Blog editing helps to ensure that the long-form copy on your website can both attract traffic from Google and convert your visitors into customers who buy. By hiring a professional content editor to edit your blog articles, you can ensure that you cater to a wide range of customers at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
Many businesses don’t understand the importance of a blog. Many see blogs as just something to have for the sake of having. However, a blog is a crucial aspect of content marketing. When executed well, a blog can be an engine that drives traffic, leads, and eventually sales to your business.
However, your blog should be designed with a good understanding of SEO, tone of voice (TOV), and the sales funnel. In this article, I explain how blog editing can improve your website and drive more traffic and sales.
What is blog editing?
Blog editing is the process of correcting long-form copy to enhance its SEO features and appeal to target readers. It can be a challenging task. With blog editing, there has to be a balance between writing for SEO and writing for conversion.
In other words, you have to edit to make sure that you can rank on Google, while also ensuring that your readers are impressed by your writing and are convince to buy what you sell. This problem is especially challenging with the rise of AI-written content.
While AI is capable of producing large amounts of OK content, it remains lacking in providing original ideas, convincing human tone, and gaining customer trust.
Besides fixing AI content, a professional editor can help improve your blog in a wide variety of ways. A professional content editor can help adjust the TOV of your blog to appeal more effectively to your target audience. In addition, they can edit copy to target a wide range of customers at various stages of the sales funnel.
What are the benefits of blog editing services?
Blog editing services have several advantages. These advantages are based on the fact that most conventional writing is not optimized for sales conversion or search engines.
Blog editing corrects the writing on your blog to increase the likelihood of ranking your website, driving traffic, and turning visitors into customers. How does blog editing do that? Here is a list of strategies through which a professional blog editor can achieve all of these things for your site.
The following are the benefits of blog editing:
Blog editing optimizes your content for SEO
Blog editing optimizes AI-written content
Blog editing improves your content’s TOV or tone of voice
Blog editing caters to customers at every stage of the customer journey
In short, as mentioned earlier, a blog that is properly edited and structured can become a hidden engine that drives your business’ growth, traffic, and sales. I will examine each of these strategies below.
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1. Blog Editing optimizes your content for SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is an effective method to gain traffic and sales for your business if done well. Editing blogs for SEO involves doing the right keyword research and including keywords in headings, subheadings, and the body of the text.
Keyword research means doing research to see how customers search for information using search terms typed into the Google search bar. This can be done using SEO software such as SemRush, SurferSEO, and AHrefs. They tell you how many times a specific keyword is being searched and in what region.
A blog editor works backward from this information to develop blogs that seeks to answer the questions that these customers have. Ideally, this should be done during the content writing process. However, if for whatever reason, proper SEO strategy has not been implemented into your published blog articles, then an SEO blog editor should be able to help you with that.
A blog editor, in that regard, does not necessarily have to change the content of the blog. However, they will change the framing to enure that the searchers searching for the information are more likely to land on your website. To learn how this is done, check out my previous article on the subject — SEO Editing: A Comprehensive Guide.
2. Blog editing optimizes AI-written content
AI-generated content isn’t enough to gain the trust of either the Google search engine or purchasing customers. AI content is often thought of as the great game changer, but is it really?
Everyone and their pet dog now has access to AI. If AI-written content is so ubiquitous and easy to access, you need to start asking yourself, Is there any really any edge to using AI-written content?
AI is capable of producing written content that seems passable and that the Google algorithm would just love. After all, ChatGPT is as much a robot as the Google algorithm. Therefore, you would expect they know how to impress each other. However, this is not the case.
AI content has several issues, including:
Hallucinations
Robotic tone
Thin content
Violating Google guidelines
The hallucinations refer to AI just making up fake information in the absence of sources that can verify said information. The robotic tone refers to the kind of canned and robotic tone that is used by AI chatbots like ChatGPT. These large language model software programs simply spin and regurgitate content.
The overall effect is content that is average — literally. The content they produce is nothing more but an approximation of all the other sources that they rely on to get their information. Large language models or LLMs are incapable of properly distinguishing between “good content” and “bad content.”
