Case Study Formats - On-page vs. PDF
-
Hey all,
I've been thinking about the pros and cons of case study formats (On-page vs. PDF), and was curious to see what you all think.
An on-page case study is crawled by search engines and has fewer barriers in terms of visibility.
The only pros I can think of for a downloadable case study (with no opt-in) is that it's less likely to be plagiarised (generally a low priority) and can have a custom design that may not fit with your website's look and feel without clashing. Also, I suppose it makes it easier for visitors to save the PDF for future reference.
Have I missed anything? Do you have a preference? Keen to hear which you prefer, and why. Let's brainstorm!
Cheers,
Carlo -
Yes, I've been through this too. My gut feeling here is to focus on your audience and think about how they will consume and share this information.
For example, how can you make it easy for Dave to walk into his boss and tell his boss exactly why he should hire you!
There's absolutely no reason why you can't put the case-study on-line to allow people to read, or at least scan through the document on-line. AND allow them to download the PDF so that it's easy for them to print, read off-line or share around their team/colleagues.
Having the content on a web page also gives you more opportunities to engage your audience (social sharing, even comments etc)
Where PDFs can really come into their own is where you have complicated graphs, drawings that you just can't scale well to fit on a screen, provide enough context and stay legible!
Oh, and make sure that you've got links in your case-study PDF documents to take you to relevant/useful pages on your website.
If you do decide to go down the PDF only route - please do your visitors a favour and provide a really good extract so that they know what they're going to get. I've downloaded too many case-studies that turned out to be rubbish, irrelevant or just blatant marketing bumpf! (Thinking about your audience first can also change the way your approach case-studies and whitepapers!)
-
I wouldn't bet my money on this but backlinks in PDF's won't count I think.
-
Hi Carlo, PDF's get indexed as well. Unless you outline the text in your design that is. Sites like Slide Share can be useful for submitting them if you intend for people discover to share your content. Make sure to optimise your PDF with urls to gain some traffic to your site.
I don't know if urls in PDF's count as a backlink? Maybe someone else can shed some light on that.
Ciao,
Immanuel.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
ECommerce Configurable vs a lot of articles
Hey Moz Community! We have a eCommerce Store with a ton of articles/products. And we have a lot of Brands/Manufactures for Flavors with different tastes. As example we have a Brand Called "Copy cat" with 60 different flavors, and their product names are "copy cat xyz flavor". Currently we have for each flavor a single product created, so i guess we have a lot of duplicated keywords [copy cat] flavorname [flavor] + generell manufacturer content in the product descriptions. While thinking about it, i thought about to merge all those articles to configurable articles. So we have 1 Copy Cat article with some kind of a dropdown selection for the different flavor. Does anyone have experience with this? How will the User Experience change? (we are using elastic search, it's including the variations of products - so the search wouldnt be affected)
Branding | | MJClassy0 -
Reducing Amount of Text on Web Pages-Risk of Killing Ranking?
We are a commercial real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan. Our site (w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . com) is text heavy and somewhat uninviting. Ranking is fair. Conversions awful. Our niche is very competitive. We plan on reducing the amount of text and making the site more visual. Among the planned changes: -Reduce amount of text in home page and text heavy pages. More emphasis on product (listings)
Branding | | Kingalan1
-Much larger photos for listings
-Lighter cleaner design with more open white areas
-Use of more visible fonts
-Better forms New design will be like: http://www.dernieretage-paris.com/ Theme and graphics based on Manhattan. More visuals. Better photos. Less text. But are we shooting ourselves in the foot by reducing text? Is there a risk that Google will reduce our ranking? Can we compensate for reduced text that is visible to visitors by completing meta tags more fully? Any thoughts??? Thanks,
Alan0 -
Pages with High Priority Issues 404 Errors
Hi there, I need some help on how to go about fixing the many 404 errors that i have on the site http://goo.gl/arwlON Many of the 404 errors are images that were on the CDN and now i have not joking 6k 404 errors and a good percentage are the cdn images that I deleted of 3 years work as I did not need them. Would you guys/gals be able to help me on best solution to fixing them? Thank you for your help in advance.
Branding | | blinky510 -
Will you show a case study/live analytics of Moz before and after name change?
so many people are interested these days in changing domains either for branding purposes like you did or some people believe that having an exact match domain will save the day. I believe posting any knowledge you have gained through your fantastic looking analytics system could shed light on a subject so many people seem to be asking about. Some things I would love to know regarding the amount of people that you have either gained or lost through organic search along with your ranking for the term "seo" And other things you guys must be learning along the way as well. I would also like to know your opinion of having a meter of some sort tell us just how many new people type in Moz vs seomoz I tink it would be a great topic for people to learn about branding from as well as a way to show off your new analytics. Fellow Mozers to you agree or not? ( I now see all the little tricks you guys have been putting in our head by never using seo in branding for a long time aside from of course your name) Great job on the transition. Sincerely, Thomas PS. Did Roger get a new coat of paint or did you just take him to the car wash?
Branding | | BlueprintMarketing0 -
Authorship/publisher markup - Author photo vs. company logo
I'm trying to get a company logo to show up next to the search results for a search on [company name] AND a separate author photo to show next to the About page of the author of the same site for a search on [author name] There is author markup on the company's "About" page and Google's structured data testing tool shows that that page is correctly configured to show the author pic. There is publisher markup on the home page and the tool shows that the page is correctly configured to show the company logo. However, no company logo shows up in the search results for the [company name] search--just an author pic next to the "about" page for the [author name] search. if I add author markup to the homepage in addition to the publisher markup, I get the author pic showing up for both [author name] and [company name] searches. How is anyone making this work? Thanks.
Branding | | Chris.Menke0 -
How do you promote a G Plus page? Where are the G+ ads?
Hi All, My question doesn't actually refer to the fluent work of maintaining a page but rather to the basics. In our Facebook page we simply "bought" ads leading to our page and got the followers over time. I don't see an equivalent option in G+. Do I need to use regular adwords and point people to the G+ page or is there a place I can place ads inside G+? Thanks
Branding | | BeytzNet0 -
Google+ business pages and Schema.org
Hi All, I'm an SEO for a company that runs a number of brands. I'm in the process of setting up the Google+ pages for these brands and decided to watch the Microformats & Schema.org - Real life Use Cases - Mozinar by Richard Baxter and the Online Reputation Management: Branding for SERP Domination Mozinar by Rhea Drysdale to help understand the best way to achieve this. One of the suggestions by Richard Baxter was to include the authorship schema.org, but I can't see how this can be done for an organisation instead of an individual. My question is, how do you manage authorship when your not able to link websites to Google+ business pages, only profiles? How have you managed this on SEOMoz for example? Hope you can help. Thanks Jojo
Branding | | JojoSeaman0 -
What are the best/ your favourite brand pages?
I've got a meeting today where we are looking to come up with some ideas to redesign our brand pages which are currently a bit rubbish www.schuh.co.uk/brands/converse Does anyone have some great pages that I could look to for inspiration? Idealy i'd like to get not only get SEO benefit, but also be able to use them for PPC landing pages as well as the page giving some good info on the brands we are selling. It would be great to get video on the page but this always serves to either push the product further down or get lost at the bottom. Any ideas or examples would be much appreciated!
Branding | | wp20130