Striking distance keywords can highlight where sites may be able to make a big impact on their rankings and traffic with less effort. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Jo talks about how to locate, track, and label these keyword opportunities in Moz Pro.

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Hello there, Moz fans. It's Jo here from the Content team for another episode of Whiteboard Friday. Today I'm talking about those opportunities where maybe you're ranking, but you're not quite on the top of the results. These are what we call striking distance keywords. I'm going to talk a little bit about why they're important, and I'm going to show you exactly how to find them. 

So, as I mentioned, your striking distance keywords are pages on your site that are already ranking, but they're not quite in the top three positions. So I define them as pages that you're ranking for your target keywords from position 4 to 20. There's an opportunity here that maybe with a little push or some small tweaks, you could really have a big impact on your rankings and on the targeted traffic to your site by focusing on these striking distance keywords. 

You and I both know that unless you're in those top three positions, it's going to be really hard to be generating a lot of organic traffic and especially with so much competition in the search results — AI overviews is a big one at the moment. But also some of the classics, like shopping results, images, the Knowledge Graph, other things that can affect on the visibility of those very traditional top 10 organic links. It's not just enough anymore to rank in those top 10 positions — you really want to be on those top three podium spots to get the lion's share of the traffic. 

And striking distance keywords are definitely an appealing opportunity for sites because the idea is you don't have to put in as much effort than starting from scratch. However, it's also important to note that this is definitely important to apply alongside a more broader keyword strategy. So also looking at keyword gaps where you're not ranking at all, keywords you want to protect, so maybe you're in those top three positions and you want to keep an eye on them, and also paying attention to where your competitors are performing. And with those, that is a full spectrum of a good SEO keyword research strategy that you can use to generate a lot more organic traffic for your website. 

So, just a little recap: striking distance keywords are where you're in position 4 to 20. The idea is that with some tweaks, a little bit of effort applied to your website, you can see some real results in the organic traffic to your website. 

So let's get stuck into exactly how we can find striking distance keywords with Moz Pro. So in the Keyword Research section of Moz Pro, head to Ranking Keywords, enter your website, select the market you're targeting, and click Analyze. 

From here, you'll see a full list of keywords, where you're ranking in position 1 to 50, that's in our dataset. And using these filters, you can refine this list further. We're going to look at ranking first of all, and we're going to slide these toggles to position 4 to 20 and click Apply. 

You can also look at filtering further by Difficulty or Volume if you have a deep understanding of your market and your website and your competitors. If you're not certain what Difficulty level you're wanting to target, I've got a handy guide for you to find your difficulty benchmark. And the Bitly link there is mz.cm/difficultybenchmark. Again, if you're not sure, leave these blank and we're going to collect together all of these keywords so you can start to track those. 

And that's it. You've got yourself a list of striking distance keywords in a couple of clicks. 

Next up, we're going to track those with our Moz Pro Campaign. 

So scroll down to your ranking keywords that you'll see in the Keyword Research section, and you'll want to select the top checkbox in the header for Keyword, and it will select all of those keywords in that list. Then on the other side, click Add To and select Campaign. 

If you don't have a Campaign set up and you're not sure how to do that, don't worry, I've got you. Head to mz.cm/trackasite, and it will take you through, step-by-step, on getting started. 

And finally, the last step is to make sure that you have all those keywords labeled. 

So head over to your Campaign and open it up. And under Keyword Rankings, there's a Tracked Keywords Overview section. Just scroll down and you want to filter by the Rank delta. Once you've selected that, toggle to the last page and begin to select and apply a label to all those keywords that you've just added. 

And you've just added them so they don't have a rank associated with them yet, which means they'll all filter to the bottom of your list. Go through and add labels. I've named mine "Striking distance keywords" so that I can compare those with those other keyword strategies I mentioned earlier: keyword gaps, competitor keywords, and keywords that you want to protect as well. 

So this is a quick way for you to locate those keywords where there's a big opportunity and then also start to track them so that you can see the impact of the work you're doing. As you know, anything that you do on your site can help you to increase the relevancy of your content. Any work that you do offsite in terms of link building or earning links is going to help build your authority. And there's a lot of things that you can do also behind the scenes, on the technical side, which can also help improve the efficiency of your website, how Google and other crawlers crawl it, and increasing the page speed. And they're the three main elements of SEO that you can be focusing on to see some impact on these striking distance keywords. 

Best of luck to all of you. Thank you so much, and see you next time.