Amanda Cargill

WomansWorld.com
I pitched and wrote this story for two reasons. First, Woman’s World (WW) had published several articles on grief – specifically, “sympathy messages for loss of [father, mother, colleague, etc.]” – as part of an SEO strategy centered on keyword topic clusters. By anchoring these SEO articles in a “root article” designed for referral pickup, we could generate second and third clicks, and thus increase pages per session and total traffic. Second, the median age of WW’s online reader is 49, which puts her in a demographic with an increased likelihood of losing a loved one to death and having friends and family who lose loved ones to death. (Women, for example, have a longer average life expectancy than men – and thus, often outlive their partners.) Notable, too, is the fact that COVID had, in the two years prior to the article’s publication, claimed the lives of nearly one million Americans, 90 percent of whom were age 50 and older. Taken together, these data points highlighted the salience of addressing grief in the lives of WW readers, and it was an issue I felt we could speak to in ways that publications targeting younger readers could not.