Item: Conductor
Rating: 8
Author: Erika Nieman

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a small, in-house marketing team. About half of us use Conductor on a regular basis to optimize content, improve existing pages, and plan future content efforts. I probably log into Conductor on a daily basis to just help inform decisions we're making in all our marketing channels in one way or another. We also use Conductor to keep an eye on the market and who is moving up or down, who is creating content, and what kind of content is working or not to keep our efforts focused.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The keyword tracking and analysis is wonderful. You can look high level, create segments, and dig deep into each search term and get all the information you could want.
Market share tracking has been very valuable to keep track of how our efforts measure up and where we need to focus next.
Knowing how each individual piece of content is performing is great. We can keep track of the effort involved and how it pays off over time.

Cons

The reports are wonderful, and we have several built, but they are hard to customize the way we'd like.
Once keywords are in the system, it takes some effort to make changes to them.
The page recommendations are helpful, but you can't dismiss them if you decide not to implement.

Return on Investment

We found ways to improve our ranking for more keywords and phrases than we knew we could even target, resulting in a huge uptick in organic leads to our business.
We use the reporting to show stakeholders how changes we made had an impact on rankings, traffic, and therefore leads to the business.
We're able to identify page and site issues accurately instead of guessing, and act on them immediately with confidence.
We're able to plan ahead on content ideas and topics that we wouldn't have even thought of without the tools in Conductor.

Support Rating

The support from Conductor has been wonderful. I've worked with a few different account reps and for the most part, they have all been amazing. If I ever have questions, it's easy to get answers and help. They're always reaching out to make sure we're getting what we need out of the platform.

Alternatives Considered

Semrush and Google Analytics

Conductor had more features and options in one place than other products we looked at. We previously used tools that were all disjointed, but Conductor brought everything together and added more insight into the overall market, competitors, and recommendations than we ever had.

Likelihood to Recommend

Conductor is great for teams who really like to know exactly what's going on in one, easy location. If your focus is on content marketing, this is a great tool to make sure you're on target and hitting goals. It could be cost prohibitive for a lot of teams, but if you can measure your return from content growth, you can likely justify it.

Conductor Feature Ratings

Using Conductor Searchlight

Usability

For how much is packed into Conductor, it's a pretty easy tool to use. Once you get used to what everything is called, it's quick to find what you need. The InsightStream has been useful to get notified of things that I don't necessarily look at all the time and the Workspaces keep me updated on the metrics and performance I want to keep an eye on regularly. I wouldn't be able to figure everything out on my own, but having account reps available to show me new features and workflows has made the product much easier to explore.

Comments

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Joe Taylor
(Vendor Representative) commented 8 years ago
Erika, thank you for the review and congratulations on becoming an SEO Magician. Despite the low search volume, I fully support making that your title on LinkedIn. Great job on improving your rankings, traffic, and lead volume! At the end of the day, that's why customers like you choose to work with us and I am happy to hear you're succeeding against your goals. Also glad to hear you're using our Workspaces effectively and it looks like you'd like to customize them even further. The good news is that we've recently rolled out some enhancements to Workspaces to help you manage them easier and are also planning to release more enhancements in the coming months. If you need something super-custom, our new FlexHub probably could do the trick so definitely ask your CSM about that. We definitely agree that editing keywords in the system should be easier and just last week we released updates for this. You can now edit several aspects of your keywords without going into Settings and we are working on adding more functionality here as well in the near term. I'm a big fan of this one. I've shared your feedback on "sleeping" recommendations with our Product team, and if you have any other specific changes you'd like to see, send them over. Thank you, Joe Taylor Director of Customer Success jtaylor@conductor.com

Conductor makes you an SEO magician