Nexcess (http://www.nexcess.net) is one of the most successful managed hosting providers in the world. As an Inc. 5000 company with owned data centers in Dearborn & Southfield Michigan, a close partnership with eBay-owned Magento, and a solid track record dating back to 2000, there are few hosting companies that have measured up to Nexcess.

When Nexcess sought out to find an online marketing consultancy that could continue moving their firm forward following the kind of history that Internet startup dreams are built on, the bar was set very high. As such, it came as no surprise that Nexcess enlisted Northcutt's services to help bring the company's online marketing practices to the next level.

"We continue to see a huge benefit working with Northcutt. Our steady growth is measurable and Northcutt is constantly innovating to make sure this growth is sustained." -Chris Wells, Nexcess President & CEO

The Opportunity

Nexcess was started in 2000, just like many great tech startups, in someone's garage. The company grew steadily over their first 10 years, above all else, through always going the extra mile for their clients. Nexcess began a six-month agreement with Northcutt in November of 2010, and as of January 2012 (the time this case study was written), continues online marketing services with Northcutt.

The Solution

Northcutt quickly started in with organic search engine optimization and content marketing services for Nexcess. Although existing efforts existed in the majority of the most significant areas that we would work, Northcutt's long-running expertise in online marketing quickly amplified the firm's in-house efforts. Northcutt's methods required no investment beyond a flat rate, with the exception of a very minor PPC experiment (<$200), and newswire press release syndication (which took advantage of Northcutt's extreme bulk agency discounts).

The Results

Nexcess was so successful in 2011 that they made the Inc. 5000 for a second year, and had to begin work on a second data center in Southfield, Michigan. For the sake of this study, we'll look at the first twelve months of service, comparing numbers between 2010 and 2011. This also allows us to remove short-term data contaminants such as seasonality, and visualize a steady accumulation of traffic that's associated with content marketing (an ever-growing sum of inbound traffic from news stories, blogs, infographics, and other content, long after publishing).

In a year-over-year November comparison of the root domain and key subdomains, Nexcess new visitor traffic increased dramatically, while bounce rates (visitors who immediately leave a site, implying poorly-targeted traffic) decreased as reported by combined Google Analytics data. Pageviews grew by less than new visitors due to the elimination of unnecessary intermediate pages from the site structure.

There is one glaring omission that deserves mention in our data: that of conversion rates. While Northcutt paid heavy attention to conversion rate optimization theory, and our process as a whole pays special attention to Google's ultimate guideline of "optimize sites for the user experience", we do not have reliable metrics to substantiate a definite claim of improved conversion rates here. This flaw in our methods has since been rectified in 2012.

Nexcess increased their content marketing output and engagement in all areas while building a nice audience of subscribers. These numbers compare October 2010 to October 2011 unless otherwise noted (the time just before our agreement with Nexcess began). Content was produced in part by Northcutt, and in part by Nexcess' skilled team of hosting experts, later optimized and promoted by our team.

As expected, quality content marketing produced a 'trickle' effect, with high traffic seen at initial publication, trumped by long-term traffic from search engines and old links. This supplied an especially meteoric rise for the Nexcess blog (see graph).

Throughout 2011, Nexcess focused only in organic (non-paid) search engine marketing. The company's SEO planning was met with wild success, moving all desired Magento-related phrases to page 1 from 1 to 3 pages deeper, with a large percentage of long-tail variations (such as magento cluster hosting) residing in the #1/#2 positions with multiples of secondary appearances on the first page.

Through pairing a strategic SEO campaign with content marketing, we were able to achieve a wide variety of goals that greatly exceeded initial expectations in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In addition to success with our pool of 25 key variations on Magento (a word searched more often than eCommerce), we were able to place Nexcess on page 1 for terms such as shared hosting in all 3 engines for quite some time, a phrase with 300,000 competitors (source: a Google search) and 135,000 Global Monthly Searches in Google (source: AdWords keyword tool, January 2012).

After quickly reaching our page 1 goals with Magento, we quickly expanded our approach to include a wider variety of search phrases, including those related to eCommerce, relevant data center certifications, Michigan-based hosting facilities and shared web hosts. Although many of our more impressive "high competition rankings saw a moderate decrease in Google alone following October's Panda 2.5 algorithm update, overall search traffic did not wane. The months since are again showing steady growth on even the most competitive search phrases as we continue adapting to meet ever-evolving search engine expectations for Nexcess.