UPDATE: After posting the below review, their CEO reached out to me to make amends, so I'm adding this blurb and changing from 1 to 3 stars. He offered a refund for the charges being contested plus a few months of free service to prove that they're better than the unfortunate experience I had with them. He was a class act in handling this sticky situation and admitted that their process of ending a relationship with a client needs an overhaul.
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Working with Straight North has been worst SEO agency experience of my life, and I've worked with five other agencies in my career. It was so bad that I'm suspicious of the legitimacy of the other positive reviews.
Let's take it from the top:
1. I signed on with them in October of 2017 for $4500/month, after their salesman did an excellent analysis of my website and current SEO positioning. As soon as I signed, everything went south.
2. My website is an email marketing platform, and as such, they were going to help me rank higher for email marketing related keywords. Their first order of business was to develop a "content asset" on the DO's and DONT's of email marketing. I wish I could link to the "asset" here, but Yelp doesn't allow that. It had misspellings and redundant obvious content. They were then surprised that after reaching out to 85 different outlets (so they claimed), that nobody linked to it. Of course nobody linked to it. The "content asset" was more like "content ass". It was so embarrassingly bad that I refused to put it on my own blog.
3. I was suspicious of the quality of their work from my very first call with my account manager. She had no clue what was already on my website and what needed to be added. She would read to me from the Straight North Reporting portal (which I had already seen) on our monthly 15 minute phone calls, and if I asked her any detailed questions about their recommendations, she never knew the answer. She would always have to go back to someone else to ask the question, get the answer, and then relay it back to me. Those monthly calls were a complete waste of my time. Very strange.
4. Everybody knows that an essential part of SEO is link building. The only links they acquired to my site were in free-submission directory sites like yooplist.com and superlist.us. Never heard of these sites? Well no one else has either. These links provide ZERO SEO value. Now some directory sites do provide value. In my industry, sites like Capterra and G2 Crowd would have been great to have profiles on. But Straight North wasn't smart enough to know that.
5. They edited some of the pages on my site, to add to the indexable content. The writing quality was so poor and misaligned with the rest of the website copy that I never published the pages.
Here's where it gets fun. At the end of January, I told them I no longer wished to work with them and wanted to end my 6 month contract early. They refused, saying they wanted a chance to improve. I explained that they had shown a complete misunderstanding of my business and SEO fundamentals and I wanted to walk away peacefully with no more billing. They refused.
6. On February 1, 2018, they billed my card again for $4,500, despite my telling them beforehand to cease billing.
7. On February 2, 2018, they attempted to bill my card for another $9,000, probably assuming that I wasn't going to be responding to them anymore. That charge didn't go through, thankfully.
8. Later on February 2, 2018, they attempted another charge for $4,500. They probably figured "well, the $9000 didn't go through, let's just try $4500". Thankfully it didn't go through either.
9. A couple days later, I received an email from their attorney explaining that he was about to begin the process of obtaining a pre-judgement writ of attachment. Google that legal term if you don't know what it is. The attorney is a moron if he thinks he'd actually be able to secure that.
10. A couple days later, I received a rambling and sometimes incomprehensible voicemail from a private investigator hired by the attorney to investigate my assets.
I will soon be publishing a long-form blog post showing detailed examples of their work, their communication with me, and the emails and voice mails from the attorneys and investigators, so Google for that shortly!
The world needs to be aware of Straight North's practices. They really ought to rename themselves to Straight South.
Summary: Straight North is incompetent and unapologetic. Their attorney doesn't understand basic legal concepts and how to use them. Their private investigator...well, I have yet to determine if he's any good. We'll see what he turns up on me. read more
