Author: George Nguyen
I can’t go to a single digital marketing event in 2024 without someone asking whether I feel threatened that AI will replace me as the editor-in-chief of the Wix SEO Learning Hub.
I’m confident that won’t be the case because generative AI doesn’t think like target audiences (as a matter of fact, it doesn’t ‘think’ at all).
By adopting unwavering editorial standards in tandem with extensive knowledge of the audience, my expert contributors and I have brought industry-wide attention to this publication within the first two years of its launch.
In this article, I’ll walk you through a few of my editorial practices so that you can adapt and adopt them for your own publication and for the benefit of your potential customers. If you’re a writer, these tips can also help you self-edit and improve your output for your client(s).
Table of contents:
Before we get started: Editorial workflow overview
The tips I’m going to provide you are widely applicable (so you can jump straight to them if you prefer), but those tips are more valuable when you have an overview of my editorial workflow. Additionally, you may find this information helpful if you’re starting your own publication or looking to streamline your processes.
After determining a topic, vetting the outline, and receiving the first draft, I:
Create a private, unshared copy of the first draft — I do this when I’m about to read a draft for the first time. I use this document to mark up the content and jot down all of my thoughts—all of them, which is why this file is unshared. I’ll cover this in more detail in the next section of this article.
Conduct the first review — When you return the draft to your writer, ensure that it includes all suggestions and feedback that the writer will need to re-submit their draft without the need for a second round of revisions (although this is not always avoidable).
Conduct the second review — This would ideally be your final review before sending the content to get staged. Typically, you’ll have plenty of time between rounds of reviews so that you’ll come back to the content with ‘fresh eyes’. If you’re self-editing, I strongly recommend asking a peer to give it a final read before staging.
Stage and schedule the content for publication — You may want to make another copy of the article to add production notes for the person staging the content on your CMS.
My entire publishing workflow involves more steps, but for the purposes of this article, I’ll focus purely on the editorial process.
Make a new, private copy of the first draft to record your first impressions
Seeing the forest for the trees is one of the toughest challenges when editing lengthier content. Taking notes on an unshared version of the draft gives you the freedom to monitor and record your thoughts and reactions as you proceed through the article like a reader encountering it for the very first time.
This helps you answer questions like:
Where are the flaws in logic?
Is the overall positioning right for the audience?
Where doesn’t the tone match brand or style guidelines?
What transition sentences does the author need to add?
Do headers adopt the appropriate format (i.e., imperative sentence, gerund phrase, etc)?
Which sections need more multimedia?
Are the CTAs contextually appropriate?
What sections provide little to no value?
What can the author reformat for concision, readability, skimability, or visualization?
Which sections require bolstering or take up too much of the content?
This step saves you time by ensuring that your subsequent line edits move the content closer to achieving its goal—instead of potentially editing to improve sentences that may get cut later on because there are positioning problems with the article.
When I edit, I keep this unshared draft in an open tab on a second monitor so that I can reference it as I perform the line edits. I also keep a physical notepad on-hand so that I can jot down notes that are not specific to a particular section of content (e.g., other blog posts from which to link to this one, follow-up article ideas for later, etc).
At the very least, review this document before sending your revisions back to the author so that you don’t omit any crucial feedback that necessitates another round of revisions.
Troubleshoot content by identifying and labeling sentence functions
By identifying the function of surrounding sections or sentences, you can more easily see what copy is missing or inadequate. Do this in an unshared copy of the draft so as not to litter the working doc with comments.
This is one of my go-to tactics when I feel like something isn’t right with the copy, but cannot pinpoint the cause. It’s also a useful tactic to help break through writer’s block.
When you can see what functions the sentences perform, you can more easily reverse engineer what’s missing and provide that feedback to the writer.
In the example below, I identified the purposes of these sections to determine that more explanation was needed to support the claim (highlighted in orange):
If you’re self-editing, this is also a great practice because it allows you to compare what you wrote against the intended function of the sentence/section.
Review the beginning of each section to trim the fat
If your content is slow to get to the point, users will bounce, defeating the purpose of your content to begin with and creating a less-than-satisfactory association with your brand.
If you find that your content reads slow, but are stuck when it comes to making it more impactful and concise, review your section headers and the first few sentences that follow. If the first sentences don’t meaningfully contextualize for the reader or expand on the header, delete those sentences and review the section.
