Here’s why second page keywords (where we rank between 11 and 20) are so important, and how we can identify them with Search Console.
People are always claiming that search rankings don’t matter as much as they used to. The numbers tell a different story. An analysis of billions of clicks and impressions this year showed that only 3% of desktop clicks (and just 2.4% of mobile clicks) went to anything beyond the top 10 results. The pattern has barely shifted for two years. Whatever else changes in search, page one still captures almost every click.
It makes sense. On mobile or desktop, it’s the same thing: a quick scan of the first few results, a decision, and a click. The rest of the index may as well be invisible.
Interestingly, impressions tell a different story, with more than a quarter of desktop impressions now coming from positions beyond 30. However, those views are more likely from bots and scrapers, not people. Real searchers don’t browse that far.
One takeaway is a reminder that we should treat SEO as a game of marginal gains. The biggest wins can come from elevation in the rankings. Nudging a climb from eleven to ten might be the most valuable step we can make in 2026.
Tip: In Google Search Console, go to ‘Search Results’ and ‘Performance’, set the date to the last few months (higher if your numbers are low), and add a filter so the country is just ‘United Kingdom’. Click the ‘Total clicks’, ‘Total impressions’ and ‘Average Position’ panels above the graph, so these columns appear in the table. Click the ‘Export’ link at the top. In the spreadsheet, sort on impressions, largest to smallest, and delete the bottom 50% to 75% of results, which will have had too few impressions to be that interesting. Highlight the top few rows (e.g 10–20) which have an exceptionally high number of impressions. Colour them green or something like that. Now re-sort your (truncated) table by position, smallest to largest. This gives you the search terms where you’re ranking highly, down to those where you’re not. Look for the relevant search terms where the impressions are high (the ones you highlighted) but where you’re ranking 11 to 20.