Who is Straight North?
Before you commit to any agency, it helps to review what they actually offer, how they price it, and where they focus. Here's what we found when we looked at Straight North.
Straight North is a 25-year-old Chicago agency known for one thing above all else: lead validation. They manually verify every lead their campaigns generate — a human being reviews each submission to separate real prospects from spam, bots, and unqualified inquiries. You get a true picture of what your marketing actually produced.
Recognition: 25+ years in business · Known for lead validation expertise · Proprietary lead validation methodology
Feature review at a glance
Side-by-side
Where Straight North excels
Honest lead counts. Most agencies report raw numbers — 200 leads this month — and let you figure out how many were real. Straight North validates every single one before it hits their reporting. So if you've been burned by agencies who inflated lead numbers to justify their retainer while your actual booked jobs told a different story, Straight North's methodology is built to fix that trust gap. Twenty-five years in business doing this suggests the honest-reporting approach doesn't hurt retention. Turns out contractors stay when you don't lie to them.
Where Fervor differs as a Straight North alternative
Straight North and Fervor don't actually compete. Straight North gets more people to your site. SEO, PPC, paid channels. We focus on what happens after they land. So if you're pulling 2,000 visits a month but your phone only rings 9 times, that's not a traffic problem. That's a conversion problem. And conversion is the only thing we work on.
(Quick way to tell which problem you have: check your Google Analytics. If your monthly sessions are under 500, you probably need traffic. If they're over 1,000 and you're still not getting calls, you need conversion work.)
Revenue per visitor
Your traffic has a dollar value. But most agencies won't calculate it because the number isn't always flattering. We measure what each visitor is actually worth in booked revenue, then rank your fixes by which ones move that number fastest.
The Site Inspection
Before we recommend a single change, we score your site across 6 categories against 64 national contractor brands. You get a Fervor Grade™ and a ranked fix list. No sales call required. And no money changes hands.
Conversion-first design
Booked by Design™ doesn't start with a homepage mockup. It starts with conversion benchmarks from 18 trades we've already scored. So layout decisions, CTA placement, form position, the order your services appear on the page, even which photo goes above the fold — all of it is backed by what actually gets contractors booked.
Choosing the right agency for your business
Choose Straight North if:
- You need SEO, PPC, web design, and paid channels managed under one roof
- You want more visitors hitting your site every month
- Your main bottleneck is traffic volume, not what happens after visitors land
- You value 25+ years — proprietary lead validation methodology that separates real leads from noise
Choose Fervor if:
- Your site gets traffic but your close rate from web leads sits under 5%
- You want to know exactly which pages are bleeding leads right now
- You need a website rebuilt around revenue per visitor, not just how it looks
- You want a Canada-based agency that works with US and Canadian contractors
One more thing. These aren't competing solutions. If your site converts well but needs more eyeballs, Straight North can drive that traffic. If you're getting the traffic but it's not turning into booked jobs, that's our side of the equation. Some contractors review both options and end up working with both.
Find out which problem you actually have
The free Site Inspection scores your site across 6 categories and tells you whether your bottleneck is traffic or conversion. It takes 30 seconds to submit.
Get My Free Site Inspection