Item: Conductor
Rating: 10
Author: Misty McMillan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Conductor for our university website. It is currently used by our Marketing department in order to strategize our content. Previously, our website was a free-for-all without any SEO implementation. We are working to gain a competitive advantage online by utilizing our keyword research and competitive analysis as well as maintaining our site health and ADA compliance with their site analysis. Being a team of one at the moment, Conductor's customer service and access to a team whenever needed is a lifesaver. I fought leadership for over 8 months to get approval to partner with Conductor and it was well worth the struggle!

Pros and Cons

Customer Service. By far what they offer is the best. I have access to a team and their calendars. So when I need to set up a meeting I know when they are available. They are easy to talk to and help me work through any problem I might be having.
Reports. I've seen reports by some of their competitors and quite honestly wasn't sure what I was looking at. But Conductors reports can be streamlined to fit several different audiences and I can email them out (automatically) whenever I want to whomever I want, whether they are a Conductor user or not.
Competitive Analysis. I've not done a lot of comparison with other vendors, but I like the convenient, straightforward way Conductor shows your competitors and how they are ranking in comparison to you. You have control over your competitors and can change them when needed.

Site Analysis. Conductor uses DeepCrawl for its site analysis. While this is a powerful tool that helps me know everything wrong with my website like - no titles, short descriptions, no Alt tags, etc - the amount of information can be overwhelming. Initially, I had thousands of errors I was trying to fix using DeepCrawl - it was difficult to know what I had corrected and what still needed to be corrected without doing another crawl. It would be helpful if there was a way to check off things that had been fixed as I was working through the list.
Conductor does a great job training. First, they introduced me to Conductor and walked me through everything, and helped me create workspaces and set up reports. Then we moved on to the site analysis with DeepCrawl. Because I had so much work to do from the site analysis it was a while before I got back into Conductor. I had forgotten much of the training by that point. But the team is helping me get back into the flow of things again. They are great like that!

Return on Investment

Currently, I'm making a few tweaks with Conductor's recommendations on some of our academic pages. We are already seeing a 25-35% increase in traffic to some of those pages. At this point, we equate traffic with potential applicants.

Data Integration

Being new to Conductor, I haven't been able to fully test everything and see many results. However, in the package I've chosen, we track 2,000 keywords - many splits between our academic programs and enrollment. We have three competitors that we are tracking against these same keywords. So far, this is more than enough data for us. We can always increase our package, but for now, this is what I can manage.

Strategic Collaboration

Learning all that Conductor has to offer and the way in which it works, we are considering changing our whole approach to content strategy and making it a more centralized effort. Otherwise, the decentralized method we currently have could negate the improvements we're working to make. This will be a slow change - but Conductor has helped us realize the greater need for these changes.

Support Rating

I feel like every answer has been about the overall support I receive from Conductor. But for me, that really was the key to choosing them. I needed the hand-holding to help me through onboarding, training and continued planning for moving forward. They are like an extended team. I can ask them questions (and they have answers.) I can collaborate with them. I can ask them for advice. What more could I want?

Alternatives Considered

BrightEdge

I evaluated BrightEdge and thought they were a close competitor for Conductor. However, after attending the C3 Conference and talking with Conductor clients, I was sure the Customer Service approach that Conductor implemented was the best path for me being such a small team. Other universities within the UNC System use SiteImprove, but I found they were really just a tool with reports. I found them hard to understand, share and navigate on my own.

Likelihood to Recommend

The only reason I wouldn't want to share this with a colleague is that they will then become a much greater competition in the market. Areas where conductor helps us as an educational institution is: we have many different segmented areas in our Website. It's great to be able to create segmented keywords (categories) and reports that I can share with the various individual departments across campus.

Users and Roles

1 - Web Content Manager - Keyword research, SEO, Content Strategy, Writing Content.

Usability

I find Conductor very easy to use. And if ever something is confusing, then your team is there to help explain it to you. There's no reason to ever feel overwhelmed or lost. Also, you constantly get reminders of webinars and other help that can guide you. Also, Conductor wants feedback - so if something isn't as user-friendly as it should be, then they are probably already gathering your feedback and working on a solution. I have no doubt of that!

Conductor is more of a partnership than a tool.

Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight