Challenge
Nexcess was founded by Chris Wells in 2000, like many great startups, in a garage. The company grew steadily over their first 10 years, crediting this success to the level of care that was given to clients. And clients enjoyed repaying Nexcess in kind through word-of-mouth referrals. Despite this, very little online marketing had been done outside of the founder's actions, and virtually no online marketing processes were yet formalized. This presented an ideal environment for Northcutt to succeed. All aspects of our process would be allowed to operate with extremely little compromise. Nexcess' clients were clearly happy, which presented an absolutely ideal environment to nurture an audience of advocates while earning new attention.
Solution
In November of 2010, Nexcess began a six-month agreement with Northcutt, which would evolve and multiply in size across the next five years as Nexcess multiplied in size. Northcutt initiated our inbound marketing process with Nexcess in phases. Early conversations surrounded Search Engine Optimization, as a result of Corey Northcutt's glowing portfolio of success with related tactics. This included brand-safe link building processes that stemmed from knowledge of more than 30,000 meticulously organized opportunities. It was also established that content marketing was crucial need, in the way of press releases, blogging, and web content. This stemmed from the fact that Nexcess had placed nearly all focus on being technically brilliant, with a treasure trove of technically spectacular concepts at play that were ripe to be communicated with an audience. As initiatives proved positive returns, Northcutt began to layer on a wide variety of other services, including social media marketing on and off the major social media sites, email, conversion optimization processes, real time ad bidding, editorial public relations placements, and much more.
Results
Five years later, Nexcess' substantial growth, as verified by five consecutive return visits to the Inc. 5000, prove the value of Northcutt's long-term inbound marketing capabilities. In this time, the Nexcess team has grown to 4X the size, and Northcutt has adjusted to work seamlessly with a growing team as we continue to manage all online marketing activities. In Google, Nexcess ranks #1 for all major variations of very competitive search queries surrounding the hosting of Magento and ExpressionEngine. As a later addition to the company's product line, WordPress-related rankings are not far off either. Because Northcutt's methods center around earning rankings and attention rather than utilizing webspam and cheap short-term tactics, these rankings been maintained while most of the cast sharing page 1 on these phrases has changed with Google algorithm updates. The company also ranks for countless other phrases that come from great content marketing. This places nexcess.net's Alexa traffic score in the top 20k of all websites worldwide. This is true even after an international SEO implementation.
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