4 Private Investigator SEO Myths
Murdering Your Website in 2015

“SEO”is a type of practice that get’s thrown around a lot these days. It stands for “search engine optimization,” it’s a strategy that helps your website increase in rankings on search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. We recently wrote an article to help our clients understand  the basics of SEO for Private Investigator Websites. In the section below, we’ve compiled a list of SEO myths that are murdering your website on Search results.

SEO is a one time, quick-fix setup.

This is the biggest myth of them all; SEO requires a long term commitment, especially in a competitive and cutthroat market like private investigation. Clients think that by investing in SEO today, they’ll be on top of the first page tomorrow. In all reality, it can take months and A LOT of effort before a company can dominate search engine results for a particular keyword or phrase.

SEO is not a “set and forget” strategy. It’s a ongoing and long term marketing strategy in which we have to track and monitor every single page, keyword, visitor, and sale that goes through a website. We collect that data, tweak the website, bring in more data and determine if the changes we made increased the results or lowered them. The goal is to increase the rankings over time. At the going rates of marketing versus surveillance, a basic SEO package generally can be paid with one surveillance per year.

Keywords are important for my page to rank well in search.

Yes, keywords are important for a website to rank well in search, but they need to be the right kinds of keywords. PI Now wrote an article about the 10 mistakes that private investigators should avoid regarding SEO. 2 of the 10 mistakes were keyword errors. We’ve had about a dozen clients come to us wanting to optimize their website for “Best Investigator” – we never do that for them, but they still ask.

Keywords match two things: The Search Term and Relevant Website Content.

This means in order for a client to find a website that is being optimized for “Best Investigator” they literally have to type in “Best Investigator” to find the site. That’s not how people search. People search by typing out complete sentences: “Best Private Investigator in Dallas Texas” works better than “Best Investigator.” An even better option would be to narrow down the type of service offered by the investigations agency: “Cheating Spouse Private Investigator in Dallas Texas” The more specific your keyword, the less competition you’ll have.

There are 10 Spots available on the first page of Google. Everyone wants to be on the first page for the generic keywords: “Private Investigator” – “Best Investigator” – “Dallas Investigator” – “Washington Investigator” etc. The more specific your keyword and page content, the easier it is for your potential customers to find you. To determine which keywords are most profitable for your business, you’ll need to:

• Conduct research
• Figure out market saturation level
• determine who is using the target keyword phrases
• Identify who is competing for your best keywords and how they are using them
• Quantify potential traffic you expect for a well optimized sight and SEO campaign

and then decide if it is worth your time and effort!

Google ranking is all about links.

Yes, links are good for your website, assuming that the link is legitimate and it comes from a website that is contextually relevant to your own. You have to be careful – if you intentionally create or trade out too many links with other websites, you could hurt your rankings if Google believes you are taking part in a link farm. On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group.

MOZ has a great video on link building and the rules of link building (Listed below) the main thing to understand is that if a website like Pursuit Magazine links back to your company website, your page will get a higher bump than from MyFriendBobInvestigations.com.