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Most websites already rank for high opportunity keywords… They just do not know it. And Google Search Console is literally showing them — for free. Do you want to know how to find them? Keep reading.
What is a high opportunity keyword?
First of all: what is a High Opportunity keyword? It is a relevant word or group of words used in an online search, with high impressions that can generate traffic to your website, if you rank high enough for it. Because let us be clear: if you own or manage a website and it does not appear on the first Search Results Page for these keywords, almost nobody will find it.
In this article, I will teach you how to find high opportunity keywords that our website is already ranking for on Google, using Google Search Console data. If you use this information wisely, it could lead your website to a huge number of conversions: readers for blogs or news, clients for e-commerce or online services, etc.
Opening Google Search Console
I am going to assume that you already have access to your website on Google Search Console, which shows you the details regarding the visits you receive from searches on Google. If you do not, kindly open a new tab, enter https://search.google.com/search-console and verify domain ownership before you continue reading.
Once you are in the overview page, go to Search Results under Performance. This is the main section we will use here. The first thing we see is a graph showing the activity our website has received during the last 3 months. I can change the period shown by clicking on 24 hours, 7 days, 28 days or adjusting a custom time frame under the more tab. I will leave it in 3 months for now.
Four metrics
From this panel, I can activate or deactivate four different metrics: clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position. This is reflected both on the graph and the data chart below.
Clicks are the amount of people who clicked, and thus visited a page on our website.
Impressions are the amount of times that our website was shown on a person’s search, but that doesn’t mean that they even saw it. If it was in position 8 or 9 of the search page and they didn’t scroll down, they sure missed it.
CTR or Click Through Rate is the percentage of clicks by the number of impressions.
Finally, the average position tells me in which order our website appears in search results.
For the sake of this article, I will leave all four activated. Why? Because impressions and position are the basis of what I will show you in the next steps.
Preparing the data
The view I have now reflects the activity of our website as a whole, taking into consideration all the information available. But maybe you only want to see part of the results. We usually don’t share internal information, but I want to show you a real example to make this video super helpful to you.
An important part of our customers are located in India. If I want to see the performance of our client only in that country, I will click on Countries - India and then see how all the data is filtered to the search activity there.
Imagine your website also belongs to a business focused or only working in a specific country. Then you would apply this filter to your country of activity.
Removing this filter and going back to the general performance view is as easy as clicking the X on this filter query up here.
Keep in mind that whatever you filter here is what you’ll export later. So make sure you narrow the results according to your own needs: country, queries, pages, time span, etc.
Exporting the Data
Because Google Search Console’s User Interface is limited, and I want full control of the data in a spreadsheet, I will export it to Google Drive. Let’s click on the Export button on the top right corner and choose Google Sheets.
This automatically creates and opens a file that is now saved in my Google Drive. The file is called sparktraffic.com-Performance-on-Search-2026-01-30 so I can see that it includes the website name -which is useful if you manage more than one website-, and the date of creation, which will be ideal to compare with future files.
Now look at the lower part of the screen - you can see a tab for each performance category I had in Google Search Console: Graph, Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices and so on. I will go to Queries now.
Before manipulating any data, I am going to fix the top row so that the categories remain there. To do that, I will select the first row and go to View - Freeze - 1 Row.
Ordering by impressions
Now that I have fixed the first row, I am going to order the results by number of impressions. This will help me see which queries are shown to more people, which will make them more valuable to invest our time and money on.
I will select the Impressions column, click on this small triangle and select Order sheet from Z to A. The result in row 13, for example, tells me that Google showed our website in the Search Results 16.518 times to people who searched for increase web traffic in the last 3 months. This took us to the 5,93 average position for this keyword, which is already strong — and it means we are very close to the top results.
Note that this is not exact and covers a relatively extended amount of time, so I will go and search this keyword on Google. As you can see, our client appears in the first position of organic results, so it’s even better now.
So far, I’ve only organized and prioritized the data. Now I am going to identify which of these queries are real opportunities.
Finding high opportunity keywords
This is the moment where the data starts giving me valuable information. If I scroll down, I can see hundreds of different keywords that match our content.
The “higher” the position number is, the lower our ranking for that query, and thus it is less likely that someone searching for those queries will see our website in the Search Results. Therefore, the higher the position number, the more opportunity for growth.
There are two types of opportunities that we can find in this file:
- For the Top 10 positions, we need to check the CTR. If it is lower than the average Google CTR, then the visitors are clicking at our competitors and we need to improve our Title and Description to make our website more clickable.
- For the positions beyond number 10, the CTR usually drops to 0-2% and we need to look at the total number of impressions. Interesting keywords will be in the top lines in our files.
Now we need to apply some Excel magic. We will apply the following formula, so feel free to copy it and paste it in your own file. It writes the word ‘Opportunity’ if the conditions are met. If not, it leaves the field blank.
=IF(AND(E2<=2, D6<20%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=3, D6<13%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=4, D6<10%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=5, D6<7%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=6, D6<9%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=7, D6<7%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=8, D6<7%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=9, D6<7%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=10, D6<6%), "Opportunity", IF(AND(E2<=11, D6<8%), "Opportunity", IF(E2>11, "Opportunity", "")))))))))))Now, if you have too many keywords marked as Opportunity, you need to filter out only the ones that are commercially interesting for your website. Unfortunately, it is a manual process. You may try using a Large Language Model chatbot at this stage and ask it to analyze what keywords may bring you leads, but I recommend you to read them one by one and think if your customers can use them to find you or not.
Conclusion
Congratulations, you have learnt how to find your own website’s high opportunity keywords. This technique is completely free and you only need Google Search Console and Sheets.
Remember, SEO is a long term work, so the lower you are ranking in those searches, the more room there is for improvement. But take it gradually.
If you have any questions, contact UpSEO's customer service — they will help you find the best keywords for your specific website.
