Please, use anything but Conductor! (So I can CRUSH YOU!!!!)
Updated September 25, 2015
Please, use anything but Conductor! (So I can CRUSH YOU!!!!)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight
Go Big or go Home? Conductor lets you go big. EDDY uses Conductor for 8 websites with excellent results. We give access to the Product Team and Creative Team so they can monitor progress and get ideas for content. The tool is only administered by the SEO Team. We use reports from Conductor to support business decision making.
- Business Visibility: Excellent reporting and business intelligence with tools such as Keyword Pipeline.
- Focus: Conductor helps us focus on the top opportunities across 8 sites and hundreds of thousands of pages.
- Excellent Training: Conductor's documentation and training library are second to none. I can take junior people and feel very comfortable that they can quickly and effectively get up to speed.
- Power Tools: For myself and my other more experienced users Conductor provides a wide array of power tools that we use to analyze our sites, content, and the related business performance.
- Categorization allows us to create excellent drill down capability within the tool. We can zoom in from the site level down to very discrete section of the website and compare performance of those sections independently or in comparison to any other part of the website. This capability allows us to understand what ROI we are achieving based on content creation efforts. It helps us plan and ideate new content.
- The Keyword Visibility Tool is one of my favorites! The first thing I do every Monday morning is to log-in to Conductor and review Keyword Visibility. We can quickly and effectively discern if there are any issues with site pages or if recent optimizations garnered us improvements. The tool helps to focus upcoming work as well.
- Do not underestimate "Categories"! Building out your categories in detail makes Conductor an extremely effective tool. You can get a detailed "health" view of your site on the main page. This helps you identify opportunities that you would otherwise overlook with the Keyword Visibility Tool. You can compare similar categories and filter to compare multiple different types of categories. One click takes you to the Keyword Pipeline view for a given category and one more click can take you to the Keyword Visibility for that Category. This is exactly how I would design it myself. :)
- Wherefore art thou Webmaster Tools? Having the Page level detail (with keywords) from Webmaster Tools integrated into Conductor in a similar way to Visibility Explore would be ideal. Especially since Google has made using Search Analytics painful with their last "update".
- Pages, not Keywords! Conductor is slowly morphing to be a Content / Page platform. However, all of these tools started as keyword centric. For example, in the Keyword Visibility Tool I never click through the keywords. I open the associated pages instead. What I want are recommendations at the page level; not for discrete keywords. I have lots of ideas how to do this right. Let's talk....
- Workflow. Simply not robust enough right now. Needs to be able to be assigned from almost anywhere in the platform.
- How about a 243% in net profit within 4 months on our biggest site?
- The ability to measure the effectiveness of new content pieces helps our creative team come up with increasing better ideas. Both an ROI metric and an efficiency metric.
- Speed. We are able to do more faster and more effectively with Conductor. This allows us to get the absolute most out of our staff.
I will be brutally honest. BrightEdge has a great sales staff and a so/so at best customer service group. And a clunky user interface. I used BrightEdge and Conductor at the same time for 10 months. Conductor was easier to use. Much more intuitive. Better value for the money at the keyword level. BrightEdge has a nifty tool in the DataCube. I like it. However, I can also get the same type of data from several other sources much more cost effectively. At the end it was no comparison. Conductor won hands down.
Conductor Feature Ratings
Using Conductor Searchlight
11 - SEO, Product Management, Creative, and even a Content Freelancer. We find giving the Product Team and Creative Visibility [Team] helps them do their jobs.
2 - We have two high-end SEO people, myself and Anthony. We handle all of the configurations, reporting, set up, and admin. We have the sites split out between us based on what we routinely work on. That is more than enough in-house support. Conductor is excellent about helping us out with anything we have questions about.
- Content ROI.
- Website Migration.
- Revenue Generation through SEO Optimization.
- Complete website migration including new content creation in support of what we saw in Conductor.
- Tracking content generation through Social Shares and back-links through Keyword Pipeline to Revenue.
- Uncovering hidden gems. Areas of the website that we did not have on our content calendar yet had great potential for SEO optimizations.
- Full integration of Social Signals and back-links into the tool.
- Integration of Google Tag Manager built content groupings into Conductor's view of the site.
- Integration of webmaster tools page query data into Conductor.
Evaluating Conductor Searchlight and Competitors
Yes - We were running Conductor and BrightEdge across the enterprise. After a 10 month head-to-head battle (because of contract terms) Conductor won hands down. We have evaluated numerous other platforms in the past two years and foresee no reason in the next year or two to look again.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Third-party Reviews
FORGET SALES! Look, can we be honest? The purpose of sales is to sell you. If you think you have a great relationship with the sales person. All that means is they are good at their job. Do not let that sway your opinion! After sales support along with product features and usability are what is critical. Conductor wins on these criteria every time.
The only thing that I would change in our selection criteria is to use more third party reviews. I find that well thought out and detailed reviews can help with the decision making process. It is very helpful to have your own decision making framework well established going into a review process. Again, third party reviews can help you flesh out your framework.
Conductor Searchlight Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - The main change management has to do we how we function as an organization. The previous SEO head did not give accounts to the product team or creative, seeing this as just an SEO team tool. By incorporating it into our webdesign and content creation processes we've gotten much more value!
- None.
- How about really none!
- Did I mention none?
Conductor Searchlight Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No
The support I get from Conductor is simply the best I have ever had from a software vendor. And I'm old and have used thousands of packages. Their integrated help, available for every page/view within the tool is brilliant. Support requests, sent from the page, pull all of the relevant information saving time. They get back to you almost on-click.
Yes - There are very few bugs with Conductor. Anything I have reported has been completely investigated and resolved in a very timely manner.
So many examples so little time... Categorization is a very important feature within Conductor. As I was doing mas science once to totally revise my categories Kevin Blake took my example and just did it. I was not expecting that. I had sent him the example to make sure it made sense before I ran it across all of my keywords. He replied back how it made perfect sense and he had implemented it for me. Have tons of other similar examples.
Using Conductor Searchlight
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- The Bulk Keyword Update tool is your best friend.
- The ability to download into Excel what you are seeing on just about any screen is excellent.
- The Visibility Explorer and Paid & Natural Explorer are great tools.
- Workflow needs to be enhanced to be triggered from many more areas within the tool, not just on the keyword recommendation pages.
- Please integrate with webmaster tools so I do not have to do this by hand for page level query information.
- Needs an auto categorize feature for recently optimized pages and their associated keywords.