How to Run an SEO Blog: A Systematic Approach
- Melchior Antoine
- Apr 3
- 13 min read
An SEO blog, when done right can drive traffic and business to your website. It is otherwise known as business blogging. It is something that all website owners or online businesses should be interested in. Old-fashioned blogging where you just write about your interests and hobbies does not cut it anymore. You should have a website with a blog with content that is based on search engine optimization (or SEO).
Most editors content themselves with websites that serve as digital business cards. This means a website with no blog. They just include a homepage with their profile pic and maybe a portfolio page showing client testimonials and works published on other websites.
This isn’t enough. The fact that your website is not SEO-friendly means that your potential clients won’t be able to find you to begin with. So what is SEO, and how can you turn our website into a business blog that takes advantage of it? In this article, I describe just that and give a brief account of how I turned my own website into a business blog.
How to make Google happy with your site
To turn your website into a successful business blog, you first need to understand the nature of the beast. And by beast I mean the google search engine. Of course, there are other search engines. But Google is the most important. It sees a total of about 8.5 billion searches a day.
Just imagine owning a website that can capture a large enough portion of this visit to make your freelance editing business a success. But this is easier said than done.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, then you are probably aware of the numerous and massive updates that Google has been carrying out for the past couple of years. These updates have been rather controversial, with several sites being destroyed as a direct result of these updates.
Some of these updates have been due to Google cracking down on affiliate sites. Others have been due to Google trying to clamp down on the rise of AI. Maybe you don’t know about any of these developments because you don’t care or maybe it’s because your website is too small, or you don’t even have a website.
But these developments are important for any writer or editor who is thinking of garnering clients through their websites. In this article, I discuss what these google updates mean for you and your website and how you could benefit from them.
What you should know about Google updates
Google updates are occasional changes in the search site’s algorithm that determines which sites are prioritized for search. This means it decides the sites that are more likely to show up on the first page of Google.
Therefore, these changes have a major effect on your online business blog. If you own a website, you would want to be on the right side of these changes. The details of Google updates are rather complicated . However, we do not need to go too deep into the details here.
We are going to focus on three aspects of these updates:
They are cracking down on affiliate and content sites
They are cracking down on AI sites
They prioritize websites that present as businesses
Let’s take a look at each point.
1. Affiliate and content sites
Google doesn’t like affiliate and content sites. These are sites that do not directly provide any service or sell a product. They have large blogs, where they talk about hobbies or where they review the products or services of other legitimate businesses.
Google for a host of reasons have decided to crack down on such sites. A good example of this would be sites like HouseFresh. It's a site that writes content about air purifiers and dehumidifiers. After a major Google update, they lost close to all their views or visits — up to 91%. Their business model is based on affiliate marketing.
They produce exhaustive reviews of dehumidifiers and purifiers and provide links to these products. If you purchase via their link, then they receive commissions. Affiliate sites are not the only ones on the chopping block.
Google is going after “content sites.” Content sites can be described as the traditional blog. You remember the good old days when you could write about your hobby and even monetize it through ads or subscriptions. Well, no more. This used to be a popular monetization model.
You choose a hobby that you figure that many people have an interest in, but which the market does not cater to. Then you write loads of SEO-friendly content about that topic. After attracting tons of views, you sign up for an ad program or affiliates and Ching! Ching! Ching! The money rolls in. With the recent Google updates, these sites have been wrecked.
2. The nuisance of AI sites
Ever since the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots, the Internet has seen a deluge of AI -generated content. It has been a problem for Google. AI-generated content at first may seem an easy solution. It’s cheap. It’s fast, and it’s easy.
However, for all its advancement, AI remains a big dumb robot. Most of the content produced its unoriginal, robot-sounding, and unconvincing. And people are getting tired of it. Google has decided to do something about it. They are eliminating or de-indexing sites that use AI to produce all their content with zero human editing.
Some sites have taken to abusing AI by producing large volumes of thin content that has zero value. By de-indexing these sites, Google hopes to improve your Internet experience. You just need to take a look at the hell site that is Facebook to understand the threat that AI poses in terms of Internet experience.
3. Making your website a business
As a business owner, it is not enough to treat your website like a portfolio or digital business card. It has to be turned into an SEO blog. That means using SEO to maximize your chances of being discovered on Google.
This is easier said than done. You have to strike a balance between three things — 1. Content relevant to what your business is about (in this case editing or content writing); 2. Content your potential clients are interested in reading; and 3. Content that eventually turns readers into buyers of your services.
What does that look like in practice? Let’s say you are an editor. You would want a website with a blog that has content about editing topics. However, you should bear your potential customers in mind. You wouldn’t write about “How to become an editor.” Well, unless your target audience is other editors.
