Page Two Keywords on Shopify: Quick Wins From Search Console

Quick answer: Striking distance keywords are searches where your Shopify store already appears in Google at roughly positions 8 to 20. To find them, open the Performance report in Search Console, filter to your country, exclude brand searches, sort the Queries table by impressions and keep the rows with an average position in that band. Then check which page Google is showing, drop queries with the wrong intent or too few impressions, improve that page’s title, copy and internal links, and judge the result on that page over several weeks. Nothing here is a ranking guarantee.

Page two keywords are the nearest thing SEO has to low-hanging fruit. Google is already showing one of your pages for the search. The page is just not near enough the top to earn much of the click.

“Quick wins” is a phrase I use carefully. Google’s SEO starter guide says some changes can take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and it suggests waiting a few weeks before judging. So this is not a promise. It is a method that costs only time: how to pull the list, how to read Search Console’s numbers without fooling yourself, which queries deserve your next hour, and what to change on a collection page, a product page or a guide.

Everything below is built from Google’s and Shopify’s own help pages, which I read on 31 October 2026, plus one named click-through study. Search Console’s labels change from time to time, so if a button is named slightly differently on your screen, look for the closest match. The worked example uses made-up numbers, labelled as such. No client results are used.

What “striking distance” means, and why I use 8 to 20

Search Console has no striking distance report. The term is SEO shorthand for searches where you appear, but not high enough to earn many clicks, and there is no official range. I use positions 8 to 20 as a working band, and it is my rule of thumb, not Google’s.

Two reasons for it:

• The bottom of page one is not the finish line. Backlinko (now owned by Semrush) analysed about 4 million Google results, using click-through data from several Search Console accounts supplied through Semrush. Its page, last updated on 16 April 2025, says click-through rates across positions 8 to 10 are virtually the same, that the top three results took 54.4% of all clicks, and that ranking on page one “may not be a worthy SEO goal” while the top spot, or at least the top two, is what counts. So a query at position 9 is not a finished job. It stays in striking distance, because the prize is a jump toward the top three, not one place up.
• Past about position 20, one edit rarely does it. That is judgement, not data. A query at position 45 usually needs a different kind of page or much stronger signals, not a title tweak.

On the idea that shoppers rarely look at page two, here is the evidence I am willing to put my name to. The same Backlinko study reports that only 0.63% of Google searchers clicked something from the second page. Treat that as direction, not a forecast. It is an average across many sites and queries, and the page does not present it as a Shopify or Australian figure. The study also found that 90.3% of the queries in its dataset had ten impressions or fewer, which is why you will want an impressions floor later.

What average position does and does not mean

This is the part most striking distance guides skip, and it causes bad decisions. This section comes from Google’s Search Console Help pages: “What are impressions, position, and clicks?”, “Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup” and “About the data”.

The chart number is a whole-store blend

The chart at the top of the Performance report shows the average position of the topmost result from your entire site. Google defines the metric as the topmost position of a link to your property or page, averaged across all queries it appeared for. Elsewhere Google describes it as an average across impressions, so I would not lean on exactly how it is weighted. The practical point is the same either way: it blends every search you appear for, brand searches and rare long-tail searches included.

Picture a store (illustrative) that is first for its own name and fiftieth for dozens of category searches. It gets one blended number that describes neither. That makes the headline figure a smoke alarm, not a score. Do not set it as a target and do not report it as a result.

The table is different. In the table, the value is the average position for the URL or grouping shown in that row. That is the number to work with.

”Topmost” can hide your second page

If two of your pages appear for the same search, Google counts the higher one. Google’s own example: a search where your site appears at positions 2, 4 and 6 is counted as 2, another where it appears at 3, 5 and 9 is counted as 3, and the average across the two is 2.5.

Here is why that matters on Shopify. Data in the Queries tab is aggregated by property, so for each search only your topmost result is reported. If a collection page and a product page both appear for “burr grinder”, the Queries table shows one position, the higher one. The Pages tab aggregates by page, and Google says average position and CTR generally look better when aggregated by property. Check both tabs before you decide which page to improve. Search Console also assigns data to the canonical URL Google selects, which is why duplicate content and canonical URLs matter here.

Position is not the same as page

Google says a position number can mean different things in different situations and that you should not make simple assumptions. Its own example is position 11, which could be a spot in a knowledge panel or the first item on page 2. Each element on the results page takes one position. An AI Overview takes a single position, and every link inside it shares that position. Ads take none.

