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
-
Backlinks in PDF's created on my site causing algo demotion.
I have a few questions. My website allows people to create custom 'puzzle' and education (i.e. "math") worksheets - enter your 'school spelling list' - I can make a crossword or many other puzzles (PDF form) from it. I recently realized that I was being penalized for the backlink I placed in each one. I placed in each PDF ("Created with mydomain.com Crossword maker") - I was linking the "crossword maker" back to my site. BAD! I am now aware of this. I have recently disavowed several hundred backlinks where people have posted those PDF's online - and have started to see a big recovery in ranking and traffic. My questions about my citation: "Created with mydomain.com Crossword maker":
Branding | | Addict
1. Moving forward, can I leave the same citation on each PDF - but just link 'mydomain.com' back to my domain (not the keywords, just the domain)
2. If not, can I just leave the unlinked text on the PDF: i.e. "Created with mydomain.com Crossword maker" -no embeded links at all.
3. Is it OK to assert that they must leave the "citation" (linked/unlinked?) to post them on their website as a part of my terms of use? If not, is there an acceptable way to get credit for giving away free custom content - other than asking for an 'optional' link back? I have thousands more of these that I would need to end up disavowing so knowing exactly what is permissible is extremely important to me moving forward. I have watched this whiteboard Friday: https://moz.com/blog/backlinks-maximize-benefits-avoid-problems-whiteboard-friday (I am looking for clarification on what I can put in the original content I essentially syndicate - the content is different on each and every PDF, except for the citation). Thank you so much for your time and help!0 -
Hosted content vs Dedicated website (for large piece of content)
There is one question that keep bugging us and for which we are looking for a logical answer – to put it short, in which context(s) is it preferable to publish original content on a company website vs on a dedicated external platform with its own URL? To give a little more details: we an education company that provides languages course abroad and that functions like a specialised travel agency. Each trip is very specific – it depends on people's language level, objectives, budget, etc. – so we provide tailor-made advice for each of our students. Our site is not an e-commerce site, and a typical call-to-action is a request for a 1-to-1 interview with one of our agents, or a quote request for a language trip project. The top conversion for us is an enrolment for a language course abroad. We have a corporate websites structure where we have 1 website per locale where we operate, which means 14 websites in 7 different languages. We produce smaller pieces of content for these websites in a dedicated section – the rest of the website being mostly a presentation of our products, services and destinations – but here we intend to create a very large Quiz which will be based on multiple audio files. The content will be translated into multiple languages (likely 10 different languages) and will require some rather heavy development. We intend to add sections for scoreboards, stats, a log-in section (probably Facebook), etc. This sounds to us like something we should host on a specific URL, but then how can we make the most of the SEO benefits that we will (hopefully) get with such content? We plan to have an about section where we explain a little bit who we are, where we will probably link back to our corporate websites, but of course we want our project to live for itself and to be as far from commercial as possible – while still making the most of the SEO benefits. How can we do this in the most subtle / logical way? Would it be better to host our Quiz on our corporate domains? Thanks in advance for your advice. Maëlle
Branding | | ESL_Education0 -
Getting Google Plus Page to Appear
I've recently been making changes and updates to my company's verified local Google + page--my question is when and/or how do I configure it to appear in the search results? When I type my business into Google (Exchange Capital Management), it's not even within the results displayed. The page isn't accessible unless someone were to Google "Exchange Capital Management Google Plus." As mentioned, the page has been verified, updated, and has about 8,000+ views. Any advice or feedback is appreciated! All best, Lauren McLaughlin
Branding | | LMcLaughlin0 -
YouTube won't let me disconnect a Google+ business page from my channel.
Hello! Here is a good one. My YouTube channel is connected to a Google+ page a created by accident. Since I named this accidental page as a business, when I go into advanced setting to disconnect it from YouTube, it says "This feature is not available for this account." Does anyone know a way around this? I don't want to have to rebuild my Google+ page on the new, accidental page. I have put quite a bit of time onto my current page and would like to get it hooked up to YouTube. Please help! Thank you!
Branding | | sarita3450 -
Googe+ personal profile & business page conundrum
I have asked this question before and am still seeking help. My apologies for being repetitive and hopefully not too pesky but I am sincere in my search for guidance. I am looking for advice on how to manage my personal G+ profile along with my business G+ page. My challenge is the coordination between the two and getting people to add our biz page to their Circles instead of to me personally through my personal profile. Google+ requires that we have personal profiles- especially for authorship, but it's my business that I want to represent and promote. I do have the Google+ badge on my website and blog posts. And I am duplicating my posts on both the personal and business pages. I have joined a couple of communities and know that i need to find more and engage in those. And also, another question this brings up: in terms of the social signal aspect for our company website/blog, does it matter where I am building my Circles?
Branding | | gfiedel0 -
Register a Domain: Brand Name VS Product Name
Hi All, Since Google give more priority to brand names and most of the penalized websites by Google's Penguin update are websites which had links with promoted keywords, is it a good idea to register a new domain by the product name (ex: www.leatherbags.com) ?. Or is it good to register the domain by the company or brand name and then build a reputable brand first before targeting product based keywords (ex: leather bags) ?.
Branding | | Iresh.Dilan1 -
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 -
Facebook Like my website or fan page??
Should I want people facebook liking my website or my fan page? Is there a way to link the two? Here is my dilemma... People liking my website will obviously have an effect on rankings within bing and google possibly. BUT - People liking my fan page will allow me to engage with them in the future about givaways, sales and so on. I'm stuck, is there a way to link these? Or if not, which do you recommend?
Branding | | Hyrule0