![A section of text that reads: “Invest in building relationships using interpersonal skills: [Blue text starts] One of the most often repeated, yet underrated parts of learning is the impact of human connections. We, humans are social creatures, which means that you have an impact on the people around you and they have an impact on you. [Blue text ends] [regular text] You need to learn something really hard? Having a supportive community or just a friend cheering you on can make a huge difference in your journey. Trying to get buy-in for a technical project? You will need the trust and support of your stakeholders and decision-makers. Want to get promoted? Start by considering the impact you are currently making on the people around you. Let’s be honest, when it comes to your promotion it is still going to be people making those decisions not algorithms.”](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a484d4_21179bf579664d9f918c8641997cf5dd~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_619,h_341,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/a484d4_21179bf579664d9f918c8641997cf5dd~mv2.png)
This is a great practice because it also helps your writers understand that they can cover more ground in fewer words—an absolute non-negotiable when you have to compete for your audience’s attention against just about everything else that can pop up on their desktop or mobile device.
Honor user context and intent in your copy and structure
Sure, you have to address your users’ pain points, but the way you do that speaks volumes about your customer experience. So, exercise some creativity to invoke a solution to a pain point or just honor their time by getting straight to business (this is my preferred method).
In the example above, the introduction accounts for just 4% of the entire content (92 words out of a total 2,745). But, that sliver of the article adequately frames the content for the searcher (as annotated in the image) without extra fluff.
In contrast, a different author might have:
Wrote an overly detailed introduction to the Meta Ads platform, which would be excessive because this is not an introductory-level article; it’s for digital marketers already running campaigns that know what they need (i.e., to increase sales).
Included vague statistics (the way so much marketing content does) that may apply to the industry at large but are inappropriate to generalize onto specific businesses
Used a needless analogy that oversimplifies or just misrepresents the topic (another hallmark of poorly organized, beginner-level content)
I’m always working on ways to improve my feedback for my authors and this area is amongst the most challenging (because sometimes it’s more of a feeling than clear language or positioning errors). Here are some of the tips I commonly provide them:
Eliminate unnecessary FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). E.g., “Without rental car insurance, you risk being liable for all damage to your rental vehicle or others and their property…”Instead, a less manipulative approach might discuss how additional rental car insurance provides peace of mind and protects you in the event of the unexpected.
Earn your audience’s trust via transparency. Sidestepping your users’ critical decision factors or obfuscating publicly available information is disrespectful and, by definition, means your content is not comprehensive, which could hinder rankings and traffic. Picking up from the example above, this fictional car rental company could tell its audience that their personal auto policy may already include rental coverage.
Lean into your users’ intent. There’s keyword intent and then there’s implicit search intent—you must account for both if you want to rank and actually convert users. This is one area in which subject matter expertise is invaluable as it allows you to signal who the content is actually for, potentially increasing your conversion rate and minimizing low quality leads. Review the language and structure of your content: Does it appropriately incorporate industry terminology/lingo? Are all sections relevant to the target audience? Is the main content easy to access (or do they have to watch an entire webinar to answer a single question, for example)?
When you greet your high-intent, bottom-of-the-funnel users with introductory definitions that speak to beginners or make them work to find what they came for (or vice versa), those visitors may bounce believing that the content was not meant for them—and the bottom is probably the worst place to drop out of your marketing funnel.
Compare the final draft against your feedback to finalize the content
Experienced creators know that it’s easy to keep reworking content to improve it—so easy that it’s hard to know when it's actually ‘finished’.
Don’t let the deadline dictate when your content is complete.
Instead, after your first round of revisions, save the working doc (where you added all your suggestions and line edits before returning them to the author) as a new, unshared document.
Refer to this document during the final review of the draft (before you stage it). This tells you whether the author followed all your guidance (since you can review the first draft side-by-side against the second draft) and you can see how they approached your suggestions.
You can do this natively within Google Sheets and Microsoft Word via the version history feature, but writers often dismiss comments when they address them or inadvertently remove them when the text they’re anchored to gets deleted.
If you’ve thoroughly covered your bases during your first revision, then the author has everything they need to complete the assignment, and you have an easy method to verify whether they added everything you requested.
This step is valuable from a contributorship standpoint as well, since it speaks to the writer’s attention to detail and willingness—it’s how the best writers identify themselves, and unfortunately, if you’re not actively looking for that, you may miss it, which means it’s harder to know who you want to retain on your roster.
Pro tip: You can also ask your writers to make their revisions in ‘suggestion’ mode so that you can see exactly what they changed. Personally, I do not ask my writers to do this because I like to read their final revision as if it was the published content; this sometimes yields new insights that can help me further improve the content.
Combine editorial skill and subject matter expertise for an industry-leading publication
In addition to the tips I laid out above, subject matter expertise in the field you’re editing for will dramatically improve your publication by:
Minimizing inaccuracies
Saving time spent fact-checking
Attracting expert contributors
Strengthening the expertise within each article
And, perhaps most importantly, subject matter expertise means you understand the factors that affect your audience’s buying decisions, which is the best way to turn them into customers.
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event.