In the realms of online marketing, optimising content is tricky business. As content needs to serve the dual purposes of being appealing to machines (Googlebot etc.) and humans, trying to improve the optimisation for one or the other could potentially mean sacrificing the optimisation for one or the other. While this complicates matters significantly, with a highly strategic approach to content, you can still achieve great success in both areas.

While there is still a long way to go for this situation to resolve itself, the changes which have been made to search engines like Google over the last 10 years, have reduced the barrier between optimisation for human interaction and bots. It used to be the case that SEO’s would stuff keywords into content ad nauseam, until Google made it so this behaviour was penalised, and then other search engines quickly followed suit. Even so, a balance still needs to be struck.

To come up with strategy for developing and optimising content, you have a number of tools at your disposal. Assuming that you can instantly implement a winning recipe for content is a bit misguided, as from industry to industry and website to website, a recipe that works for one website might not work for the next. Therefore, using tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, ranking monitoring tools, which are some of the favourites of the SEO community, that can give you essential data on how people interact with your content and how search engines are reacting to it, becomes necessary.