Best SEO tool I've used, and I've used quite a few
November 08, 2017
Best SEO tool I've used, and I've used quite a few
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight
We use it for SEO strategy and research across a multi-national team. I manage content for 4 countries, and so I primarily use Conductor to see what's working for my peers in the US team, to see how our strategy is performing in each locale, and to do localised competitor analysis.
- I like that I can do easy competitor research on more than one competitor. Extra handy is that I can tag competitors as SEO or business, so it's easier to see.
- Their chat help is solid. I've needed to use it a few times and their responses are thorough. They also send along extra info at the end concerning your problem for extra context and email you the correspondence in case you need it for later.
- My favourite thing is the insight stream. It takes all the important things you want to know about how you're performing and packs it into one view. I also like that I can pin them or message someone on my team about what is appearing.
- I still feel a bit confused about how to build a report based on specific keywords, like for a campaign. I know we went through it in training, but when I did it myself it was more difficult than I remembered. Maybe it would be good to ask teams to think of a campaign or report they'd like to build before that training and actually build it in the training.
- The names are confusing. I know it's probably hard to fix them, but I can never remember which thing does what.
- We'd like better reporting about knowledge boxes. I know we can see basics, but giving tips for how to optimise, and combining reports for a more comprehensive view would be good. I believe we already gave this feedback to an account manager. (This is more my manager's feedback than mine so I don't know all the ins and outs)
- I can more easily share the results of our campaigns to our stakeholders, and show any negative effects that have occurred as a consequence of prioritising other projects.
- We like to track organic traffic to the site as a way to show our team's value. It's nice being able to share an official report or card that says 92% of all traffic to our site came from organic search last week, for example.
- It's definitely helped us prioritise opportunities with our content—still waiting on the ROI!
I like the new data I get from Conductor because it makes me think more outside the box when it comes to the content I produce. I like that I can see where our big opportunities are in different views and easily create actions and content plans around them—often on topics I might not have considered myself.
Our content team is the SEO team, so I don't have much to contribute here, unfortunately. But I will say that it's made my job of straddling the two disciplines much easier and less stressful than it was before. And it's made collaboration between our team in the UK and the US easier as well.
I know we used to use Brightedge. Our US team moved to Conductor, so we followed. I wasn't involved in the decision making process, unfortunately!