Instead, you write helpful content that is relevant to your preferred audience —- that is people who need editing services. This includes students who need help in their academic essays or theses or content marketers who need editors to polish their content before publishing them as blog articles. So, these are the people you write for.
Many traditional writers and bloggers do not like that idea. The blog industry, as I mentioned earlier, in its heyday was all about writing about your hobbies and interests. This type of content, which we can describe as business blogging, is much more boring.
You write about topics that your potential audience will like, instead of what you find interesting. And how do you know what your audience likes? Well a lot of it is intuition. However, most of it should be based on formal research based on SEO tools.
How does an SEO blog work?
We've all heard of SEO, but many writers have no clue as to how it works. You can describe SEO as a balance between statistics and persuasive writing. It begins with “keywords.” An SEO blog uses these keywords to attract visitors and turn them into leads. Keywords are the words, phrases, and even sentences that you type into the Google search bar whenever you want to find something out.
For example, “best editing software,” “what is epistrophe,” “best cafe near me,” and “how to heal carpal tunnel syndrome” are all keywords. There is specialized software that you can use that measures exactly how often these terms are searched every month. These tools also provide information on the intent of searchers as well as the commercial value or potential of these terms.
There are several software applications that you can use for this purpose. The most popular include SemRush, Ahrefs, and SurferSEO. I prefer SemRush as they provide a free version of the application that can be quite useful.
Let me demonstrate briefly how this works. Below is a screenshot from SemRush:
The screenshot shows SEO data related to the search term “best editing services.” The search volume is somewhat low at 410. However, we have other data. The table below sums it all up.
Term | Meaning | Importance |
Keyword difficulty (KD) | This measures how difficult it is to rank for a keyword | The higher the value, the more difficult the keyword. Newer websites should focus on keywords with low KD. |
Keyword volume (KV) | This describes the number of times people search for a term in a given month. | The higher the volume, the higher the potential for the term to attract traffic to your site. |
Cost per click (CPC) | This is an advertising term that indicates how much advertisers are willing to pay for a term in their ads. | CPC is typically used as a proxy for the commercial value of a keyword. The higher the CPC, the higher is the keyword’s estimated value. |
Intent | This tells you what is the intention of the customer who is searching this term: Informational, commercial, or transactional | Terms with commercial or transactional intent are more likely to lead to sales. |
So, what is the practical value of all this information? Let’s say you are an editor with a blog. Would it make sense to write an article about “best editing services” on your site?
Let’s analyze it. The search volume is low at 400 visits a month. How much effort would it take to write an article to rank on the first page, and would even expect any results from it? By that, I mean will this article increase the chances of turning site visitors into customers?
Well, although the search volume might be low, you should go for it. These types of keywords are called bottom of the funnel content. This term is related to a marketing term known as the “the buyer’s journey” or the “sales funnel.”
It means that the customer is at a stage where they are ready to make a purchase. The vast majority of people who visit a site at any given time are not going to purchase. They are just looking for information. As a site owner, you should prioritize such individuals.
However, this does not mean you should not include educational content. It makes no sense to have a site with thousands of visits and zero sales. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore educational content. In fact, it is absolutely necessary for a successful editing website.
Such educational content is part of the nurturing process associated with the sales funnel. By nurturing, I mean eventually turning people who visit your site for educational content into purchasing customers.
Creating holistic content for a sales funnel
Sales funnel is a marketing term that describes the customer’s purchasing journey. They are a crucial aspect of running a successful SEO blog. It should be at the top of your mind when creating your business blog. It is summed up with the acronym AIDA — which stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Awareness and Interest are located at the top of the funnel, which gets narrower and narrower as it gets to the bottom.
Awareness refers to customers who are aware of their problem and looking for content that talks about the problem. For example, I am an academic editor. On my website I have an article titled “Writing a Master’s Thesis or Dissertation: A Guide.”
This article caters to students who have no idea about how to write a master’s thesis. There is little chance that these students will be converted into customers at this stage. They are at the awareness stage where they are aware they have a problem: The difficulty of writing a master’s thesis. This is described as top of the funnel (or TOFU) content.
However, if they read the article and learn from it, it may generate good will and loyalty for my site. An article about thesis editing such as “Dissertation and Thesis Editing” will cater to customers in the middle of the funnel (or MOFU). These are students who have completed their theses but who feel that a professional editor may help improve it.
In short, such students are “Interested” in the services that I offer. After these students have satisfied their interest by reading the article, they will have a Desire to purchase. This takes them to the bottom of the funnel (or BOFU). This means they will want to compare my prices with that of competitors.
You can further cater to these potential clients by comparing your pricing to that of competitors. I did exactly this with an article entitled “Best 10 copyediting services.” The last stage of the sales funnel is Action. This means the customer is ready to make a purchase.
