Should I Split Sites Up for SEO purposes?

You don't have to, if the services are all provided by the same business it is best to keep everything on one main website. The best way to this is create a subdomain for each service (private-investigation.yoursite.com). This is like an entirely different website, but still sticks to your main site which looks better to clients. You can optimize the subdomain separately from the main site this way.

If the site is built right, it can be properly SEO'd for 2 unrelated terms, not a problem at all.

Eh... In my opinion you could go both ways with this. What I've seen a lot of companies doing now, especially in the medical field, is building 5-6 pages geared towards a specific keyword.

For an example lets say that I am doing SEO for a laser hair removal company and I'm trying to rank for a city term as well as state. While my already established website name might be "Shannon's Laser Hair Removal" I know in the back of my head that big G plays big favorites for exact match domain names. But at the same time I want to maintain my brand and create a "brandable" image.

The answer to the problem is landing pages. Create mini-sites that rank for certain and specific keywords that then link back to your site using the keywords that they are ranking for as anchor text.

So if you were to map it all out our visitors would hit your site in the following fashion:

Google search - Seattle laser hair removal ---> your website "Seattlelaserhair removal.com" ---> your money/branded page.

People might say that this is sloppy but in my opinion I think that you should really take advantage of how big G works and play the game. The worst case scenario is that your long-tail sites drop off. If so they are still linking to your website using the correct anchor text.

It's sloppy but believe me it works.s


My .02

If they are 2 separate businesses and share 1 domain name then I would split them up. If anything were to happen with one of them for any reason at all it affects both businesses. I'm not a fan of having all eggs in 1 basket.