Source record
After 16 years doing SEO, I finally get why case studies matter. ChatGPT searches for them when recommending businesses. Do you have any?...
You should be collecting case studies for your business. And that's not advice I would have given even six months ago. I've been doing SEO for 16 years, and while there's always been some utility in case studies, it's never been a core part of my strategy.
I wanna talk about what I've been seeing just in the last six months that's made me start to prioritize getting case studies for my clients. While this advice might not apply to every business, I do think it applies to most of them. Now, case studies have always been nice for conversion rate.
If you're already driving traffic to a page, adding a case study can be a great way to close the deal. And case studies have always made great social media content, and they still do. But case studies have never been great at driving traffic from search engines like Google.
And this primarily because no one searches for case studies. Now, I know some SEOs have had success with taking a case study and optimizing it for another term. Like you might make a page called bathroom remodel in Tampa and it's really just a case study about a bathroom remodel you did in Tampa.
But in my experience, they never really performed any better than just a page created for that search term. So let's talk about the two things I've seen in the last six months that have changed my mind. One is that large language models love case studies.
If you go to ChatGPT or Google's AI mode and you ask for recommendations for a specific product or service, often one of the first things it'll do is search for case studies. If you have case studies on your website and your competitor doesn't, you'll win that recommendation by default. And the second is that Google's getting a lot better at ranking content that shares personal experience and true expertise.
This is something I've been trying to do for years, but only recently have I really seen it working. Weaving relevant case studies into your existing content allows you to write from a position of expertise and authority. And while I don't have any research to back this point up, anecdotally it does seem to be ranking much better.
LLMs and Google AI Mode may search for case studies when making product/service recommendations; having relevant case studies can help win recommendations against competitors without them.
Prioritize collecting and publishing real case studies for service/product pages, especially where AI recommendation prompts are important.
This source is connected to case studies / AI recommendations, expertise / content quality.
You should be collecting case studies for your business. And that's not advice I would have given even six months ago. I've been doing SEO for 16 years, and while there's always been some utility in case studies, it's never been a core part of my strategy...