SEO in the Time of Cholera
Updated January 28, 2020
SEO in the Time of Cholera
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.
- 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.
- 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.
The quality of the data is great, inasmuch as Google is the main party concerned. There is quite a quantity of data as well, but much of it doesn't seem as important in my case. The collection of site analysis recommendations isn't all that useful to a full-service SEO suite like the one I work for, because we already have other tools to locate, for instance, pages with missing meta data etc.
Insights gleaned from the keyword reports from Conductor have helped focus on specific URLs that need optimization. A Conductor rep once gave us a special report where top keyword opportunities were listed out by URL. This allowed us to bring ideas to the content team to change direction on certain pages and combine other pages to increase focus.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Search Metrics and Semrush
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.