Find keywords that are close to page one

Kite reads your rankings from two sources, and the one it relies on depends on what you've connected.

Google Search Console is the most precise source for your own site. It reports every search Google showed your site for, along with the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position for each one. When you connect your Google account, Kite keeps a daily copy of that data, so it can look across weeks of searches without asking Google for everything again each time.

Kite also comes with built-in ranking data from DataForSEO, which needs no account. It shows the keywords any domain ranks for in Google's top 20, with the position held, the monthly searches, how hard the keyword is to rank for, and the page that ranks. These figures are estimates drawn from a sample of US English Google results, so they're less exact than Search Console for your own site. But they let Kite show you where you stand before you connect anything, and they work just as well for a competitor's domain.

Kite treats a search as close to page one when your site's average position for it falls between 5 and 20. That's a little wider than the usual 8 to 20. A result in position 5, 6, or 7 is technically on the first page, but it earns a fraction of the clicks the top three get, so it belongs on the same list.

Kite only keeps searches where Google showed your site at least 100 times. A search with fewer impressions can't show whether a change worked, because a few clicks either way would swing the numbers. If you've told Kite which keywords you're targeting, it puts those searches at the top of the list.

Kite ranks the remaining searches by how many more clicks each one would earn if its page reached the top three. For each search, it compares the click-through rate you get today with the rate a third-place result usually gets, then multiplies the difference by the number of times Google showed your site.

That math often reorders the list in a useful way. Say your site sells scheduling software and has two searches in range:

• "Appointment reminder software" showed your site 4,000 times at an average position of 12 and earned 20 clicks, a click-through rate of 0.5%. Reaching the top three could add about 420 clicks over the same period.
• "Scheduling software pricing" showed your site 600 times at position 8.4 and earned 12 clicks, a rate of 2%. Reaching the top three could add about 54 clicks.

The pricing search is closer to page one, but the reminder search is worth almost eight times as much. Kite picks the five searches with the most clicks to gain and adds them to its plan of search work. Each one comes with a plain explanation of the numbers behind it: how often Google showed your site, at what position, how many clicks it earned, and how many more it could earn by moving up.

Before Kite changes anything, it works out what it's competing against. It reads Search Console again to find which of your pages Google shows most often for that search, along with that page's own position. Then it runs a live Google search and records the results ranked above your page, up to three of them, with their addresses and titles.

Those results tell Kite what Google is rewarding for the search. Maybe the pages above yours each have a section on pricing and yours doesn't. Maybe they answer the question in the first paragraph while yours gets there after three hundred words of introduction. Kite compares their headings with yours to find the subtopics your page is missing.

Sometimes the gap is links rather than content. If you connect Ahrefs, Kite can read the backlinks pointing at the pages above yours and at your own page. When a competing page has links from dozens of industry sites and yours has a handful, Kite knows a rewrite alone may not be enough, and it can turn to finding sites worth pitching.

Kite improves the page Google already ranks rather than writing a new one, and it keeps the page's address the same. A new page would start from nothing, while the existing page has already earned its place in Google's results.

For each search, Kite's changes usually cover the following:

• It names the search in the page's title tag, meta description, and first heading, in the words people actually use.
• It answers the search plainly near the top of the page.
• It adds the subtopics that the results above yours cover and your page doesn't.
• It links from the page to your related pages where that helps the reader.
• It adds structured data that matches what the page shows. Structured data is hidden markup that tells search engines what a page is about.

Kite writes the changes in your brand's voice, using what it already knows about your products, customers, and positioning. On a site Kite hosts, the finished change waits as an unpublished change you can preview. You approve it with the Approve or Publish button in the conversation or with a reply, in the Kite web app or in Slack, and Kite publishes it. If your site runs on Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, or self-hosted Payload, Kite makes the update through your connected account. If Kite works on a site you imported from GitHub, it merges the change into your repository or opens a pull request.

Some quick wins don't need a better ranking at all. A page can already sit on the first page and still get far fewer clicks than its position usually earns. That usually means its title and description don't match what people searched for, so they scroll past it.

Kite looks for pages that Google showed at least 200 times in the top 20 results and that earn less than half the click-through rate their position usually gets. It ranks those pages by the clicks they're missing, reads the searches that show each one, and rewrites the title tag, meta description, and first heading to match them. These fixes are small, and they often pay off faster than a ranking change because the page keeps its position while more people click it.

Kite measures each change against the search it was meant to improve. For a page Kite publishes, it records the search's clicks, impressions, and average position in the 28 days before the change and the 28 days after. Search Console's numbers take about three days to become final, so Kite waits for that before it reads the result, and it doesn't report anything early.

Kite only reports a result when the search had at least 100 impressions in each of those periods. That way, a change of a few clicks doesn't get mistaken for progress. For a site that runs on Webflow, WordPress, or another system, you can ask Kite to read the same numbers again after Google recrawls the page, or put that check on a schedule.

The result feeds the next round. If the page climbed into the top three, Kite moves on to the next search on the list. If it moved only part of the way, Kite looks at what still separates it from the results above it.