A page with 800 monthly impressions and 10 clicks has a 1.25% click-through rate. A page with 800 monthly impressions and 80 clicks has a 10% CTR. The content could be virtually identical. The difference is almost always position — and position is what the filter below helps you improve.
Why “Almost Ranking” Keywords Are Your Best Opportunity
Position matters more than most business owners expect. According to Advanced Web Ranking’s CTR study, the top three organic results on a Google results page capture more than 50% of all clicks for a given search. By position 8, a typical result gets less than 3%. By position 15, it’s a fraction of a percent.
But pages ranking in positions 5 through 20 have something new pages don’t: Google has already decided they’re relevant. That’s not a small thing. New content can take three to six months before Google decides whether it belongs in the rankings at all. Pages in that 5–20 range have already cleared that bar. Pushing them up is faster and more predictable than starting from scratch.
Consider what that math looks like in practice. Moving a page from position 14 to position 4 — on a keyword with 600 monthly searches — can shift your monthly traffic from single digits to 50 or 60 visitors from that one keyword alone. Repeat that across 10 or 12 pages and you’ve built a meaningful traffic increase without publishing a single new post.
An e-commerce site like ArcherySupplier.com — which reached over 1,100 monthly sessions through consistent content — grew not by constantly publishing new pages, but by systematically identifying and strengthening content that was already getting traction. The almost-ranking keyword filter is the engine behind that approach.
How to Find Your Almost-Ranking Keywords (Step by Step)
This takes about 15 minutes. You need Google Search Console connected to your site — if it isn’t yet, go to search.google.com/search-console and follow the site verification steps. Google will walk you through adding a meta tag or uploading a verification file. Once your site is verified and has been live for at least 60–90 days, you’ll have enough data to work with.
- Go to Performance > Search Results in the left sidebar.
- Set the date range to 90 days. Thirty days gives you too small a sample for keywords that get 100–300 monthly impressions. Ninety days smooths out fluctuations and shows you where you consistently stand.
- Enable all four metrics. Click the checkboxes for Total Clicks, Total Impressions, Average CTR, and Average Position. All four columns need to be visible in your table.
- Open the Queries tab. This lists every search phrase that triggered an impression for your site, sorted by click volume by default.
- Add a Position filter: click “+ New,” choose “Position,” set it to greater than 4. This removes your already-ranking keywords from the view and shows only pages sitting below the top four results.
- Add an Impressions filter: greater than 100. This eliminates noise — one-off searches and keywords with so little volume that optimizing for them wouldn’t move the needle.
- Sort by Impressions descending. The keywords at the top of this list are the searches your site appears for most often without earning meaningful clicks. These are your targets.
What to look for: keywords with 200 or more impressions, a CTR below 5%, and an average position between 5 and 25. A keyword showing 700 impressions, 1.4% CTR, and average position 9.3 is telling you something specific — Google thinks you’re a relevant result for this search, and you’re one page-one ranking away from capturing it.
What to Do With the Keywords You Find
Once you have a list, the next move is specific — and most people get this wrong.
First, find which page Google is serving. Click any keyword in your filtered list, then click the Pages tab. GSC shows you exactly which URL Google has been sending users to for that query. That is the page you’re updating. Not a new page — that one.
Creating a new page for a keyword your existing page already ranks for is one of the most common SEO mistakes small business owners make. Two pages targeting the same keyword split your ranking signals and create a cannibalization problem — Google doesn’t know which to rank, so it ranks neither well. Strengthen the page that already has Google’s attention.
The update itself is focused:
- Add an H2 section with the keyword (or a natural variant) as the heading — write 150 to 250 words directly answering the question that search implies
- Confirm the keyword appears in your first paragraph; if it doesn’t, revise the intro
- Check your title tag — if the keyword isn’t there, add it toward the front
- Find two or three other pages on your site that cover related topics and add an internal link pointing to the page you just updated
That last step — internal links — carries more weight than most people give it. It signals to Google that your site considers this page important enough to reference from elsewhere. Combined with the broader strategy of building topic clusters that reinforce each other, it’s one of the most reliable ways to push almost-ranking pages over the line. For a deeper look at how to prioritize which keywords to chase first, the methodology pairs well with a systematic approach to finding low-competition keywords — GSC data tells you which low-competition terms you’re already getting impressions for.
