As a sub-editor, I’ve used my skills across a wide variety of mediums, from newspapers to magazines, books to online blogs and more. For some, a job such as mine may only be seen as necessary when managing and publishing a large amount of copy. However, the sub-editing process is vital for anyone who maintains a blog.
If you’ve ever written a blog for your business or personal website, you know how important it is to curate the content in such a way that it pleases your customer base – at least enough so that they are willing to come back for more. Unfortunately, while most serious bloggers understand the necessity of the sub-editing process, time-strapped small business owners rarely have enough minutes in the day to punch out a few hundred words on their blog let alone revise and rewrite.
Time spent sub-editing is time well spent
If you’re one of the countless folk managing a blog on your business website, it’s important to understand that unless you post the best content possible, you are at serious risk of losing customers or even seeing your Google rankings slide.
The most obvious example of this is misspelling words, particularly keywords that can land you at the top of SERPs. Say you run your own dental clinic and rely on the search term “Sydney local dentist” for unique hits – something as simple as “Sydney local detnist” can wreak havoc on your blog, so it pays to give your copy a proper draft. You’ll thank yourself later for the extra effort, and those customers who are fond of showing off their grammatical prowess won’t have any reason to correct you on your embarrassing typos.
Focus on SEO
But sub-editing isn’t just about fixing spelling mistakes. How your content flows, proper use of headlines and sub-headers, as well as intelligent linking and rewrites are all essential for turning a drab blog into an exciting article that your readers will want to share among their friends.
Perhaps even more importantly, however, is getting your head around the basics of SEO. If you aren’t familiar with what you can do to start building a great digital strategy, check out our article for a few tips.
Basically, you want your blogs to not only entertain your current customers, you want them to be able to expand your client base. To do this, you need to be writing content that is relevant to your business but also isn’t simply repeating what 10,000 other bloggers have written about. Take a unique approach to your blogs and seek out topics and interviews that haven’t been covered before.
Do your research, get the right keywords and then revise, revise, revise. During the editing process, you can add appropriate keywords and links and then revise again to ensure it all makes sense and doesn’t look too spammy. But whatever you do, always check for those pesky typos!