The problem gets even worse when one considers the large volume of AI content that has been unleashed upon the world. This means that AI is using mediocre content that was previously produced by AI to create even more mediocre content. If this continues, the Internet will soon be buried beneath a humungous pile of crappy content.
Google now recognizes this as a problem and has punished sites that flood the internet with massive amounts of unpolished or unedited AI content. You do not want your content to be deemed as contributing to the problem. A professional editor can humanize content by:
Double-checking information to remove hallucinations
Editing to ensure that your content doesn't sound like a robot
Revising to ensure that content is not too thin
To learn more about how to edit AI-written content, please check out my previous post here: How to Edit AI-Written Content.
3. Blog editing improves your content’s TOV
ToV or tone of voice is a big part of content writing. It plays a crucial role in convincing customers to buy from you. There are different types of ToV. To ensure that you hit the right pitch with your tone of voice you should consider:
The limitations of AI content
The taste and expectations of your specific target audience
Academic content vs sales-driven content
1. The limitations of AI content. I discussed AI content and how it sounds like a robot. AI-written content cannot produce the appropriate ToV for a target audience.
It can mimic a model that you provide it with. However, your offers and content should be unique and specific to your goals. So, that might not always work.
2. The target audience. ToV depends heavily on the target audience. How you write to undergraduate college students will differ from the way you write to senior citizens. If you are an insurance company offering different insurance packages to young people and senior citizens, then your blog cannot use the same ToV.
The tone of voice you use to sell travel insurance to young digital nomads is not the same that you will use to sell life insurance to senior citizens. The tone used for younger digital nomads would be more light-hearted, whereas the tone used for the older target audience would be more serious.
3. Academic vs blog content. Blog content should not sound like academic writing. More likely than not, most professional writers will have a background in academics. This means they learn how to write classic academic essays that would impress their professor.
It is rare to find writers that are trained at college how to write for the Internet. To be fair, academic writers are not inferior to SEO writers. In fact, quite often, it would make more sense to hire academic or creative writers and train them in SEO than to hire SEOs who know nothing about writing.
However, in the event that your content has already been written in the form of academic content, you would need the services of a professional editor to correct your content in a manner that appeals to both Google and potential customers.
Professional editors perform manuscript editing to ready academic documents for academic publishing. However, in the case of blog or content editing, the job of the editor would be to turn academic content into blog-type content for a wider readership.
A good example of this is taking a study published in a medical journal and turning it into a blog that a wider viewership can read on popular medical websites such as Healthline.
4. Catering to every stage of the sales journey
The customer journey refers to the various stages that customers go through before purchasing a service or product. It has a funnel shape as represented below and has four stages: 1. Awareness; 2. Interest; 3. Desire; and Action. This is commonly referred to as AIDA.
Awareness means customers who are aware of your product or service. Interest refers to those who wish to learn more. Desire means they are willing to buy, and Action means making a purchase. A well-written blog should be designed to cater to each one of these stages.
The sales funnel is shaped as a funnel because the closer you get to the sales of action stage, the fewer the number of customers get. However, an effective blog covers customers at every stage.
Even if you’re not able to get an immediate sale, customers at earlier stages such as Awareness can develop trust and recognition of your brand through your blog. This means when they are ready to buy, they come to you.
EminentEdit's blog editing services
EminentEdit provides blog editing services aimed at optimizing your blog for the Google search engine while writing content that appeals to readers. At EminentEdit, we understand how crucial a blog is to your content marketing strategy. We know exactly what it takes to rank a blog and use it to drive traffic and sales.
EminentEdit provides editing and proofreading services that are:
More importantly, we are adaptable to your specific needs. | Get in touch with one of our representatives for help in editing your blog We know what you want to say. We help you say it better. |
Our services don't just start with proofreading the final product. We help with keyword research and in creating a grand overall strategy for your website. Our blog editing services include the following:
Substantive editing to improve the quality of your writing on a sentence level
Editing to improve SEO performance
Proofreading to make sure your writing is grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation
Help in achieving topical authority
Get in touch through our contact page here: CONTACT US AT EMINENT EDIT. Good luck with your research writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, November 22). Blog Editing: All You Need to Know. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/blog-editing-all-you-need-to-know |
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