Straight North
Massage Therapy Business
Best part of the experience?
Straight North provided digital marketing services, targeting keywords for PPC efforts and creating SEO-optimized website content. They also developed an online quote calculator on the site.
Change about the experience?
I can’t think of anything they could improve on as of yet. We’re happy with their work and ability to get us through challenges in a reasonable timeframe.
Overall Feedback:
While waiting on search engine results to move in their favor, the partner noticed increases in click-through rates and incoming inquiries. The team effectively communicates with its client, allowing them to offer strong customer service experience. They consistently respond within a business day. They’ve not only remodeled and designed site pages, but they also implemented our current online calculator that provides instant quotes to customers. That allows clients to formulate their own quotes rather than waiting on us to do that. They had the software skills and expertise to tweak the site as we needed it. Additionally, they chose keywords for our PPC work and added new content for our site to make us rank more highly on Google. All of those things were valuable to us and came at a reasonable cost.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2019
Elizabeth R.
Best part of the experience?
Straight North provided SEO services and web design support for a home services provider. This included backlinks, keyword suggestions, and updates to copy on the client’s website.
Change about the experience?
No, they’ve been really awesome to work with.
Overall Feedback:
The suggestions have made the website more interesting and readable. Straight North establishes a smooth workflow, providing regular updates to the internal team. The team is understanding and accommodating, meeting the client’s requirements for timeline and budget. Straight North provides us with SEO and web design support. Their team provides us with backlinks and onsite SEO recommendations. They also give us copy edits on our product, about us, and home pages. Straight North recommends page titles and keywords. Their team also works on directory listings for us. They’ll go out on the web and create listings for our company, including our services, phone number, and more. Straight North also makes recommendations for our Google Business listing. Our team has worked on it internally, they just made some suggestions and updates, such as pictures or holiday hours.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2017
Greg Niewold
Best part of the experience?
Straight North provided SEO services, content development, and website updates. Their team also helped with Google and Facebook PPC. They worked with on-page SEO and improved the site's metadata.
Change about the experience?
I wish I was their only client, sometimes. If I were on top of their queue that would be nice, but that’s also unrealistic.
Overall Feedback:
Straight North was very straightforward about the timeline, and we did start to see results after six months. E-commerce volume has increased substantially due to their efforts. The knowledge and skill of their team are very impressive. They manage the project effectively through phone calls. Initially, they were very honest and told us not to expect overnight results. After we revamped the website and did the SEO, they told us we would start seeing results in six months. Slowly, we did start to see more impressions and gain more business. I didn’t want to add things like a blog without tangible results, but they were able to achieve them. In the first year, we tripled our e-commerce output. The next year, we doubled that. We’re really starting to see results. It’s been a long process, but they were upfront and said that at the beginning. My company is very seasonal, so there are slower times. During those times, they change things on the site so it’s ready for when things ramp up. It’s advantageous for me to have someone that understands that.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2017
Local Private College
Best part of the experience?
Straight North provided a variety of SEM services for a college, including SEO, PPC, and web development support. Their team helped rank the college on specific keywords and generate leads.
Change about the experience?
I wish they could always be a little cheaper. The extra project management aspects, such as suggesting different improvements for the home page and optimizing strategy, are separate, billable items, which I wasn’t aware of when we signed on. Every so often you need to buy some extra web development time, which could’ve been expressed upfront.
Overall Feedback:
Straight North successfully grew leads and organic traffic. The number of leads has steadily grown. Keyword rankings have improved across the board. Their project management and kindness constantly stand out—they're very responsive and care deeply. They could be more upfront with costs. As of right now, we’ve tripled the number of leads we had last year after increasing spending by 150%. We’ve continued to grow semester after semester and decreased our cost per lead on paid search. Internally, we’re trying to increase our conversation rate because we’ve gotten so many. On the SEO side, we’ve improved on 25-30 keywords. We went from not being ranked at all to the first three pages. On a few keywords, we’ve advanced from the second page to the first. A lot has gone well on that side, and we’ve been growing about 110-120% each year.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2018
Vice President, Machinery Dealer
Best part of the experience?
Straight North developed and designed a website that integrates with a Salesforce system. They worked on the website’s content and layout. They also perform SEO & branding services.
Change about the experience?
There’s one thing I’ve received pushback on. While I’m not skilled in their business, I see a lot of fresh and exciting functionalities in different websites. They’ve advised me against a few things because it could hurt my SEO results. But according to what they’re telling me, it’s right that they don’t implement those features. I hope that one day they will find a way to fit my vision without sacrificing the SEO side.
Overall Feedback:
The team at Straight North went above and beyond. Traffic has increased significantly due to their skilled expertise in the industry. They’re communicative and organized, working well as a partner. I’ve been happy with the work that they provided. Since we made the switch, we’ve noticed a significant increase in web traffic. There are a lot more leads, forms, and calls. Overall, it’s been positive. We’ve received a lot of compliments from friends and competitors in the industry about the look and feel of the brand and website. I wish I could do more with Straight North, besides the ongoing SEO services. I plan on continuing our relationship with them.
- Hired for:
- Web Design
- Hired In: 2017
John Steiner
Best part of the experience?
