Case studies can be valuable additions to your website. They provide an opportunity to use your important keywords in natural text, they help site visitors imagine exactly what you can do for them, and they increase your unique content and update your site.
I’ve written before on how to write case studies, but that still leaves you with the question of where to put them.
Let me show you a couple of options.
The screenshot above shows a new set of case studies at the website of Customer Dynamics, a Utah IT company specializing in customer relationship management software. The company had half a dozen case studies in PDF form. Since Customer Dynamics works with electronics, manufacturing, and industrial clients, chances are good that they will need materials they can print out and carry into meetings or leave with individuals who will themselves need to distribute the materials to committees within their companies.
While the PDF sheets may be just right for the company’s face to face marketing, they don’t help with search for the website. We created a SEO redesign for them earlier this year, and have seen their traffic increase steadily; we want this to continue, so adding content is an opportunity we don’t want to miss. At the same time, we want to provide information for visitors in multiple forms to suit their needs.
We have a page of testimonials on this site under the Company tab, and each testimonial has a “read more” button linking to a write up of the case study. The write ups are keyword rich, well optimized content, but they don’t have the level of technical detail the PDF files offer. We gave each case study a screenshot of the associated PDF and a link to download it easily. I had the PDFs load onto the visitor’s screen rather than downloading to their computers to lessen resistance to reading them. The DotNetNuke platform this site is built on allows us to track downloads easily, so we can gauge the interest level of visitors.
With Vertz and Company, we created a case study to represent each of the major industries the company serves and used the list as a secondary navigation across the top of the homepage.
Vertz’s products are much more industry-specific than those of Customer Dynamics, so this focus makes sense for them.
Each case study has photos of specific products, as well as images of the workspaces in which they’re used. This makes the pages look more exciting and showcases products.
These two examples keep the case studies out of the main navigation, but many sites use case studies as a portfolio with a tab in the main navigation.
Jacksonville software company Oyova has a separate Work page with screenshots and brief descriptions of the companies they’ve developed and designed for.
We wrote up lengthier stories for each one and used the trusty “read more” button to encourage visitors to learn more about the individual cases.
This gives more information than a standard portfolio page would and puts a strong focus on the company’s work history.
At Clevertech.biz, we wrote complete case studies in the blog as they came up. The site has a client page with logos and a brief statement for each company. The “read more” buttons go to a simple case study, and that page links to the blog post. This allows a visitor considering hiring Clevertech to get a lot of information about a relevant case, without duplicating blog content on other pages.
As these few examples show, there are lots of options. Put them in your blog, link them from a portfolio or testimonials page, give them their own page, or create white papers about them — every website can fit case studies in somewhere.
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