Item: Conductor
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Conductor to compare our keyword rankings on Google against our competitors and for looking at the competition trends over time. On the technical side, the Deep Crawl add-on helps us do full audits on all our pages.

The platform is exclusively used by the Search Marketing team.

The main business question the tool is trying to address for us is that when there is a shift in ranking, is this shift exclusive to our brand or is it among our competitors as well? The tool also helps in discovery of new keywords in our industry that may be exclusively controlled by the competition.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Tracking the competition's ranking against your own. You can see who is ranking on the terms you are concerned about and discover terms you might have realized are valuable.
Deep Crawl analysis of the site to discover problematic pages. Each run can be archived and compared against previous crawls to show changes.
Help team is always online and can typically answer any questions you have while using the platform. If the answer is not immediately available they can usually get back to you quickly.

Cons

Backlink analysis is not present in the tool and should be. Without any backlink data, a user would have a tougher time doing any linking auditing or analyzing a competitor's portfolio.
Some of the functions are not clear unless you have already practiced and familiarized with the platform. Having tool tips for the different functions would help.
Better pre-built dashboards or tutorials with specific common use cases in mind.

Return on Investment

We have been able to take a bird's eye view of the competitive landscape for the keywords that matter most to our business. This has given us better direction when performing competitor research.
The ability to identify new competitors in our keyword space has improved greatly due to the platform's ability to show domains that share common keywords with our business.

Support Rating

Customer support has been excellent. The onboarding team will guide you through the platform and help you set up all the critical pieces. They will also go through each function one by one and explain their functionality.

Customer success will keep in touch with you throughout your term and will be available should you have any questions regarding your account. They can also assist with requests on how to better utilize the data in the tool.

In our experience, the CS team has been able to address all our requests in a timely manner. They available for live chat when you log in and if they cannot solve your problem right away then can usually get back to you with a resolution fairly quickly.

Alternatives Considered

We looked into Searchmetrics, Brightedge and SEMRush prior to signing our initial deal with Conductor.

Likelihood to Recommend

Good for large businesses who have a lot of content/product that need to be managed with a growing or fluctuating set of keywords. The tool does well in creating custom keyword buckets where you can compare yourself to your competitors to find out if you are gaining or losing ground on a particular topic or product.

For businesses that also want to grow their keyword list, Conductor can help the user discover and poach keywords that other businesses may be targeting either through a domain keyword analysis or a PPC ad report.

Conductor Feature Ratings

Using Conductor Searchlight

Usability

InsightStream is a helpful tool since it can roll up some basic analysis into small digestible chunks that are instantly presented to you when you login in. The data provided by InsightStream can quickly lead to actionable items for prioritization.

We currently do not use the Workspaces at the moment.

Comments

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Joe Taylor
(Vendor Representative) commented 8 years ago
Thank you for the review! It's awesome that your team is focusing on the competitive landscape. The market shifts often in the world of Search and paying close attention to competitive shifts is a great way to mitigate risk and find opportunities. We're happy that we've been able to help out with that. Thanks for the feedback on how we can improve as well. I will share with Product and make sure your voice is heard regarding link analysis, pre-built Workspaces, and improving tool tips. As a reminder, we do have Success Templates (pre-built, role-based, Workspaces) and Train Me videos on each of your features. Thanks again, Joe Taylor Director of Customer Success jtaylor@conductor.com

Conductor - Insights into your organic competitors.