Straight North managed digital marketing initiatives to promote services for an advanced surgery institute. They executed a PPC campaign to improve digital visibility and enhanced a site to support SEO efforts.
Change about the experience?
I don’t have suggestions for their improvement at this point. They’ve been right there with us. They didn’t run away from the problems we faced when moving our website to another host. That was wonderful to see.
Overall Feedback:
Straight North provides effective digital marketing services that result in a substantial number of impressions and an increase in engagement with services. The team is straightforward and flexible, which encourages project improvements. They are diligent and offer tools to facilitate collaboration. This is my latest engagement with Straight North, as I’ve worked with them over a number of years. In this engagement, their team has two responsibilities. One was to optimize our website so that patients find us. To support SEO initiatives, they advanced our website. Straight North's greater responsibility's a PPC campaign to optimize our presence and availability in the Chicago region. Largely, our audience goes to academic medical centers for bariatric surgery. Their team optimized our services to reach that audience.
- Hired for:
- Digital Marketing
- Hired In: 2019
Colton Mandell, Enviro Tech Int
Best part of the experience?
Straight North rebuilt a manufacturer’s website, redesigning the entire site while ensuring it was SEO-friendly. They continue to provide SEO and PPC services, such as managing keywords and creating backlinks.
Change about the experience?
No, I don’t have any complaints. Some of the SEO and PPC terms can be hard to understand, but it’s a confusing industry. When I’ve asked them to explain something better, they’ve always been able to.
Overall Feedback:
Their services have played a critical part in boosting Google rankings and generating leads, while internal stakeholders and customers alike have praised the professional, user-friendly website. Responsive and prompt, the team provides thorough monthly reports and insightful recommendations. We get comments from our customers all the time that our site is one of the better-looking ones they’ve seen in the industry. The website looks way more professional than our last one. I’d put an infographic together for our previous website using Microsoft Paint, and I asked Straight North to redesign it. Their designers recreated the infographic to match our new site, and it looks really good. To create backlinks, they shared the graphic with a handful of resources and asked them to link it back to our website; just doing that moved us up quite a bit on Google rankings. They’re constantly looking over our website and making sure that all of our keywords are relevant so that we can rank as high as we can. While working with Straight North, we’ve noticed that we rank higher in Google search terms than we did with our previous provider. Our leads have also gone up. We can now log into the website at any time and make whatever changes we’d like, which is really helpful. Also, the fact that they write blogs is impressive, since we’re in a pretty technical industry. Whoever they have writing blogs requires a good amount of knowledge about chemistry and our products.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2016
Leo Shapiro
Best part of the experience?
Straight North provides SEO and PPC services to a rubber mulch company. They’ve prepared the website for organic searches and run paid ads on Google and Bing.
Change about the experience?
No, not off the top of my head.
Overall Feedback:
Straight North has boosted sales, generated leads, and achieved first-page rankings. Internal stakeholders are pleased with their high-quality yet cost-effective work. The responsive team provides monthly reports that thoroughly account for costs, rates of return, leads, and other key metrics. I know it works because we’ve gotten leads and sales. They make sure we show up on the first page of search results when individuals search for our products, and they do so in a really cost-effective way. I’m happy with the quality of their work, and the price they charge seems to be fair.
- Hired for:
- Digital Marketing
- Hired In: 2017
Beyan O'Connell
Best part of the experience?
In order to generate inbound leads, Straight North conducted SEO for a water treatment provider. Along with improving the company website, the team also generated SEO-sensitive content for publication.
Change about the experience?
Early on in the engagement, it took them a while to understand our business, but that’s not unusual since our line of work is quite complex.
Overall Feedback:
Straight North’s efforts have definitively increased the client’s visibility, making them accessible to hard-to-reach customers. The team skillfully leveraged project management tools to drive results. They even extended themselves beyond project scope at times, which led to a positive engagement. The quality of their work has been excellent. Over the past year, we’ve made significant improvements in making ourselves visible and available to those seeking our services. A major value-add has been the “leads” dashboard, located on Straight North’s web platform, which records interest generated from our website. That’s been very useful for training purposes, and Google Analytics has also been helpful in guiding us through our progress.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2019
Metal Processing Company
Best part of the experience?
Straight North serves as the go-to content development and SEO partner for a materials processing center that wanted to expand into different markets. They also make changes to the site structure as needed.
Change about the experience?
I can’t think of anything because they do fantastic work and have a diversity of skills. I never felt like I was alone while working with them.
Overall Feedback:
Compared to the work of past partners, the team’s work has improved company performance by 10%–15% year over year. They worked closely with their partner in order to fully understand the complexities of operations. Their client dashboard updates constantly to provide the latest performance data. Each month, I recieve a report from them that allows me insight into how their work is performing. I never feel as if I’m not getting the information I’m expecting. Month-over-month, we’re seeing about a 10%–15% improvement compared to our past partner. It’s been a very good experience. The team has made a great effort to better understand our business, allowing them to write better content for our site. We’re in the process of changing the site’s look and feel, and they’ve been professional and intuitive throughout that process. They actively offer suggestions while still making sure to get our approval before going ahead on anything. There are times when their suggestions don’t apply to our business, so we pivot together in those cases.
- Hired for:
- SEO
- Hired In: 2019