Names anonymized at client request. Numbers, timelines, and tactics—real.
Mid-size firm. Strong attorney referrals. Zero organic pipeline.
Apex was profitable but fragile. Every dollar of revenue traced back to a handful of attorney relationships. Their website generated zero organic leads. When they tried Google Ads to fill the gap, they got domestic-investigations clicks at $48 per lead—the wrong work, at the wrong margin.
We rebuilt their site architecture around B2B search intent. Three new authority hubs—Litigation Support, Corporate Surveillance, Executive Due Diligence—each with dedicated case-type pages, schema, and supporting editorial content. GBP optimized for the downtown legal corridor. Authority links acquired from three legal trade publications.
We hired them to fix our SEO. We got something more useful: a pipeline that no longer depends on three relationships I can't afford to lose.
Established firm. Page-three rankings. Newer competitors winning the work.
Vanguard had been operating for 18 years. They were technically excellent and well-respected within Denver legal circles. But for the term every prospect actually typed—“Denver private investigator”—they sat on page three. Newer firms with slick websites and aggressive map-pack strategies were taking the asset-search and background-check work that should have been Vanguard's by reputation alone.
Aggressive local SEO campaign. We fixed 40+ technical issues on their WordPress site, rebuilt their GBP from the citation level up, and acquired strategic links from Colorado bar publications and the state PI association. We also built service-area pages for the high-net-worth Denver suburbs—Cherry Hills, Greenwood Village, Castle Pines.
Eighteen years of reputation finally translated into a pipeline. The map-pack work alone covered the engagement in three months.
Saturated market. Previous SEO penalty. Recovery from zero.
Trident had inherited a Google penalty from a previous SEO vendor that had built spammy backlinks at scale. The site had been effectively invisible in organic search for fourteen months. Compounding the problem: Miami is one of the most saturated PI markets in the country, with bilingual search competition adding another layer of complexity.
Phase one: link detox and reconsideration request. We disavowed 1,200+ toxic backlinks and submitted a documented recovery filing. Phase two: rebuild domain authority through digital PR and a deliberate set of high-authority links from legal and risk-management publications. Phase three: hyper-local pages for high-net-worth Miami suburbs (Coral Gables, Pinecrest, Key Biscayne) with Spanish-language alternates.
I had given up on SEO. The previous agency had set us back so badly I didn't think we could recover. They proved me wrong in 30 days.
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