So “page two” is a convenient label, not a precise one. Google recommends watching change in position over time, and its common-tasks guidance says to focus more on trends in impressions and clicks than on position alone. Look at the real results page first.

Only results someone saw get a position

A link must get an impression for its position to be recorded. Google’s example is a result on page 3 when the searcher only views page 1: no position is recorded for that search.

My inference from that, not a Google statement: impressions at positions 11 to 20 only count searches where somebody looked at page two, so the real demand for the search is likely larger than what Search Console shows. Use impressions to rank your candidates against each other. Do not use them to forecast traffic.

Your own search is not the report

Google says the position value is an average across all searches, and that for your own search it can differ because of search history, location and similar variables. For an Australian store, set the country filter to Australia and stop judging by your own laptop.

What the report leaves out

• Google’s October 2022 Search Central post says exports from the Search Console interface are capped at 1,000 rows, so rare queries may be missing on a bigger store. Check the row count of your own export.
• Anonymised queries (ones not issued by more than a few dozen users over two to three months, per the same post) are left out of the tables. They stay in the chart totals unless you filter by query, so filtered numbers will not add up to the headline.
• The newest data can be preliminary, and Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months, per Google’s Analytics help. Export regularly if you want a longer history.
• Google’s data anomalies page, as I read it on 31 October 2026, records a logging error that affected reported impressions, and with them CTR and average position (not clicks), for data from 13 May 2025. Google marks it resolved and says you may notice impressions fall as a result. The entry’s dates are not consistent on the page, so read it yourself. Be wary of any impressions comparison that reaches back into 2025, such as a same-period-last-year check.

None of this is a reason to avoid the report. Treat each number as a clue.

Step 1: Pull the list in Search Console

This is the filter walkthrough. Allow about fifteen minutes.

1. Open Performance, then Search results. Google says the default view covers the past three months, which suits this job: page-two impressions are thin and a shorter range gives you noise.
2. Leave Search type on Web.
3. Add a country filter. Choose Add filter, then Country, and pick Australia (or the United States, if that is your market). Filters combine, so you can add device as well.
4. Switch on the four metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position.
5. Open the Queries tab and exclude your brand. Use the Query filter’s Branded or Non-branded option. Google’s help says it started on 11 March 2025 and is not available for sub-properties or sites with a low number of impressions. If you do not have it, choose Custom (regex), then Doesn’t match regex, and enter your brand and its variants, for example (yourbrand|your brand). Google says regex uses RE2 syntax and matches partially and without case by default.
6. Sort and read down. Click the Impressions column heading to sort. Note every row with an average position from about 8 to 20. Google’s filtering article lists filters for query, page, country, device and search appearance, and does not describe one on position. So read the sorted table, or use the export button and filter in a spreadsheet. One catch: Google says values shown as a dash or tilde export as zeros, so remove zero positions in the spreadsheet.
7. Click a promising query. The whole report filters to that query. Open the Pages tab to see which URLs Google showed for it.
8. Check the history. With the query filter on, show only the Average position metric. A query that has hovered around 12 for months is a different case from one that was at 6 and slipped.

To start from pages instead, open the Pages tab, add a Page filter with “URLs containing” and enter /collections/, then repeat for /products/, and click through to each page’s queries.

Export the result and save it with today’s date. That file is your baseline.

Step 2: Cut the list, then rank what is left

A raw list of 200 rows is not a work list. These are the cuts I make, in order.

Cut anything with too few impressions. Backlinko’s data shows most queries get ten impressions or fewer, and page-two positions are only recorded when someone views that page, so small numbers are shaky. Set a floor that suits your store, for example the top 30 to 50 rows by impressions. On a small store, “at least 100 impressions over three months” is a place to start. It is a judgement, so adjust it to your volume.

Cut queries your store cannot honestly serve. Products you no longer stock, a competitor’s brand name, searches for something you do not sell.

Cut queries where the intent does not fit the page. Shopify’s SEO overview describes four kinds of search intent: informational, navigational, transactional and commercial investigation. Mark each query with one. A “how to” search that lands on a product page is not a product page win. You need a guide.

Look at the real results page. Search the query yourself and see who sits above you and what kind of result it is. If positions 1 to 5 are all marketplaces and national retailers, one title edit is unlikely to move you. If they are smaller specialists, you have a case.

