A client sent me their Ahrefs export last year with 14 pages highlighted in yellow. Positions 6 through 12. The note attached said, "these are the easy wins, right?" Their previous agency had been pushing internal links at them for 4 months. None of them had moved.
I opened the first 3 ranking URLs for their primary keyword. Every one of them was a comparison listicle. The client's page was a service landing page. No amount of internal linking was going to fix that. The page was in striking distance of a result it could not win, because Google was not ranking pages like it.
This is the trap inside the striking-distance shortcut. The Ahrefs report tells you a page is close. It does not tell you whether the page can ever actually arrive.
What striking distance actually is, and what it is not
Striking distance, in the way most practitioners use it, means a page ranking in positions 4 through 20 for a target keyword. The logic is straightforward. The page already has authority signals Google trusts. Push it harder with better on-page work, internal links, and a content refresh, and it can move into positions 1 through 3 in weeks rather than months.
I agree with the math. Striking-distance pages can move in 2 to 4 weeks because the relevance signals already exist. New pages take much longer to rank, if they rank at all. That part is true.
Here is what is missing from the standard playbook: striking distance assumes the page is the right shape for the result. If the top of page 1 is dominated by a different content format than your page, you are not in striking distance. You are in stuck-at-7-forever distance, fighting against gravity.
The three checks I run before touching a striking-distance page
Before I touch a single striking-distance page, I run 3 checks. They take 15 minutes per page. Every architecture mistake I have seen traces back to skipping at least 1 of them.
Check 1: Does the keyword match what the page actually sells?
If the page is a service page targeting "dental implants Vancouver," the searcher is looking to book. If the page reads like a 2,000-word guide on the history of implants with a CTA buried at the bottom, the page is fighting the keyword. Google can see the mismatch even when the agency cannot.
Check 2: Would the searcher be satisfied landing here?
Open the page as if you have never seen it. Read the first screen. Is the answer to the searcher's question visible? Or do you have to scroll past hero animations, founder bios, and 4 testimonials before anything addresses the query? Position 8 sometimes means the page has the right keyword but takes too long to deliver on it.
Check 3: Does the SERP confirm the intent?
This is the one that gets skipped. Open the actual ranking URLs for the keyword. All 10 of them. Classify each one. Is it a service page, a listicle, a guide, a forum thread, a product page? If 8 of the top 10 are listicles and your striking-distance page is a service page, the format is wrong and no on-page optimisation will fix it.
The decision matrix
I built this table after the third time I watched another agency burn a quarter pushing links at a page that could never win.
| Diagnosis | What it looks like | The right move |
|---|---|---|
| Format matches, on-page weak | Top 10 are all the same content type as your page. Yours is thinner, less specific, or older. | Optimise. Rewrite for specificity, add internal links, refresh. |
| Format matches, depth weak | Top 10 are the same type. Yours covers the topic but at half the depth. | Optimise. Expand. Earn the additional sections. |
| Intent close but slightly off | Top 10 mix comparison and service pages. Yours is one of them but generic. | Sharpen the angle. Rewrite the intro and H1 to match the dominant intent. |
| Format mismatch | Top 10 are listicles. Your page is a service page. (Or the reverse.) | Build a new page in the correct format. Keep the old one for what it is good at. |
| Intent mismatch | The keyword has shifted. Top 10 are now answering a different question than your page does. | Build new. Repurpose the old page for a closer keyword if one exists. |
The first 3 rows are optimise. The last 2 are rebuild. In my experience, the split is roughly even.
What this looked like with Tenmar
When we started with Tenmar, the BC glass railing installer, the site had 5 pages and a handful of striking-distance rankings around positions 12 to 18. The previous instinct would have been to push the existing pages harder.
I ran the SERP check on each one. For their highest-value keyword, the top 10 were a mix of category service pages with specific location modifiers and product pages with installer info. Tenmar had 1 generic service page trying to cover the entire province. Format was wrong. Specificity was wrong. The page could not win the keyword no matter how many links pointed at it.
We expanded from 5 pages to 85+ over the engagement. Most of the growth came from new pages built in the correct format for each keyword cluster, not from optimising the existing 5. Leads grew 4x in 10 weeks. The 5 original pages were either rewritten or quietly replaced.
If we had spent that time pushing internal links at the original pages, the result would have been a slightly higher position on the wrong format. Possibly position 6 or 7. Still no leads.
Why agencies default to optimise
Optimising is easier to sell and easier to deliver. Pulling an Ahrefs report and circling pages in striking distance feels like a clear plan. Adding 3 internal links and a refresh feels like progress.
Building new pages requires reading the SERP, classifying intent, designing structure, and writing every section so it could not be pasted onto another page without anyone noticing. It is more work, and the timeline to first movement is longer.
The bias toward optimisation also looks better in monthly reports. A page moving from position 11 to position 7 is a metric you can show. A page being deprecated and replaced is a longer story that takes 2 to 3 months to pay off.
I take the harder path because the cheap path leaves money on the table for the client. Every striking-distance page pushed in the wrong direction is a quarter where the site does not actually grow, just rearranges.
The check most people skip
If you remember 1 thing from this post, make it the SERP check. Open the actual ranking URLs. Do not trust the keyword report, do not trust your instinct about what the page should be. Read what is winning. Classify it.
Format follows SERP, not instinct. Sections earn promotion to pages. Pages earn rebuilds when the SERP shifts under them. The Ahrefs export is a starting point for a question, not the answer to it.
The clients who see compounding growth are the ones where we made the rebuild call early instead of pushing the wrong page for another 6 months. The work is unglamorous and the case for it is harder to make in a status meeting. It is also the difference between a site Google ignores and one it rewards.
Liam Lytton is the founder of The 66th, a Vancouver SEO and GEO agency working with founder-operators across North America. The team has helped clients like AetherHaus, WashTech, Maple Terroir, Tenmar, Hedra, and Butcher's Hook build search presence that compounds across Google and AI search.
