originally published on our Medium blog
Case studies are a great type of content, and you should by all means invest in them.
However, you should not expect much organic traffic from them. At least not the way most writers do them.
Most case studies we’ve seen are cluttered, chaotic, and somehow manage to not include any searchable keywords.
There are other benefits of having case studies on your website though, and you need to be well aware of them before planning and producing such content.
Let’s go over some of the practical tips for case study/success story planning and creation.
Case studies work as proof of your competence and authority.
…especially if the clients mentioned in the case study are doing well.
Go through your old case studies and double-check all the businesses and websites mentioned in them to make sure you’re not linking to expired domains and closed businesses.
Nothing markets you better than having helped massive brands that everyone can see do well.
Case studies and success stories help you close deals
Your salespeople can use case studies to better convert your leads.
Considering that, aim to have a case study for every major industry you’re targeting.
Have your case studies display clear, quantifiable improvements that your products or services introduced.
Case studies and success stories help you with keyword discovery
Now this is where it gets interesting, and most businesses completely miss this.
Detailed and well-written case studies will pick up tons of impressions for unexpected searches on Google.
Produce your case studies, optimize them initially, make them long and detailed, let them get indexed and sit for some time, then run (or order) a Google Search Console audit.
The audit will show you what search phrases the case study is getting impressions for.
You can use some of these phrases to further optimize your case study, or as seeds for your future blog posts and other content.
Basically, an audit is a way to dive deep right into the raw searches of your market before they make it to third-party tools like Ahrefs or SemRush.
How to maximize the SEO effect of your case studies
As you can see, SEO is not the primary goal you should be chasing with case studies and success stories — but it can become a nice & lucrative side quest.
Optimizing case studies and success stories is tricky because you can’t copy anyone’s keywords or rely on third-party data too much. Still, there are some basic tactics you can use.
Here are a couple of things that have worked for us and our clients throughout the years.
The most obvious keywords to target with your case studies are
- YOUR SERVICE for INDUSTRY
- YOUR SERVICE for PURPOSE
Where “industry” and “purpose” are the things that your client does, and “your service” is what you do.
For example, “email marketing for a new bar”, or “custom magnets for a bank anniversary”. Use these throughout the text naturally and you will see the effect even if third-party tools don’t (yet!) detect any volume on these.
Those are the basic keywords that will make the meat of your case study titles.
Then add the brand names of your clients and some other bells and whistles to the titles — year numbers, business size, specific results achieved, locations, and so on. Our examples become:
- Email marketing for a new bar — how we 5x’ed The Goathorn visitors
- Custom magnets for a bank anniversary — solving OTP Bank merch challenges in 2021
Consider having the fattest and the most impressive client stories on pages optimized for the more general keywords — e.g. “digital marketing for food service”. Make these case studies longer too, just make sure they do not cannibalize (i.e. target the same keywords) your search pages though.
And always remember you’re not producing case studies just for traffic.
It’s a good idea to keep each piece of content versatile (more on that in my future posts).
Any content you put out needs to at least be able to both
- convert (e.g. when sent in a direct message to a prospect)
- pull organic traffic
Case studies and success stories are often a challenge — hopefully this little guide will help you produce better case studies.
As always, we’re happy to talk and help you design the optimal content strategy – so get in touch with us!