The top post on trending literally gives a handful of solutions to that concern though. I would love to have your input on it.

As for making more SEO friendly articles that get attention and clicks, starting by changing the titles and first few sentences is the first step, as that's what people read on google. Not only are most Trending posts Steem/crypto related in the headlines, but many of the quality posts made on other popular topics starts with sentences liek "dear Steem community" or "hello steemians", or "X Curation project post number #503". Aka things that don't mean anything to people outside, and instead makes content appear unfit to them since they're not the ones being talked to.

So yeah, we need to curate content marketing material for the many communities, bloggers and apps in here that have appealing messages to the outside. And as written in our post, we'll be running competitions for that (curious if you would be interested in also curating such contributions?)

As for Trending being mostly Steem-based, I don't think that matters. Most of the traffic contributing to Steemit's Alexa rating and thus ad-revenue come from people finding Steem content via google searches and people sharing their posts. Very few come to the Trending page who doesn't already know Steem and crypto. So I don't think it matters if Trending is filled with Steem stuff, as long as there are plenty of good articles and posts elsewhere that get good results on Google (who doesn't care about their proof of brain rating on Steem)