Writing Case Studies for Your Website

Case studies are great for search and for conversion. For search, they’re an opportunity to create keyword-rich content. It’s not only your primary keywords that search engines notice, after all. Search engines use related words to disambiguate keywords, so that someone searching for “lead generation” will get things about generating sales leads rather than things about the current generation’s exposure to lead.

Our case study for a valve manufacturer’s representative lets us use not only terms like “valve” and “actuator,” but also lots of words and phrases relating to the specific industries our client works with. As people use longer, more specific search queries and personal search becomes more important, having a rich net of related terms also becomes more important.

Case studies also let you strut your stuff, professionally speaking. Showing how you solved a problem for someone helps your visitors see how you could solve a problem for them, too.

Finally, case studies let you add fresh content to a site with no blog. The site we’re building for VAC will be on a WordPress platform, since the company needs to be able to update product specs and similar information regularly, but they have no plans to blog. With case studies, we can easily add pages for them when new concerns arise in their field, without complicating their navigation.

Here are some suggestions for writing effective online case studies:

• Use your essential keywords as soon as possible in the case study. Read a case study explaining that if you want more detail on this point.
• Make sure you speak to your primary selling points. The company whose case study shows at the top of this post wants to make it clear that they know the business well and keep up on innovations, so they can really be useful to their customers. Some visitors may need the specific innovative valve being described, but many more may need a company that will make their purchasing process more efficient with innovative solutions.
• Also consider the worries and problems your customers may face. Many people search for the problem, rather than the solution. If someone searches for “control valve problems” or “sticky control valve,” we’ve got a case study for that.
• As with any writing you do, especially for the web, keep it direct and active and make every word count.