SEO in the Time of Cholera
Updated January 28, 2020

SEO in the Time of Cholera

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Our whole SEO team uses Conductor. About 6 people in the agency use it. We use it for easy-to-see rank tracking primarily. We have many spreadsheets that we set up so we can v-lookup a large set of keyword ranks and do MoM and YoY rank comparisons, movements, etc. The market share feature is also useful.

Pros

  • The ability to isolate answer boxes in the ranking analysis is excellent.
  • The market share pie charts are a great way to get at-a-glance industry positioning.
  • I appreciate the interface of the main rankings where you can click Top 5 and Did Not Rank, etc, toggling for each date range.
  • It's easy to add or revise keyword lists without requesting help from the company.

Cons

  • The "Activity Stream" homepage on each account has these widgets that were meant to be interesting insights, but I rarely found them useful.
  • It is way too hard to use Conductor with an account that uses various markets (countries). You have to reload the whole interface for each country, which is very burdensome for some accounts with 15 or so countries -- reporting is almost impossible like this.
  • I don't like that Conductor only uses Google data -- even though Bing/Yahoo and other engines are the vast majority, there are still trends to see there.
  • I wish there was more focus on changes in search volume -- that would be nice to see any alerts about volume change.
  • Reporting efficiency has improved with the help of Conductor.
  • Insights on Answer Boxes and where competitors are winning has helped provide a value-add for clients.
  • The ability to show a timeline for ranking fluctuations of specific keywords has helped sharpen strategy.
Some aspects of the support are a large part of what I like about Conductor. The live chat box has been such a life-saver. Some support personnel were incredibly helpful and I always felt welcome to throw out a quick, random question and could get a good, immediate response. But the monthly meetings with the account supervisor were a bit too much at times. I felt a bit like I was being scolded at times, for not using certain features. This led me to dislike jumping on calls because I would feel guilted for not fully using the capabilities of the tool.
One of the largest pulls of Conductor seems to be the interface. Many of the other programs listed above (Semrush, Seach Metrics, STAT) have more developer-like, skeletal interfaces that may be difficult for SEOs to get into. For this reason I think Conductor is an ideal product for employees early in their SEO education.
Conductor is ideal for a single-country account that is focused primarily on keyword movements across the site. For any account focused on more than one country, Conductor isn't the ideal solution, as the level of exporting makes it unsustainable. Investigating larger brand trends is basically a wash when you have to frequently flip countries and reset parameters.

Conductor Feature Ratings

SEO
7.2
Keyword analysis
8
SERP ranking tracking
10
Competitive analysis
8
Site audit / diagnostics
5
Site recommendations
5
SEO Channels
8.0
Local SEO
8
Mobile SEO
8
Global SEO
8
SEO Platform & Account Management
2.0
Multi-domain support
2
Integration with web analytics tools
Not Rated

Using Conductor Searchlight

Conductor is very usable, and there are lots of valuable features. The problem in my mind is just that many of the sections aren't all that intuitively named, and it doesn't feel like it's easy to browse around and discover useful features. Most to the value I got from the product required a walk-through to understand the value of the tools.

Comments

  • Joe Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Joe Taylor
    commented 8 years ago
    Thank you for sharing this experience. I'm glad to hear you've found chat support to be helpful as well as various reporting capabilities like our Answer Box data. But I also appreciate the candid feedback and will use it to improve. I'm terribly sorry about your experience on monthly calls. Our goal is to highlight underutilized areas so you can maximize your investment in the platform, but I can tell our tone was off and I take full responsibility for that. I will make sure my team knows how to deliver this information more positively. For your multi-country experience, we recently released the FlexHub which does some pretty great roll-up views and our multi-location/country clients love it. I don't know your specific use case, so it may not be exactly what you are looking for but I think it is in the same vein. Regardless, I am passing on your feedback to our Product leadership and you can absolutely reach out to me directly if you'd like more color on this. Thank you again for this feedback and please reach out if you'd like to continue the conversation. Joe Taylor Director of Customer Success jtaylor@conductor.com

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