SEO Agency Services Utilization & Review of Conductor
November 08, 2017

SEO Agency Services Utilization & Review of Conductor

Gregory Lee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Conductor is our main enterprise SEO tool we use when providing SEO consulting and content marketing services to our clients. My department uses it for reporting and pulling insights that help drive recommendations. We also use other paid SEO tools like Moz, ScreamingFrog, SEMrush, and some local SEO tools (here's a full list http://www.blendseo.com/favorite-seo-tools-consulting-agency/). But these others are used more in-between and as needed for specific tasks. Conductor is our main tool in which we setup each SEO retainer client for gathering data, creating & delivering reporting and digging for insights.

Pros

  • Reporting is the biggest area where Conductor really stands out. One of the reasons I chose this tool over others is that reporting comes with templates designed for people at various business roles. From an SEO agency perspective, I get a more productive relationship with my clients if more areas of their business understand how SEO aligns with their goals. Conductor also pulls data from sources that are troublesome for our Business Intelligence department, which creates channel integrated reports for our clients.
  • Data and insights are very important for providing SEO services. I have a huge variety of SEO tools and browser plugins at hand. But Conductor is valuable in that it provides connections between keywords, typical SEO KPIs and content performance. Other SEO enterprise tools like Searchmetrics and BrightEdge (and maybe Moz if you want to include it here) also provide meaningful insights and recommendations. But Conductor is easily competitive and holds its own here. I'm really excited about enabling Google Search Console integration, since up until now we have been pulling this data into spreadsheets with a free API that is only supported by a single unpaid person.
  • Conductor's content mapping is a really cool way to conceptualize content marketing. I love how it gives a visual representation of the customer journey and enables you to apply KPIs to each - giving you a clear idea of the business value of content and how well it performs across each stage of the journey and segment of customers.
  • Customer support is done really well by Conductor. This is a big area of difference I noticed right away during the evaluation stage between Conductor and my previous enterprise SEO tool. The Conductor team has jumped in and created reports for me numerous times. They don't hound me when it is time to renew the contract. Chat help is really helpful in solving problems.

Cons

  • Creating content maps and assigning pages to each segment is difficult. I would like to see more options in ways to associate a page with a segment. For example, allow a custom field to search for something in the code. This way, we could create a custom tag or even pull a visual element off the page that determines which segment the page belongs.
  • When looking at rankings, I'd like to be able to quickly see historic trends for a keyword. Currently, it's a little cumbersome to get this -- takes multiple clicks and waiting for the page to load each time.
  • I don't get much out of Conductor's backlink reporting. When I need this, I go straight to Majestic. Whether its to dig into backlinks or basic overview reporting, I go straight to Majestic and export data.
  • Biggest ROI for the SEO department is reporting efficiency. We used to create all reports by pulling multiple sources into Excel. Now, most of what I need is pulled into Conductor and provided in a really good, live report the client can explore.
Conductor support is excellent. They hold your hand for onboarding, with no complaints. Customer success team jumps in to help and create the occasional workspace report.
Conductor data and insights are on par with other similarly priced enterprise SEO tools. It blows away less expensive tools like Moz or Advanced Web Rankings. However, I still get a lot of value out of the variety of Moz tools and continue to use them alongside Conductor. They are great in terms of working with me on a custom package that fits my budget.
Conductor is an enterprise SEO tool. It is appropriate for a business that has the budget to invest in SEO at a corporate level -- something like $5K-$10K monthly (whether in house or with an agency). Automated reports can be provided to different roles within the business. Conductor can also support this business for ongoing SEO as its sophistication matures. After a website has completed a first phase of basic overall SEO, Conductor does a good job at providing insights for analyzing and creating strategy around individual target keyword rankings against multiple competitors.

A small or medium business that is not willing to spend as much on their SEO investment and has fewer decision makers can likely make due with a single in-house SEO expert or contractor who can spend more time using a compilation of tools to pull insights and reports. With fewer decision makers, there is less need for custom reports. The SEO staff can then take time to explain more about what is happening face to face rather than up front training and emailing reports.

Conductor Feature Ratings

SEO
9.2
Keyword analysis
10
SERP ranking tracking
10
Competitive analysis
10
Site audit / diagnostics
8
Site recommendations
8
SEO Channels
6.3
Local SEO
2
Mobile SEO
8
Global SEO
9
SEO Platform & Account Management
9.5
Multi-domain support
9
Integration with web analytics tools
10

Using Conductor Searchlight

Workspaces are the number one feature where Conductor shines. And my support team helps make and customize them. InsightStream is a cool feature that clients like because it gives them 1-liners about website performance they can devour or share with others in the company. Conductor's user interface for pulling your own data and insights used to be pretty hard to navigate. But it's been improved greatly. SEO professionals who are new to it have told me it is easy to find what you want. But it does SOOO much, training is still necessary.

Comments

  • Joe Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Joe Taylor
    commented 8 years ago
    Thank you for taking time to write this. The detail is incredible and very helpful for us (and potential users). We work with a lot of companies that waste so much time reporting rather than doing. It's great that you've been able to make your process at BKV more efficient with Conductor and I am sure that has saved hours. I'm also really happy to hear you've had a good experience with our Customer Success team. We take the customer experience seriously so it's always good to know we're on the right track. Your critical feedback is great and I will pass it on to our product team. Content Maps are incredible but I can see how having more flexibility could be useful in the setup process. Getting quick historical trends for keywords would also be useful and the data is there, but we would need to look at some UI enhancements. And I hear you on the backlink data. What we currently have works for a lot of customers but for more advanced strategies, I know you might need more. Solid feedback. Thank you again and don't hesitate to reach out for anything you might need. Joe Taylor Director of Customer Success jtaylor@conductor.com

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