What is left should be 10 to 30 queries. That is plenty. Rank them by impressions first, then by distance (8 to 12 needs a nudge, 13 to 20 needs more), then by intent (buyers before readers), and only then by who holds positions 1 to 5.

A worked example (illustrative)

These numbers and this store are made up: an Australian coffee equipment shop, last three months, country set to Australia, brand queries excluded.

A way to size the prize without a benchmark. Use your own click-through rate. In the same report, find queries where you already sit at positions 3 to 7 and note their CTR. That is your yardstick, because it comes from your audience and your listings. Then:

Extra clicks ≈ impressions × (CTR at the target position − current CTR)

Say, illustratively, that your own queries at positions 4 to 6 click at about 6%, and “hand coffee grinder” is clicking at 1%. With 4,200 impressions over three months, that is 4,200 × (0.06 − 0.01) = 210 extra clicks, if you reached that position and impressions stayed the same. Use it to rank your list, not as a forecast: impressions change when your position does, and nothing guarantees you get there.

Extra clicks only matter if they buy. If the page leaks visitors after they arrive, more clicks are worth less than they look.

Step 3: Decide which page should rank

For each priority query, write down one page. This step saves the most effort.

• Open the Pages tab with the query filter on. If two or three of your URLs appear, pick the one that best matches the intent and point the others toward it with internal links.
• Check the page is indexed. Inspect the URL in Search Console. If it is not in Google’s index, the rest does not matter. The technical SEO audit checklist covers the foundations.
• Match the page type to the intent:

Step 4: What to change, by page type

These are the changes I would try first, ordered by how little they cost. Make them on one page at a time so you can see what happened. Shopify’s help pages describe where each field lives in the admin.

Collection pages

Collections are where most commercial page-two queries land. The collection page SEO guide goes deeper. Here is the short version.

1. Title tag. In the collection’s Search engine listing, edit the page title. Google’s guidance is a title that is unique, descriptive and concise, with no keyword stuffing and your brand added briefly. Google may also show a different title from the one you wrote, so check what actually appears. On length, Shopify’s pages give two sets of numbers: under 60 characters in its SEO overview, and 70 before text may be cut off in its collection settings page. Google says there is no limit on title length but truncates to fit, so treat any number as guidance.
2. The heading and intro. Shopify’s SEO overview says to use H1 for the page title and H2 and H3 for subsections. Check what your theme outputs. Then write a short introduction above the grid that says what the collection is, who it suits and how to choose, using the search phrase naturally once or twice. Shopify suggests at least 250 words of descriptive text per page, but Google says it has no preferred word count. A 90-word introduction that helps beats 400 words of padding.
3. Internal links in. Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page, and that good anchor text is descriptive, concise and relevant, not “click here”. Only <a> links with an href can be crawled. Add links to the target collection from your menus (in Shopify, Content, then Menus), from related collections, from relevant blog posts and from product pages inside it. Shopify’s SEO overview gives the same advice: link between pages with a logical relationship.

Product pages

1. A unique description. Shopify advises against copying manufacturer text, because other websites may already use it. Write what you would tell a shopper in person: who it is for, what it does, size, materials, compatibility, care. The product page SEO checklist has the full list.
2. Title and meta description. In the product’s Search engine listing, make both unique and plain. Google says snippets are primarily created from the page content and it only sometimes uses the meta description, so the copy matters more than the field.
3. Reviews, questions and markup. Real reviews and a short list of shopper questions put the words buyers use on the page. Product reviews and star ratings covers how review content and markup fit together, and product schema and Merchant listing errors shows where to look if the markup has errors.
4. Leave the URL alone. Shopify warns that editing a handle too often may stop the page showing in search results. Its collection settings page describes an option to redirect the old address if you must change one. For a quick win, do not change URLs at all.

Guides and blog posts

If the query is informational, the page to lift is the guide. Put a direct answer near the top, use headings that mirror how people ask, and link to the relevant collection and product with descriptive anchors. A guide usually sells less directly than a collection, but it can feed the pages that do.

What I would not do

• Stuff the phrase in. Google’s title guidance warns that repeating the same terms can make results look spammy.
• Rewrite everything at once. Change title, heading, copy and links on twenty pages in one afternoon and you will not know which change did anything.
• Fix a slow page with copy. If the main image loads late, that is a separate job: see the hero image fix for LCP.
• Ship big changes mid-sale. Sales move impressions and clicks on their own, so queue edits for after the sale and note the date.

