How to Deal with Underperforming Content: 9 Strategies

As a content marketer, you’ve likely faced this reality many times: You publish a piece of content you’re confident in, but it doesn’t deliver the results you expected. Maybe it’s drawing in loads of traffic. Maybe it’s converting well. But if it isn’t doing both, it’s underperforming.

That doesn’t mean the content has failed, though. In fact, underperforming content presents a great opportunity. It’s often the case that just a few strategic adjustments are needed to improve conversions or increase visibility.

In this guide, we’ll cover six strategies for improving conversion rates on high-traffic, low-converting pages and three strategies for driving more traffic to high-converting, low-traffic pages. 

6 Ways to Address Content with High Organic Traffic and Low Conversions

If a piece of content is attracting strong organic traffic but not converting visitors, it’s time to analyse what’s going wrong. Here are six tactics to try:

1. Check engagement metrics

High organic traffic alone won’t lead to conversions—your content must capture visitors’ attention and guide them toward action. 

Look at:

• Bounce rate and engagement rate: Are readers staying long enough to convert?
  
  
• Scroll depth: Are readers even seeing your call to action (CTA)?

If most of your visitors read only the first 25% of a page or bounce within a few seconds, they’ll likely never see a lone CTA placed at the bottom. 

To capture early leavers and shallow scrollers, use visually appealing formatting—white space, short paragraphs, subheadings, and images—to hold attention. Additionally, incorporate additional CTAs placed higher up in the piece of content. 

Pro Tip

You can use heatmaps and session recordings (e.g., Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar) to analyse how mobile users interact with the content. These tools provide great insights for making quick on-page changes that can lift conversions. They clearly show if visitors aren’t scrolling to CTAs or clicking where they expect links, for example.

2. Match content to search intent

If conversions are low, the issue may not be the quality of the copy—it could be a mismatch between what users are looking for and what the content offers.

Here’s what to do:

• Check whether the content is meeting expectations. For any page with low engagement times and/or high bounce rates, analyse the search terms driving organic traffic to it (you can do this in Google Search Console). It may be that you find users are looking for information, but the content is heavily product-focused. Then, see what competing pages on the search engine results page (SERP) are offering. Perhaps they explain the topic more clearly or offer helpful insights that better match the user’s intent. 
• Ensure the content aligns with the user’s search intent. For instance, if they’re looking for educational content, a hard sales pitch may push them away. If they’re in buying mode but the page doesn’t make it easy to take action, you’ll lose conversions. 

Pro Tip

If the underperforming page is primarily informational but aims to achieve a commercial outcome, consider creating a more conversion-focused companion piece and linking to it from the original.

3. Optimise CTAs

Your CTAs themselves could also be holding things back. If they aren’t clear, easy to find, and well-aligned with your content, visitors won’t act.

Compare the CTAs in your underperforming content to your high-converting content, then follow these steps:

• Run A/B tests on CTA wording, colours, placement, and design. (For more information on conducting A/B tests, check out our guide, Attribution Analysis: 4 Techniques Every Marketer Should Know.)
• Try different formats, such as sticky CTAs, in-text links, or buttons.
• Adjust CTA strength based on content type. For instance, top-of-funnel content may need a softer ask, such as a newsletter signup, while bottom-of-funnel content can support more direct offers. 

4. Optimise for mobile conversions

It’s easy to forget that most users are reading your content on a mobile device, not a desktop. Even if your desktop version looks polished, your mobile version might not—and a clunky mobile experience will kill conversions. 

If organic traffic isn’t converting, view the page on a mobile device and walk through the experience as if you were a real user. When doing this, make sure:

• The page loads quickly—you can verify this using Page Speed Insights.
• CTAs are easy to find and click.
• Images load correctly (i.e., they’re not grainy, blurry, or cut off). 
• All forms are short and simple.
• Nothing looks off or broken (e.g., dropdowns not working, menu links being too close together to click, font being too small or large, padding issues, etc.). 

