Personally, I've been working with Straight North for 5 years (spanning two organizations). When I…read moremoved into my current organization and role--heading digital marketing efforts--without reservation, I brought SN in to help devise our SEO strategy.
My experience with Straight North has been fantastic--they live, breathe, eat, and sleep organic search. And it shows in our growth metrics. They provide us with SEO expertise, strategy execution, KPI formation, and reporting. Their team has also provided extensive competitor domain research, keyword trends, website schema markup direction, and content topic lists for new site content. They have also come together with our PPC team to plan, coordinate, and create strategy synergies.
Our initial targets were conservative: The original website was aesthetically appealing, but it was not built with SEO in mind. Our website listing was buried on Page 4 results for our most competitive industry keywords, and as a result site traffic was stagnant. Needless to say, we wanted to improve. Our initial KPIs focused on increasing traffic, qualified by conversion actions (namely quotes--as purchases are influenced by other factors, such as rates/price). However, as a team, we understood that implementing a new SEO strategy would be the "long game" play. It was also clear that to be successful we would need some degree of internal change management (writing/designing for organic search) and consistency (generation of new content). Regarding change management--the Straight North team works as an extension of our team and has educated me to champion SEO efforts and decisions. SEO is now a priority when we redesign or add content to the website.
Within 6 months, we moved from Page 4 to the top of Page 2 for our most competitive keyword. After 14 months (and currently) we show up on Page 1, hovering between position 4 and 6. These results have been amazing, and we are very pleased. Additionally, our organic traffic continues to increase month-over-month, while our cost per acquisition continues to decrease for the channel.
We have continued to improve our organic rankings for competitive keywords. As a result, our traffic, quotes, and purchases (attributable to organic search) increased and our overall cost per acquisition has decreased. People are staying on our site longer, and they are finding the info they need to make decisions based on our page views and low bounce rate.
I highly recommend Straight North--they are an extension of our team and an integral part of our digital marketing strategy. Through their sound methodologies, we have achieved (and surpassed) our goal for organic channel traffic and conversions.