The only difference between this and any other generic SEO company is that they charge double or treble what those other companies charge and the results are the exact same or even worse with Straight North. They will promise you the sun, the moon and the stars but don't fall for their gimmicks, the companies that charge $400/500 per month will deliver the exact same or even better results. They will try to intimate you into not leaving any negative reviews for their company by threatening you with legal action, it is your right to leave negative reviews for a company when you are not happy with the service you received. Don't waste your money or time with this company. read more

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. ------ 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

Personally, I've been working with Straight North for 5 years (spanning two organizations). When I moved 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. read more

Straight North is a company that was suggested to me. I was not very happy when they took my $3000 and did not communicate anything they did, didn't call or email me back. I say to you, if it's them, run, RUN FAST! Their customer service sucks in fact they don't respond in any way. Want more details, email me and I'll tell you all about their standards. read more

My company has been working with Straight North for a year now and we couldn't be happier. We now have a strong online presence and have seen month over month improvement. I would highly recommend them. read more

I do not recommend this company for any seo needs. Promises the world and delivers next to nothing!!! Go elsewhere. They will take you for thousands of dollars and not perform. Stay away!!! read more

I highly recommend Straight North. I started working with them when my business first opened. They were easy to work with and I felt like they really understood my business. They were professional, yet friendly and honest. Within a couple of months I was #1 in SEO in my town, which made a huge impact on my business. I have even gone back to them after opening more locations because I don't trust anyone else to help me the way they have helped. read more

I hired these guys about 9 months ago to work on my website and start a new SEO campaign. I have used 2 other groups that do this type of work and neither had really given a solid ROI, so I was skeptical that anyone would. Straight North delivered. First, their team was able to bring my website look and flow into this century. Second, they started hammering the SEO and over time, we started to see results. I am very impressed with how many different experts are working on a project at one time. They offer a really cool back panel that tracks all my incoming leads from my website or our direct phone line. Straight North is the real deal. read more

We are an acupuncture clinic that signed a 6 month contract with Straight North for SEO and PPC. They started late right out of the gate due to 4th of July holiday. After, what I thought, was a very thorough conversation with account mgr, planner, etc. they just didn't 'get it'. I was given a new account mgr, which was an improvement since the first one couldn't even remember to address me by my correct name in emails. Also, I spoke at length with the Director of Client Services who promised they'd clean up the issues they had made. Our site was very good to begin with but they went in and made rookie mistakes, misspelled words, bad punctuation, etc. All-in-all the site was made worse and had to be put back to the original state. They did acknowledge their mistakes but then continued on to make more, like placing notes to one another in the body of our site. It was most obvious to me they have zero quality control and checks on the work they do. If ANYONE would have bothered to look at the work they did on multiple occasions the mistakes would have been caught. I didn't hire a 'professional' SEO company and pay a large monthly fee for inferior work that had to be reversed. We have no idea how many potential patients we might have lost because they looked at our site and saw horrible mistakes. When I asked for a refund of two months of services their only offer was to do the same amount of work on backlinks. I asked why if they were willing to do 'that amount of work, dollar-wise' wouldn't they just refund the money...still NO. I didn't want them to do work on backlinks since they showed and proved just how unreliable they are. Straight North does a good job selling and making you believe they understand your audience, but the execution stinks. Save yourself the grief and go somewhere else. read more

Straight North was very professional and easy to communicate and work with. Any time we had questions or concerns our contact at Straight North addressed each situation with patience and understanding (especially for those of us who do not fully understand web operations). Everyone we dealt with at Straight North was very accommodating and they created for us an absolutely beautiful website. We had a wonderful experience with Straight North. Everything was very pleasant from the get go. Straight North developed different strategies to make sure we get the most out our SEO and PPC campaigns. The web design team did an amazing job to create what we believe to be the very best Hockey website available. read more

The website for our dental practice was in dire need of a makeover and as a dental professional, I didn't have a lot of time to spend or experience with websites. Straight North was extremely helpful and made the whole process easy. Natalie was our project manager and we could not have been happier with her! Our new website is beautiful and very user friendly. They really took the time to understand the culture of our practice and our website reflects that! read more

I highly recommend Straight North for their professional website and Internet marketing services! I've had a business relationship with their company for several years and find the team members to be responsive, knowledgeable and attentive to my account. I know of no other SEO/PPC marketing agency around that can match their performance. read more

Straight awesome SEO. My yoga studio has benefited greatly! Thank you!!!!

We have worked with Straight North for more than 8 years, and have had nothing but great experiences with them! They provide us with industry-leading SEO expertise, and have increased our organic web traffic more than 17% since last year. We are very happy with our partnership with Straight North! read more