SEO was easy 10 years ago, but has become increasingly harder and harder as the huge brands pretty much own search results now due to their huge budgets. Now, I won't say that is going to happen here, but budgets are becoming an issue if you want to get your "news" from the trending page. Because trending is really "promoted" and it's taking a larger and larger budget to get anywhere near the top of the trending page.

That said, Steemit still beats building a blog and using SEO to get noticed hands down and by a country mile!