I researched, wrote and SEOed this blog for MensLine Australia. This help-seeking piece aimed at men addresses ways to cope with stress, loss, depression, anxiety and loneliness on Father’s Day.

The blog sought to achieve several objectives.

• It had to speak to a predominantly male audience about a topic that was likely sensitive, if not downright distressing. This cohort, as anyone who works in men’s mental health will tell you, can be difficult to reach, and any messaging must pay close attention to tone, language and general presentation.
• It was time-sensitive in that it was published in the lead-up to Father’s Day. This is a period where many counselling services ready themselves to help men who may feel overwhelmed or are otherwise affected by near-inescapable Father’s Day messages, usually churned out by commercial organisations. In short, it is very difficult to not hear about Father’s Day during this period.
• It had to be readily suitable for sharing on social channels while also lending itself to longevity by incorporating best practice SEO principles.

To meet these requirements I opted for a blog loosely structured around the trusted listicle format. This made it more appealing and engaging among social users on mobile devices, as these were expected to constitute most page views after the time of publication (as is the case with many time-sensitive article).

Indeed, the blog’s Open Graph meta description was edited to improve its shareability on Facebook (translation: this article had a customised description for when it was shared in Facebook, as compared to a universal description that might work on Google but would exceed the Facebook preview character limit). You can view this by previewing this blog in Facebook — or if you’re a Level 20 Grand Master, inspect the “og:description” html property.

To meet longevity requirements the page title, meta description and obviously the body copy incorporated as many relevant SEO keywords and terms as an article on such a sensitive topic would allow. As with any time-sensitive piece that addresses an event that occurs once a year, this article would ideally accumulate search engine equity over a year to become a natural search engine destination by the time the next Father’s Day arrives. Hence the article’s page title (the description that usually appears in a search engine result) is different to its H1 header.

MensLine Australia is a national phone and web-counselling services specialising in men’s mental health and wellbeing. The service is operated by On the Line, a provider of several well-known telehealth counselling services like Suicide Line Victoria and Suicide Call Back Service.

I was On the Line’s content manager at the time. This piece was one of 150+ blogs I wrote and published for On the Line across a suite of counselling services.