Interview with Corey Northcutt of Northcutt

Clutch spoke with Corey Northcutt, CEO of online marketing agency Northcutt, about the results of our Enterprise Marketing Survey 2016.

Learn more about Northcutt on their Clutch profile or at Northcutt.com.

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Please introduce your business and what you do there.

Northcutt is an online marketing agency heavy on tech and B2B clientele. We have a team of 10 people in Chicago handling inbound marketing. I am the founder of the company and this is the third company I've started. Before this, I also founded a cloud hosting company and a VoIP provider.

Less than half of all enterprises engage in SEO or pay-per-click marketing. What is your reaction to this?

There are a few business niches that will not have an online audience. A trucking company or a healthcare brand may only have a narrow scope of B2B clients, so it makes little sense to market. In other situations, people will prioritize different online channels, which is okay. For an apparel brand that pushes style and design first, Facebook and Pinterest advertising will make more sense than search results. For everyone else, not using SEO equates to missing the boat.

We spoke with Sam Golden, who said, “Modern SEO is really about customer experience and working with all other marketing channels. SEO and marketing content are not separate silos but rather content needs to be created for both humans and search engines.” Do you agree with that statement and is there anything you could add to it?

I completely agree that SEO is not a silo. I have started outright refusing agreements and shutting down clients if they’re not willing to integrate our philosophy into what they do. SEO is much bigger than simply contracting someone for marketing and talking to him or her again three months later. It needs to be a part of the client’s normal business activity.

I do disagree with the fact that SEO is only about one thing. Narrowing it like this can be a little dangerous. There are 200 to 300 factors that we fact-check individually. SEO is granular overall.

Through our survey, we found that most marketers thought that traffic volume was the most important metric for SEO. Do you agree with this?

I strongly disagree. Each business needs to decide what its own priorities are. Generally, we measure our work through transactions, revenue and qualified leads.

One of our clients told us that their search traffic was stagnant and needed to be ramped up. We started to look at the behind-the-scenes behavior. After peeling back the onion, we saw that their support center had been hemorrhaging traffic through help articles, but it wasn’t contributing to the overall marketing. Their product pages and blog were actually growing, so that was okay. The client was ultimately looking to make money, not simply gain more traffic.

Do you agree that many of your clients don’t prioritize organic search because it takes too long to see results?

I think that our clients understand that SEO is a long-term game. We make it clear that, if they haven’t seen results within three to six months, they probably won’t see results at all. For someone who is just beginning to flirt with the idea of doing SEO, it takes a lot of patience. Eventually, people find their way back to us after years of burning ad revenue; they start to see the difference between owning attention and simply renting it.

How do you prove return-on-investment to your clients?

Every business is different in terms of what matters, but the baseline is always Google Analytics. We have a certified team set up dashboards and slice up summaries, which become very granular. Depending on how deeply they want to look at leads, we can set up marketing automation in order to score values and pass that off directly to a sales CRM, in which case they’ll know the exact dollar value of conversion rates. If that doesn’t cover it, we can use outside tricks like tracking live chat, phone calls and dark social.

Do you feel that content creation should be the top priority for SEO?

No. It will always be an important priority, and Google rewards the best content. Not taking care of this will mean swimming upstream, irrespective of other tricks used, but it shouldn’t be the top priority. Sometimes, there’s enough strong pre-existing content that we can tell the client not to worry about it. There can also be penalties and technical issues that can prevent even the best content from ranking high. There needs to be a precise look in order to decide on what’s most important at the moment.

Do you have any client success stories that resulted in a nice mix of content creation for SEO, pay-per-click and other channels?

Absolutely.  One of our clients has ranked first for Magento and ExpressionEngine hosting for the last 4 out of the 5 years we've worked with them.  We run all of their online marketing and have grown their in-house team from 30 to 130 employees.  We did it by applying all the little things.

We're always iterating and learning from the process. The four columns into which we'd divide theirs or anyone else's effort would be: content, optimization, social media and outreach. We diversify their investment in us by applying constant pressure in each area. There's been no big, all-in moment which was make-or-break - like make the sexiest marketing blog headlines. Just constant hard work across everything that matters.

About the Author

Riley Panko Marketing Communications Manager

Riley leads Clutch's media relations efforts, alongside writing original research reports on new B2B trends.

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