Item: Conductor
Rating: 10
Author: Nick Kretz - Digital Strategist/Founder of KRETZMEDIA

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a digital agency, Xivic uses Conductor for large enterprise SEO client accounts. Conductor is used and independently managed by the SEO team. The platform is used to monitor both website performance (traffic/sessions) and rank performance. We use the Google Analytics integration in order to efficiently analyze performance data both at a high-level and more granular when viewing specific page performance. In terms of rank performance, we use Conductor for keyword research, keyword discovery, keyword rank management, competition analysis and content strategy. With Conductor we are able to use one tool to keep track of:

continuous website performance reporting
historical data capture (traffic/sessions/keyword rank)
market competition analysis
content discovery and content strategy
keyword rank performance
desktop vs. mobile market share/rank performance
National and Local SEO campaigns
True rank indicators for additional rank types (ie. answer boxes, carousel images, etc.)

Pros and Cons

Pros

Very strong capabilities in keyword discovery for rank tracking and content strategy
Efficient and extremely effective competitor analysis features
Visually appealing UI to quickly interpret keyword rank performance
Powerful engine that aggregates multiple data sources to inform and develop a comprehensive SEO/Content marketing strategy

Cons

Poor quality when exporting workspace reports
Hard to bridge http/https data to review page rank performance at the keyword level
I want more control over the workspace formatting, the options are currently limited
I wish there was a normalizing factor to counter the wide ranking fluctuations seen from raw search rank data. The wide fluctuations happen often and are uncontrollable. Would be awesome to use past historical performance to set an average/normalizing factor for the extreme outliers

Return on Investment

Client had a 7,975% growth in sessions from on-page content optimizations performed based on insights pulled from Conductor data
Client had a 10,850% growth in organic search visibility from on-page content optimizations performed based on insights pulled from Conductor data
Client had 38% increase in top 3 results (over 200 URLs impacted) from on-page content optimizations performed based on insights pulled from Conductor data

Support Rating

As a new hire last year, it took awhile to be on-boarded due to the lack of primary users at my agency. I had to learn the platform on my own and I was able to quickly do so with the extensive training/support materials. Their customer success team is very responsive and definitely care about your progress in understanding all the capabilities of the platform.

Alternatives Considered

BrightEdge, Serpstat and Semrush

I've logged into a client's previous install of BrightEdge to learn the capabilities of the platform. I find that tool is extremely powerful for auditing and rank tracking but it lacks the content discovery engine and competition analytics that Conductor provides.

I've also used smaller tools like Serpstat, Semrush and webceo. all of these tools are great for smaller businesses because of their low-cost. It takes much longer to use their data outputs to quickly inform decision making.

Likelihood to Recommend

Conductor is well suited for companies that

have a dedicated budget to SEO/content marketing
have a large website with many pages to keep track off
have a specific product/service in a competitive industry
large websites with a lot of content

Not suited for

small companies with small websites
companies that do not generate new site content regularly
companies in low-competition industries

Conductor Feature Ratings

Using Conductor Searchlight

Usability

It took me 2 months to become comfortable in my use of the platform and begin to use it regularly in my day-to-day work. The insight stream is great as it gives you a look at both positive and negative performance indicators on a daily basis right when you log in to the platform. Workspaces could use some work as their email deliverabilty/pdf formatting sucks...I hear that is going to be fixed in the latest release this year. :-)

Comments

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Joe Taylor
commented 8 years ago
Nick - thanks for taking time to write this. The results you've generated for your clients are incredible. 8000-10000% growth is...pretty damn good. All of the praise goes to your team for making that happen, but we are truly happy to be a part of that success. Nobody pushes us on making Workspaces better like our agency partners. Reporting is a critical piece of agency offerings, so I totally understand. You are correct in that we are releasing enhancements for Workspaces and I hope they are in line with your requests. Rank fluctuations happen all the time so I know what you mean about wanting a metric/indicator of whether or not it is truly a one-off fluctuation or if it is a trend. If you go to Keyword Trending for any keyword, you can see "Your Rank Trend" in the summary bar which will indicate volatility for that keyword. I would love your feedback on whether this is useful for you, so please feel free to email me directly with feedback. Again, this detailed review was really helpful and I appreciate you taking the time to write it. Joe Taylor Director of Customer Success jtaylor@conductor.com

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