The question customers ask most often is, “Have you done anything like this before?” So almost every company website has a “Customer Cases” page.
Today we ran our own page through the way a machine reads it. The result: out of the entire page, it read just 13 characters.
What that page of ours looks like
The page itself looks perfectly normal: a “Construction Cases” heading, ten round photos below it — server racks, cabling, monitoring screens, meeting rooms — all shot from real projects. Further down, “Partner Companies.”
But when you pull the text out of that page, the entire content amounts to these few phrases:
Construction Cases · Our Construction Case Photo Gallery · Partner Companies
Ten photos, and not one of them has a caption. Nothing about who the client was, what industry, how large, what the original problem was, what we did, how long it took, or how it turned out. Not a single word.
Photos are for people, and people can tell “that’s a tidy server rack.” But the only information a machine can get from this page is those three phrases. When someone asks, “is there a company in Beijing that has done factory network upgrades,” this page offers nothing usable — it never even says the word “factory.”
Two other problems we found along the way
Since we had it open, we went through the whole thing. Two more issues turned up, and plenty of companies probably have them too:
| Problem | Details |
|---|---|
| An empty heading | The page has the words “Partner Companies,” and nothing underneath. Someone probably meant to put client logos there and never got around to it. The heading stands there, the content is empty |
| The page title doesn’t match the page content | The big headline at the top of this page reads “IT Network Equipment Package,” but this is a customer cases page. Headings carry a lot of weight when a machine decides what a page is about — the heading says A, the content is B, and it only gets more confused |
Neither of these is a big project, but both fall into the “it exists, which amounts to not existing” category: the page is there, there’s a link to it in the menu, clicking through doesn’t throw an error, but it conveys no information at all.
The real problem: clients won’t let you use their name
At this point, a lot of people’s first reaction is: “I get the point, but our clients won’t let us use their names.”
That’s fair, especially in enterprise services, where contracts often include confidentiality clauses. So let’s put this up front:
What makes a case study convincing isn’t the client’s name — it’s verifiable specificity.
“We’ve served a well-known enterprise” — even with a name it’s useless, because it’s empty.
“An 80-person injection molding plant in Shunyi had the network in its old office completely redone in March 2024: 52 data points, 5 days of work, and no network-related downtime since” — no name, but every sentence is specific enough to follow up on. The second is far more credible than the first.
Being able to use a name is of course better, so it’s worth asking — many clients don’t actually mind, they’ve simply never been asked. But not being able to use a name doesn’t stop you from writing a good case study at all.
One case study: get these six things clear and that’s enough
| Element | How to write it without a name |
|---|---|
| 1. Industry + size | “An 80-person injection molding plant” or “a trading company with offices in two cities” — this is what determines whether others can see themselves in it |
| 2. Location + time | “Shunyi, March 2024.” The date shows this isn’t something from ten years ago |
| 3. What was stuck before | 🔑 The one most easily skipped, and the most useful. Customers search for their own problem, not for your solution |
| 4. What you actually did | “52 data points, two switches, plus a backup broadband line” — numbers beat adjectives |
| 5. How long it took | “5 days of work, with no disruption to the workday.” Clients care a great deal about whether it will hold up business |
| 6. The result | Give measurable figures wherever you can: response time, number of failures, money saved. If you can’t produce numbers, describe the concrete outcome |
Point 3 deserves its own note. Customers search for their own trouble, not for the name of your service. They search “what to do when the office network keeps dropping” or “how to set up the network when the company moves,” not “integrated structured cabling solutions.” Writing down honestly “what was stuck before” in a case study is the same as putting their exact words onto your page.
String those six points together and a case study looks roughly like this (the following is a format example, just to show the structure):
An 80-person injection molding plant in Shunyi: network upgrade for an old factory building (March 2024)
〔What was stuck before〕The workshop and the office area shared a single broadband line, and the moment the cameras came on in the afternoon everything lagged; the cabling had been run piecemeal over more than a decade, with no labeling, so one bad cable took half a day to track down.
〔What we did〕Re-cabled 52 data points and labeled them all, split the workshop and the office into two network segments, replaced two switches, and added a backup broadband line with automatic failover.
〔How long it took〕5 days of work, all scheduled after the day shift, with no production stoppage.
〔Result〕Zero network-related work stoppages in the year after the upgrade; with the lines labeled, on-site troubleshooting went from “half a day” to “about ten minutes.”
That’s under 200 words, but it contains industry, headcount, location, time, quantities, duration, and results. No client name, yet every part of it can be followed up on.
Writing three or five of these is far more effective than a whole wall of photos. And there’s a side benefit: your sales team can send them straight to customers. You’ll find the hard part isn’t the writing — it’s getting these details out of your engineers’ heads — they see it as everyday routine, nothing worth mentioning.
Photos aren’t the problem — photos alone are
Those ten photos are good in themselves — they prove the work was really done. The only problem is there is nothing next to them.
The easiest fix: give each image a sentence or two. “Before and after: cabinet reorganization in an injection molding plant’s workshop.” “Ceiling installation in progress in a company meeting room.” It doesn’t need to be long — the point is to give each image a textual identity — machines can’t read what’s inside a picture, but they can read the text beside it and in its attributes.
One more thing: plenty of websites fill their image attributes with the file name or the site name, which is as good as leaving them blank. Replacing them with what the image actually shows takes a few seconds.
There’s another kind of case study endorsement that comes free
If you’ve taken on public tender projects — government, schools, hospitals, state-owned enterprises — then the winning-bid announcement itself is a ready-made third-party case study.
These announcements have three advantages nothing else can match:
① You didn’t publish it yourself — it appears on a tender platform, so it is third-party by nature
② The client’s name is right there, with no confidentiality issue, because it was public information to begin with
③ It can be verified — exactly the point made in the previous article on credentials: a fact that can be checked does not carry the same weight as something you simply say about yourself
Announcements like these stay online for a long time on tender information sites and are frequently indexed. Search your company name plus “winning bid” and see how many results come up — many companies have never checked, and have no idea this ready-made material already exists under their own name. If you find some, simply cite them on your case study page.
A 3-minute self-check
| Open your customer case study page | Signals that it falls short |
|---|---|
| Ignore all the images — how much text is left? | Fewer than two or three hundred words = the page is essentially empty |
| Does the page mention industry, headcount, dates or quantities? | No = readers can’t see themselves in it, and it can’t be verified |
| Is any heading followed by nothing? | Yes = you put up a sign and left it empty |
| Does the page headline match the content on this page? | No = machines will misjudge what the page is about |
We ran these four checks on ourselves — we failed all four.
Now that this series has come this far, the pattern is getting clearer: credentials buried in an “About Us” page don’t count, “recommendation” articles with no specific names don’t count, and case studies turned into a wall of images don’t count either. The common thread is the same thing — you really do have it, but you haven’t said it in a way that can be read and checked.
The good news is still the same: none of this requires asking anyone for a favor or spending money — you can fix it all yourself.
We are Beijing Siwenlide, with 14 years focused on enterprise IT services and more than 1,000 business clients served to date. This series is about the pitfalls we’ve hit ourselves along the way — the cautionary example in today’s article is our own case study page, and we’ll be rebuilding it along the lines above. If you’d like to talk about your company’s situation, take a look at About Us, or call us directly on 400-686-2011.
