Pleased With Early Impact
October 05, 2015
Pleased With Early Impact
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight
We've been using Conductor over the last six months to identify areas where our content and metadata can be tweaked for SEO gain. We also use it to help guide us with respect to AdWords spend and better understanding the impact of our campaigns and inform our decision-making in that space. I am the primary user, but several team members have access to the interface and we are increasingly integrating it into our content production and management workflows.
- Tracks "TrueRank" for Google Searches on keywords.
- Shows progress over time. Strong visualizations of performance of what's improving and what's slipping.
- Provides actionable intelligence of areas that can be addressed.
- Helps prioritize tasks based on impact and estimated level of effort.
- Shows competitor rank and allows you to understand how others competing with you for traffic are positioning their content.
- The amount of data that is available to you can be a bit overwhelming to users.
- A quarterly "health check" would be a great value add.
- Some basic tools to optimize content when it's being created would be great. Such as guidance on length of headlines/titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords. It tells you a week later when something is "too long" or "too short", but on the front end, before it's saved and published. Also more specific suggestions would be great.
- The weekly nature of updates is a bit limiting.
- Sorting through recommendations and action items, some of the sort options reset themselves too much. I haven't been able to figure out how to make certain criteria selections save/persist.
- It has put actionable intelligence in front of more users, giving them recommendations of how they can improve the SEO of existing content.
- It has helped make SEO a more approachable subject with tangible measures and results for our staff who are not too involved on the technical side of things. It's one thing to tell someone "this is important" or "this has an impact on search rank", but it's far better to be able to show someone "before" and "after" results on how a piece of content moves around the rankings based on different tactics. They are now more aware of how they can incorporate recommendations into their content creation and speak in the language that customers/users themselves use for their search queries.
- Our site does not have as much of a direct revenue component as many brand/business sites, so we do not have a great way of measuring ROI for solutions like this.
Conductor Feature Ratings
Conductor Searchlight Implementation
- Vendor implemented
- Implemented in-house
Yes - We used Conductor's professional services "quick start" program and are glad we did. There are a couple stages over the first 30-90 days, of discovery, configuration, knowledge transfer, continued tweaking. While our content doesn't fall into a strict vertical like many sites, and also our competition and our revenue objectives are less straightforward, we still found it tremendously valuable in getting us early results and familiarity with the platform. Highly recommended.
Change management was minimal - It was not a major factor for us.
- Since we don't have a straightforward revenue objective on our site (i.e. selling ads, products, gaining qualified leads) we were probably a bit of a challenge for their staff, who are more used to speaking to the benefits Conductor brings to more traditional business cases.
Using Conductor Searchlight
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Well integrated | Lots to learn |
- Overall, it's just a bit of information overload. It'd be nice if they split it into simple and advanced functionality based on user level.