What are striking-distance keywords?
Queries your site already ranks for in positions 2-10 — close enough to page 1 that a small authority boost pushes them over. A page at position 4 with real impressions often reaches page 1 from a single well-placed internal link.
Why 2-10 is the sweet spot
A page at position 20 has to climb ten positions — that usually needs new backlinks or content updates. A page at position 4 only needs to beat three competitors, and it's already passed Google's quality filters. Internal PageRank often closes the gap.
How to find yours
Open Google Search Console, Performance report, last 28 days, sort by position. Every page with average position between 2 and 7 and at least 50 impressions/month is a candidate.
The link move
For each striking-distance page, find your most topically relevant authority page and add one contextual in-body link. Natural anchor text, inside a paragraph that already discusses the topic. That's the whole technique.
Internal Linking Agent is built around striking-distance keywords — the qualification gate and the entire suggestion pipeline use them as the core unit of analysis.