Why Your Best Content Gets No Traffic (And Your Worst Performs)
On the mismatch between quality and visibility
You can spend hours perfecting a piece of work, only for it to flop.
All those nights researching.
The time it took you to write it out.
Then, worst of all…the countless hours spent perfecting it, making sure it was the best possible version of your work it could be.
You slam the publish button. You eagerly await the influx of traffic, of likes, of people messaging you to say how amazing it was.
Only…you reach the point where you know people would have seen it, and all you’ve heard is crickets.
To say it “underperformed” is to put it mildly; it seems like it’s getting ignored entirely. It didn’t even perform as well as that throwaway post you put out on a whim a while back.
Was it just terrible work? Is your work, at its best, just…bad?
And wait. Why did that post you threw out without thinking do so well?
It’s almost as if effort and outcome aren’t aligned at all. They aren’t—and the reason isn’t what you think.
The obvious (and mistaken) belief
When I began in search engine optimisation (SEO), I was incredibly excited about my first project.
I was going to sell my London photography as wall art. I’ve taken thousands of photos of London and I’ve lived here for decades. I wanted to pull search engine traffic by writing about the city I love so much. I picked a topic to go hard on: “The 7 Oldest London Underground Stations”.
I managed to procure a book from the 1960s and put together an accurate history, including a curated selection of facts from thousands I’d read and verified online. The article probably took north of 10 hours to write from start to finish.
A week after publication? No rankings.
A month later? No rankings.
Yet another month later? Google soft-deprioritised my blog, meaning none of my posts were even visible on search…at all.
It was worse than nothing. What went wrong?
I’d fallen into the trap
At the time, I assumed if something was well-researched and was genuinely interesting, an audience would naturally follow.
And once upon a time, it was indeed true that all you had to do was hit the publish button and you’d get traffic.
This was true with both Google and social media.
But times have changed.
I’d written about what I found interesting. And you know what? I still think the history of London is interesting. But I hadn’t considered that not many people were searching for “the oldest stations on the London Underground”. There aren’t many problems for which that is the solution.
It didn’t matter how good, comprehensive or interesting I made the writing. It was doomed to fail.
Meanwhile, there were my product pages, slowly but surely climbing the ranks. This, in spite of most of my sales copy being…prepare for the shock reveal…AI-generated content.
How was I getting better ranks with AI-generated content than with my best writing!?
Simple: the AI copy was doing the job it needed to on an eCommerce site product page. My product pages were actually targeting things people were searching for, and the copy was doing a perfectly good job of describing that.
By contrast, my London Underground blog was doing an excellent job of answering a question no one was asking.
And when nobody clicked on it? Google had instead decided to serve up pages which were answering people’s questions.
Why the “best content” often underperforms
Our first instinct is often to blame the system.
My writing on X flopped. “The algorithm must hate me.”
My Instagram picture got nowhere. “I must have been shadowbanned.”
My blog post didn’t rank on Google. “Google only favours big publishers.”
Wrong.
In my case, excuses like the ones above wouldn’t explain why my blog was getting ignored, but my AI-assisted product pages were ranking.
When we think of “great content”, we’re conditioned to think of content that is comprehensive and curiosity-driven. Something we think is cool or pretty. Something we think others should believe is interesting or valuable.
Here’s the thing: the moment you have to convince someone to find something interesting, you’re already upstream of demand. That’s the hardest place to win.
On the other hand, we sometimes think our worst content is:
off-the-cusp
narrow
“obvious”
The unintuitive truth? Sometimes, the thing we think is obvious is the thing that resonates with people. It might feel obvious to you because you’ve seen it a hundred times before.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t exactly what someone else needs.
When we make content about “the things we find interesting”, we’re usually assuming what other people will find interesting, too. But when a low-effort piece of content performs well, we’ve usually discovered what people want and need by accident.
The good news is that we can do this intentionally, too.
Your content shouldn’t aim to make people interested in what you have to say.
Your content should aim to show up for people who already are.
How to think about it instead
Here’s the thing: underperformance isn’t a “punishment”.
It’s a signal that the content didn’t meet a moment of real intent. It could be the topic; it can also just be timing. In either case, it didn’t resonate with people when you published it. Google is lenient on timing; articles can often be “sleeper hits” that become relevant at a later point in time. Social media platforms are much less forgiving in this way.
All content we create should not try to “create” a demand; it should try to “meet” it where it already exists.
“Demand” is the one variable you can’t negotiate with. You can’t persuade it into existence, and you can’t manufacture it through content alone. You can only recognise it where it exists—and then show up when it does.
Accordingly, the question shouldn’t be, “Is this content good?”
Instead, before you publish anything, ask yourself… “Who needs this right now?”
If the answer is “anyone”, it might as well be “nobody”. Consider giving it a miss.
But sometimes, the answer is going to be “my ICP needs this, and they need it right now.”
And in that moment, you’ll know you’re onto a winner.
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