How to Know When Your Updates Are Working
Don’t check GSC every day after making an update. It won’t tell you anything useful for at least four to six weeks. Google recrawls pages on its own schedule, and ranking changes — even significant ones — often take two to three months to fully settle. The check-in interval most people use is too frequent; it produces anxiety without information.
Set a calendar reminder for six weeks after each update. Return to the Performance report, filter the Queries tab for the specific keyword you targeted, and look at two numbers: average position and CTR.
Position improved and CTR improved — the update worked. Move to the next keyword on your list.
Position held flat — the content may not have been thorough enough, or the competing pages have stronger external link profiles. Try adding more depth rather than giving up: longer answer to the main question, an example, a comparison table.
Position improved but CTR stayed flat — your title tag or meta description is the problem. A result sitting at position 4 with 0.8% CTR is being seen and skipped. Rewrite the title to be more specific and benefit-driven. Include the keyword and make clear what the reader gets by clicking.
This kind of incremental improvement compounds. Sites that update 10 to 15 existing pages over a six-month window — using exactly this filter — typically see a 30 to 50% increase in organic traffic from those pages alone. That’s not from publishing new content. It’s from not ignoring content that’s already almost working. This is how RankOnRepeat approaches content management for client sites: find what’s almost ranking, push it over the line, repeat.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Google Search Console show me all the keywords I rank for?
Not all of them. GSC applies privacy thresholds and aggregates data, so keywords with very low search volume — generally fewer than about 10 monthly searches — may not appear in your report. You’ll see the queries that matter most for optimization purposes, but extremely niche or long-tail terms can be hidden. For everyday small business SEO, this limitation rarely affects the strategy.
Does this work if my website is brand new?
Not immediately. A new site needs to be indexed first, and pages need time to accumulate impression data before they’ll show up in the Queries report in meaningful numbers. You realistically need two to three months of live data before this filter returns actionable results. Think of it as an ongoing maintenance strategy rather than a launch tactic.
How often should I run this filter?
Once a month is enough for most small business websites. After you’ve updated a batch of pages, give them six weeks before re-checking the specific keywords you targeted. Running it weekly doesn’t give updates enough time to register — you end up chasing noise.
Can I do this without hiring an SEO agency?
Yes, completely. The filter takes 15 minutes, and a content update on an existing page doesn’t require technical knowledge. The main barrier is time, not skill. If consistent keyword tracking and content updates aren’t feasible to handle in-house, RankOnRepeat handles the full process — keyword identification, writing, publishing, and tracking — for a flat monthly fee.
If finding almost-ranking keywords, updating the right pages, and tracking results consistently sounds like a solid plan but a poor use of your available hours, RankOnRepeat handles the full process — keyword identification, content creation, publishing, and ongoing tracking — for a flat monthly fee with no per-article billing.
References
- BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey — Annual study on how consumers find and evaluate local businesses online; data on search usage rates and local intent.
- Advanced Web Ranking CTR Study — Ongoing analysis of click-through rates by Google search position; shows the concentration of clicks in positions 1–3.
- Google Search Console — Google Search Central — Official documentation covering setup, verification, and how to interpret Performance report data.
- Backlinko — Google Organic CTR Research — Large-scale analysis of click-through rate distribution across search positions, including the steep drop-off from position 1 to positions 5 and beyond.
- Semrush Content Marketing Research — Industry data on content update ROI and the performance improvement patterns from refreshing existing pages vs. publishing new ones.
Published by the RankOnRepeat editorial team · Last updated: July 31, 2026 · How RankOnRepeat works
