Item: Conductor
Rating: 10
Author: Dmitry Kroshka

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight

Usability

Both are useful and good, particularly when it comes to management reporting. I think the interface is occasionally slower than I would like, and the need to occasionally wait for an email for historical reporting is annoying. These come up about 10%-20% of the time, hence the 8/10 score.

Support Rating

This is one of the best customer success teams in the business. Even as a self-serve client I'm extremely pleased with the level of attention and engagement.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Conductor is in use by the marketing organization to drive more organic traffic, as well as understand the effectiveness of the content and programs we create. It provides automation around SEO monitoring that previously required an agency and irregular updates, vs. a regular stream of actionable data. It's also aided in providing excellent competitive insights.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The competitive intelliscope and market share views are extraordinarily valuable in understanding your position relative to the competition, especially when you have a mix of F500's and startups operating across similar thought spaces.
The ability to create customer management reports is also valuable, as it allows you to tailer to the information that management cares about now, without chasing an agency or individual to provide that data.

Cons

The biggest challenge in getting Conductor approved internally is cost. There are a lot of point solutions that can be piecemealed together. Implementation of the recommendations will always remain a challenge if you elect not to use professional services. There are some features of the platform that come at an additional cost vs. being included, though overall this is a minor gripe.

Return on Investment

It's maintained to improved search rank position in an increasingly crowded market - with some very large financial institutions beginning to play.

Likelihood to Recommend

At a high level, there are a million good reasons to use a platform like Conductor if you need to drive relevant traffic via search, and this is the case for the vast majority of categories. I think that for retailers, answer WHAT needs to happen and HOW is valuable, whereas competitive info may be less so (Amazon and eBay will ALWAYS rank for many retail categories, and 1000's of retailers may carry the same sneaker). For B2B SAAS, where competition is in the 5-20 competitors range, the levels of insight and individual keyword tracking are incredibly well suited.

Conductor Feature Ratings

Comments

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Joe Taylor
(Vendor Representative) commented 8 years ago
Thank you for the review, Dmitry. As a member of the Customer Success team, I am humbled by your statement that we are among the best. We certainly do try. I loved reading that you've increased your visibility in search in a crowded market. That's a difficult task when competing against some well established players and serves as an affirmation for the power creating great content. Congrats to you and the team for executing and seeing success. You pose an important question that many must confront before purchasing a solution like ours: should we use a handful of smaller tools or upgrade to Conductor? There are a lot of ways to address this question but ultimately I think it comes down to this: we believe that the best companies provide real value by creating customer-first content. To do that effectively, you need great individual tools and you need to collaborate with other teams internally. Our platform makes it easier for different teams--like Content, Paid, Social, PR--to collaborate by using organic search data to understand what customers need and then using web assets to provide a solution. Using a group of smaller tools makes this much more difficult and usually results in SEO staying in a silo. I am glad you've seen that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts! Thank you again, Dmitry. Don't hesitate to reach out directly if you ever need anything. Joe Taylor Sr. Director, Customer Experience jtaylor@conductor.com

A strong platform for a comprehensive view of your SEO program