Pro Tip

If you don’t have a smartphone or tablet handy, you can simulate a mobile device on your desktop using Chrome DevTools.

1. On Windows/Linux: Press Ctrl + Shift + I or F12; On Mac: Press Cmd + Option + I
2. Click the device toolbar icon (which resembles a mobile phone) to switch to mobile view and preview your page as it would appear on a phone or tablet.

5. Check your internal links

Even if a page isn’t directly converting, it can contribute to conversions elsewhere. To support this:

• Link to high-performing, conversion-friendly pages within the underperforming piece of content (creating an assisted page conversion). 
• Add mid-content links to relevant next steps, like viewing a product page or signing up for a demo. 
• Be mindful of prominent internal and external links that may lead visitors away—position them after the main CTA unless they direct users to a conversion-focused page.

6. Track and measure attribution

Once you start making changes to improve conversions, track them.  Record adjustments in a change log, noting what was updated, when, and why. That way, you can more easily pinpoint the impact of each change and revert anything if it negatively impacts conversions (or organic traffic). 

After making updates, monitor performance over time using GA4 or your preferred attribution tool, comparing it against previous periods. Look for trends in organic traffic, engagement, and conversions. Are people staying longer? Taking more action? That’s the sign your changes are driving results.

3 Ways to Address Content with Low Organic Traffic and High Conversions

If your content is converting well but isn’t attracting much organic traffic, it’s time to improve its visibility. Here are three practical ways to do that:

1. Optimise for search 

To increase organic traffic, see how your content compares to high-ranking competitors (especially those in the top three spots on the SERPs). As you analyse, ask:

• Does your page target keywords with enough search volume?
• Are there subtopics, keywords, or schema enhancements (e.g., FAQs, tables, lists, etc.) that you’ve missed that could boost your ranking? 
• Do your competitors’ titles and meta descriptions include any keywords or CTAs that yours are missing?
• Does your page contain outdated information and old or broken links?

Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Surfer SEO can be helpful here. Also, you can use Google’s Rich Results Test to quickly check any page’s schema, then use AI tools like ChatGPT to create the schema code.

Thereafter, update your page’s old stats, references, and sources to improve freshness signals. Fresh content often performs better in search—and builds trust with users.

2. Expand distribution across channels

Beyond search optimisation, distributing your content across multiple channels can amplify its reach. Here are some ways to repurpose content:

• Break the content into shorter LinkedIn posts, X threads, or Instagram carousels. Canva is a great free tool for creating carousels.
• Turn a listicle into an interactive quiz or webinar topic. It’s easy to create quizzes in Typeform and similar apps.
• Repurpose into guest posts or YouTube videos. Depending on your budget, you could hire a videographer from platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. Alternatively, there are AI tools like Pictory and Creatify that turn blog posts into videos for a relatively affordable price.

3. Test paid distribution (if ROI justifies it)

If the content is already converting well, consider putting some budget behind it through personalisation and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. 

Some ideas include:

• Test Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or LinkedIn Ads to scale traffic. Start with a small budget and optimise based on performance metrics like click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
• Segment audiences for better targeting. A/B test different audience segments to identify the most cost-effective targeting strategy. 
• Focus on high-intent keywords that drive conversions or lookalike audiences to maximise returns.
• Consider remarketing strategies to reach visitors who previously engaged but didn’t convert. Dynamic ads can help personalise retargeting efforts and improve conversion chances.

Final Thoughts

Underperforming content isn’t a wasted effort—it’s a chance to refine, improve, and get more from the work you’ve already done. With the right strategies, you can transform your high-traffic pages into ones that convert and your biggest converters into pages that reach a wider audience.

Need help creating content that ranks and converts—or identifying which pages are falling short and why? Eleven Writing can help. Our team crafts expert-backed content that performs and digs deep into your data to uncover what’s working and what isn’t.

Get in touch today to learn how we can help you achieve your content goals.

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