Case Type Pages vs. Location Pages: How to Structure a PI Website

Most private investigation firm websites are structured the way the firm thinks about its own services: a Services page listing everything, a generic About, a Contact form. This is intuitive from an organizational standpoint and almost completely ineffective for SEO. Search engines rank individual pages, not websites. A single Services page mentioning surveillance, skip tracing, and background checks competes for all those terms simultaneously against dedicated pages on competing sites. The dedicated page almost always wins.

The Case Type Page Architecture

The foundation of a PI firm website should be dedicated case-type pages: one page for each investigation type the firm offers that has meaningful search volume and represents a profitable engagement. For a firm in a single city, this means separate pages for surveillance investigations, asset searches, corporate background checks, personal background checks, skip tracing, matrimonial investigations, insurance fraud investigations, corporate due diligence, and any specialty services the firm has built expertise around.

Each page should be 600 to 900 words of accurate, specific content written for the buyer who would hire a PI for that case type. Not for search engines, but for the attorney sourcing a litigation support investigator, the HR director vetting a new hire, the spouse who has been advised by their attorney to document a situation before filing. The content that converts those buyers is also the content that ranks for the searches they conduct.

When Location Pages Make Sense

Location pages become valuable when a PI firm serves multiple distinct geographic markets. A firm based in Denver but regularly serving Colorado Springs, Boulder, and Fort Collins has a strong case for dedicated location pages for each market. The key requirement is genuine differentiation. A location page identical to the homepage with only the city name changed is a doorway page and is actively penalized by Google’s Helpful Content systems. Each location page needs unique, locally relevant content: the specific courts and licensing bodies in that jurisdiction, local market dynamics, and context that only a firm with real experience there would know.

For multi-location firms, the most powerful architecture is the intersection model: pages for each case type AND each location, with cross-links connecting them. An asset searches page links to both the general asset searches page and the relevant location page. This creates a network of topical relevance signals that reinforces authority for both the case type and the geographic market.

Internal Linking Strategy

Page architecture without internal linking is a structure without electricity. The internal links between a PI firm’s website pages are how Google’s crawler distributes authority and understands topical relationships. Every case-type page should link to related case-type pages with relevant anchor text. The surveillance page links to matrimonial investigations; asset searches links to corporate due diligence; skip tracing links to debt recovery. Blog content links to case-type pages using natural anchor text. An article about asset recovery in divorce proceedings links to the asset searches service page. This is how editorial content builds authority for the commercial pages that actually convert clients.

What Not to Do

Two structural patterns reliably suppress rankings. First, burying service information in dropdown menus that Google may not index deeply. If a case-type page can only be reached through a third-level dropdown, it will not accumulate the crawl equity needed to rank for competitive terms. Second, using JavaScript to render content that should be in static HTML. Core service pages should be fully HTML-rendered, not dynamically loaded after page paint.

Site architecture is the first thing we evaluate in every PI firm SEO audit. Request yours here.