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 cover overlapping ground — SEO, Google Ads, conversion work — but the shape is different. Straight North runs that playbook across many industries. Fervor runs it for contractors only, and ties every channel to the same number: booked jobs per visitor. So if you're pulling 2,000 visits a month and the phone only rings 9 times, we don't argue about whether the problem is traffic or conversion. We diagnose which one is actually leaking and fix that side of the funnel.
(Quick way to tell where your gap is: check your Google Analytics. Under 500 monthly sessions usually means you need more visibility — SEO, GBP, paid search. Over 1,000 and the phone still isn't ringing means the conversion path is leaking. Fervor works on both, contractor-side.)
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 343 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 want a generalist agency working across many industries, not contractor-only
- You need traditional media (TV, radio, print) or other services outside SEO, Google Ads, and CRO
- 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. Straight North and Fervor cover overlapping ground. The honest split is shape, not service line: Straight North is built for breadth across industries; Fervor is built for depth across contractor trades, with revenue-per-visitor measurement on every account. Some contractors review both options and pick the fit that matches the way their team thinks about marketing.
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