A Comprehensive SEO Tool with Superior Customer Service
November 17, 2017
A Comprehensive SEO Tool with Superior Customer Service
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight
As a digital marketing agency with an SEO service offering, Conductor is used for reporting and monitoring of all clients that receive SEO services on an ongoing basis. The tool is used to create reports which are sent to clients, by specialists to monitor, research, and make recommendations, and is also used in the business development phase as a tool to audit prospective client websites and present opportunities.
- Conductor provides a high degree of control on categorization of keywords and other data relevant to SEO efforts. This allows us to tag keywords and pages with multiple layers like priority, according to recent changes, and assumed funnel phase of the customer.
- Conductor makes it easy to adopt compared to other tools. The user interface is intuitive and organized by goal / intent in a way that makes it easy to train new users. They continue to innovate on the interface to make it easier to navigate and the knowledgebase is comprehensive and useful.
- Conductor has a lot of useful features, data partnerships, and integrations so that it's rare that one needs to leave Conductor to inform or report on SEO related work. This data is presented in insightful ways, like presenting sessions (from Google Analytics) of a particular page alongside keyword ranking growth of that URL. It's clear that Conductor strives to tell stories not just recall data, which is what our clients and ourselves need.
- As a multi-channel agency, the report builder and export functionality still leaves features to be desired. It exports only in PDF so we can't easily integrate it into PowerPoint presentations or Google slides where other channels like PPC aggregate their data. An Excel output of the visuals would provide a lot more control for us to get Conductor views into cross channel reports without needing to screenshot.
- The wysiwyg report builder can be hard to use when there's a long list of report blocks / elements. It could use a sidebar guide like PowerPoint to easily reorganize report elements. You're also unable to preview the export and awkward page breaks usually result.
- The homepage dashboard has gotten some recent updates to the Insights Stream. I would rather have a customizable dashboard for each profile so that I can see the most important metrics for each client, which usually varies by client. The Insight Stream calls out interesting changes sometimes but isn't easy to configure.
- Custom annotations is another feature that has been updated / removed in favor of automatic annotations where the system creates an annotation when a page element changes. This forces us out of the tool to leave annotations that are important but not related to site changes, like important points of seasonality or offline marketing efforts we know may affect SEO traffic.
- Conductor allows our SEO resources to provide in-depth research and optimizations for our clients in a consistent way.
- Conductor makes business development and audit presentations easier and faster to perform, which increases the number of opportunities we can pursue.
- Conductor allows us to provide a variety of SEO services and deliverables with a single tool. For example, content performance reporting is good enough to support content strategy services and it also has capabilities to track local SEO efforts.
Quality and quantity of data is high. Sometimes there are data discrepancies but it is rare and usually to do with Standard Rank vs True Rank (a keyword position that accounts for image results or local packs). Availability of data is very important to us since we have worked with some of our clients for multiple years and we need to see high level and recent trends. Data export could be improved because I don't know of a way to export the full history of a keyword or keyword rankings, only positions from two dates. This would hep us create custom trend lines in Excel. Google Analytics data is not backwards looking but I don't know of any tools that do this.
Our SEO and content teams are the same resources so I can't comment on this question except to say that the tool makes it easy to present correlations between SEO performance and content performance and vice versa.
We have used BrightEdge, gShift Labs, Lindex, and SEO Clarity. Major reasons for we moved away from gShift for better reporting capabilities and have since enjoyed innovation and superior tracking features and user interface of Conductor. The customer service teams and relationship has also kept us with Conductor as a tool. The major differentiation is ease of use and organization of data outputs. I came into an organization with SEO Clarity and moved to Conductor because it was difficult to learn where to find the information I was looking for in the SEO Clarity interface. Lots of data but not always useful and not easy to find.