Getting from position 8 to position 3 is a different game
Your pages sit at the bottom of page one or the top of page two, more work on the page changes nothing, and you cannot see why.
Everything on-page gets you to roughly position 8
Completeness, structure, speed, schema, static delivery, internal links. Do all of it well and you land somewhere in the 6 to 12 range for a query you have a genuine right to. That is the ceiling of work you can do alone, and it is a real achievement.
The gap from 8 to 3 is bought with other people’s links
Above that band, the results are held by pages other sites vouch for. No amount of further on-page work moves them, because on-page is not the variable being compared any more. This is the moment most solo sites stall and start rewriting content that was already fine.
What that means for where you spend the next quarter
Either accept position 8 and win on volume of queries, which is what this site did, or commit to the slow work of becoming linkable. Both are valid. Doing on-page work a fourth time is not.
Positions 8 to 10 are the worst place in search
You carry the full cost of ranking, the content, the links, the maintenance, and collect almost none of the return. Measured on this site's own non-brand data, positions 8 to 10 returned 1.47% click-through against 29.95% for positions 1 to 3. The same page, twenty times the traffic. Nothing else in search offers that multiple for that little additional work.
What actually moved pages here
Not more words. The moves came from matching intent more exactly than the pages above, which usually meant narrowing the page rather than expanding it, and from internal links pointing at it from pages that already ranked. The average position of this site over the full window was 9.07, which is to say most of it never made the jump. The ones that did were the ones that got specific.
Measured, not asserted
This site averages position 9.07 across 160 pages and reached 100,542 users anyway, by holding a lot of mid positions rather than a few top ones. Its Domain Rating is 22, from 122 linking sites, most of them directories.
Free tool for this: Position Value Calculator. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 23 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.