A tracking routine you can keep

A routine beats a clever dashboard. This is the one I would run for a small store.

Before you change anything

• Save the dated export from Step 1 and note each target query’s impressions, clicks, CTR and average position.
• Start a change log: date, URL, target query, what changed, the old title and heading. Search Console annotations, which Google’s common-tasks page points to, can also mark the date on the chart.
• Take a screenshot of each page as it was.

After you publish

• Use Request indexing in URL Inspection once per real change. Google says it queues the page after a quick check, does not guarantee indexing, has a daily limit, and that indexing typically takes a day or so but can take much longer. For many pages, Google suggests a sitemap with updated pages marked by lastmod.
• Indexing is not ranking. Look after about two weeks only to check nothing broke: the page loads, stock is right, and a theme update or app has not overwritten your fields.

Monthly

• Re-run the Step 1 export and compare it with your baseline. Use Compare with two equal date ranges, and weekly or monthly granularity, which Google says smooths out day-of-week swings.
• Check orders for the same pages in Shopify Analytics or GA4. More clicks that do not become orders are a different problem.
• Re-check Google’s data anomalies page if a number looks odd.

At 8 to 12 weeks, decide. That window is my rule of thumb, not a Google figure. Google only suggests waiting a few weeks, and our guide to how long Shopify SEO takes covers the wider picture.

Be careful with cause. A rise in clicks after your edit may be seasonality, a sale, a competitor stumbling or Google changing the results page. Google’s guidance on measuring page changes says other events can contribute and to compare against similar periods. Say “alongside the change”, not “because of”.

When page two is the wrong place to look

• You have few impressions overall. A new or small store may not have enough rows. Build the basics first and come back in a few months.
• Everything sits beyond position 20. The issue is likelier content depth, links or indexing than polish.
• The pages already get clicks but do not sell. Fix the page first.
• You cannot make the page better than the ones above it. That is a legitimate result. Skip the query and spend the time on one you can win.

Key takeaways

• Striking distance keywords are searches where you already appear at roughly positions 8 to 20. The band is a working rule, not an official one, and Search Console has no report for it.
• The chart’s average position is a whole-store blend. Work with the table row for a query or page, and treat the chart as an alarm.
• Position is the topmost result from your site per search, so a second page of yours can be hidden. Check the Pages tab for the same query.
• Only results someone saw get a position, so impressions at positions 11 to 20 understate demand. Rank candidates against each other and do not forecast with them.
• In Backlinko’s study of about 4 million results, only 0.63% of searchers clicked a second-page result and the top three took 54.4% of clicks. It is an average, not a Shopify figure.
• Filter to your country, exclude brand searches, set an impressions floor and mark each query by intent before you touch a page.
• Put one target page against each query, change one page at a time, log every change, and judge the result over 8 to 12 weeks in clicks and orders.

FAQs

What are striking distance keywords?

Searches where your site already appears in Google, but at roughly positions 8 to 20, so it earns few clicks. The term is industry shorthand rather than a Search Console feature, and there is no official range. Mine is 8 to 20.

What counts as page two in Search Console?

Roughly positions 11 to 20, but Google says a position number can mean different things in different situations. Its own example is that position 11 could be a spot in a knowledge panel or the first item on page 2. Check the actual results page before acting.

Is the average position in Search Console accurate?

It is an average, so it will not match what any one person sees. Google says your own search can differ because of search history, location and similar variables. In the chart it also blends every query your whole site appeared for, so work from table rows.

How long until a page-two keyword moves up?

Nobody can say. Google says some changes take effect in hours and others take months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging. I review at 8 to 12 weeks as my own rule of thumb.

Should I start with positions 8 to 10 or 11 to 20?

Neither on position alone. Backlinko found click-through at positions 8 to 10 is virtually the same, so a small move there may add little. Start with queries that have real impressions, buying intent and the right page, then aim for the top three, not just page one.

Want a second pair of eyes on your page-two list?

Sorting this list and choosing which pages to lift is part of the on-page and e-commerce work in our Shopify SEO service. The hard part is not the export. It is knowing which queries are worth a buyer’s click on your store, and which page should earn it. We do not guarantee rankings. If you would like to talk it through, book a free 30-minute diagnostic or tell us about your store. We look at your store before we recommend anything, and we tell you honestly if SEO isn’t the right move. No pitch.