You cater to these customers by including buttons or links to your service page or landing page. These links can be placed in educational articles or middle of the funnel articles such as “Thesis Editing” in my previous example. Some websites have service and landing pages with so much authority that it shows up on the first page of Google if you type “editing services.” How a website grows enough authority to make this possible is for a different article.
So turning your editing website into a business blog that becomes an engine for leads and sales is a process. Educational content even if it doesn’t translate immediately into sales can nurture loyalty and goodwill among site visitors, which may eventually turn them into paying customers.
How does SEO actually work?
A successful SEO blog is a matter of statistics and creative writing. What do I mean by that? Well, it relies on keywords. An SEO-friendly article is one that has keywords placed in the right places throughout the article.
This means:
Put the keyword in the title of your blog post
Put the keyword in one or two subheading
Put the keyword throughout the body of the article
The placement and the frequency of the keywords in this manner throughout your blog means that Google will be able to recognize your article as relevant to the queries or questions related to the keywords that the searcher is looking up.
Placement and frequency alone may be enough to have your article land on the first page. A notorious example of this is an experiment carried out by the famous SEO, Kyle Roof.
He was able to rank No. 1 for the keyword Rhinoplasty Plano. In the process, he used nonsense placeholder Latin text — lorem ipsum. This means he simply placed the keyword “Rhinoplasty Plano” in the right places mentioned earlier among the nonsense Latin text.
However, it’s one thing to rank on Google, it’s another thing to engage your readers and convince them to stay on the page and even buy your services.
This is where creativity comes in. You need to ensure that you write in a way that will capture and keep readers’ attention after they click on your article. This means the following:
Writing in a conversational tone
Fulfilling the customer’s intent
Presenting information in a visually appealing manner
When writing a blog article, always remember that you are not writing a college essay. The stuffy and serious tone has to go and be replaced with a more conversational style.
This should also be reflected in your presentation. Avoid large paragraphs and include pictures and tables to present information when it makes sense to do so.
Lastly, the most important thing is to remember why the customer searched that keyword to begin. Let’s say the customer is looking for “best content writing services.”
Such a query means that the customer is close to making a decision on choosing content writing services. You should provide a list of options for content writing services, including their prices, as well as their pros and cons. This will equip the customer with the right info to make an informed choice.
The importance of EEAT
The last aspect of a successful SEO blog is EEAT. This is part of what Google refers to as its quality rater guidelines. It’s an acronym that stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust. Google hopes to prioritize such content in its search engine. How can you as an editor with a website take advantage of this?
It means that you need to put yourself out there. These guidelines have a number of functions. But one of its more recent uses is protection against AI-generated content. Nobody trusts a robot. By putting yourself out there, it means that you are sending signals to Google that your content isn’t AI-generated.
So what does it mean exactly to put yourself out there. It means that you should put your name on your blog articles. At first, I was in the habit of publishing blogs under the name of my website. You should do away with this habit if you haven’t already.
Don’t be afraid to publish blog articles in your name. You should also have a presence beyond your website. This means a presence on social media sites such as LinkedIn. Such social media accounts should be connected to the about page of your website.
In addition, think about linking articles that you have authored or profiles from other reputable sites. If these articles or websites are directly related to the service you author, all the better yet. It increases your trust and authority.
You should make your experience and expertise clear in your bio and website pages. Lastly, you should ensure that your website is more than a blog or content.
In addition to SEO blogs, you should have well designed service or landing pages, which describes the services you offer. If you are both an editor and content writer, you should have a separate page for content writing and a separate page for editing. This signals to Google that you are not just an affiliate site or a content site trying to monetize ads.
In short, it’s not enough to be a freelancer, you have to be a solopreneur. And even that is not enough. You have to become a business entity, where your name and face is associated with the editing service that you provide.
EminentEdit's business blogging services
EminentEdit provides content writing services aimed at optimizing your SEO blog for the Google search engine while ensuring that your content appeals to readers. At EminentEdit, we know well enough how crucial a blog is to your content marketing. And we know exactly what it takes to rank a blog to drive traffic and sales.
EminentEdit provides editing and blog writing 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 business blogging services don't just start with individual blog articles. We help with keyword research and in creating an effective overall strategy for your website and business. Our blog writing services include the following:
Help in building topical authority
Substantive editing to improve the quality of your writing on a sentence level
Editing existing blogs to improve SEO performance
Proofreading to make sure your writing is grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation
Get in touch: CONTACT US AT EMINENT EDIT. Good luck with your content writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, April 03). How to Run an SEO Blog: A Systematic Approach. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/how-to-run-an-seo-blog |
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