The best SEO decision we have made so far
February 23, 2021
The best SEO decision we have made so far
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Conductor Searchlight
We are using Conductor in several ways. With Conductor, multiple teams in our marketing department have access, and we find the keyword research in their research > explorer section to be the most helpful in many cases. Here is where our content team can write their articles, blog posts, or landing page copy, and quickly identify which keywords to use based on the topic they are writing. Our web team uses Conductor to access the Deep Crawl scan where we get insight into where we need to fix issues on the site from redirect chains to broken images. I also greatly value the ease of batch exporting and updating the keywords we have, as this makes it easy to segment our keywords into categories that help with either reporting purposes or actionable tasks.
Some business problems that Conductor can solve include content creation for SEO purposes primarily, and speeding up time to find which links are good to add to the content. We are big fans of the partner marketplace through Conductor and some of the offerings there from offsite link building to video creation, which internally we do not have the bandwidth for. This also includes partner content creation which we are leveraging for refreshing content on many of our SEO pages.
- The Keyword Research Explorer tool in Conductor is excellent. It fits the needs of our content team directly. As they write content they can add that topic into Conductor and see the results of keywords they can use, or quick answer rich results gives them the edge to create strong SEO content on their own without using multiple teams.
- The batch edit of keywords is also a great and easy feature of Conductor. We have hundreds of keywords we monitor and being able to quickly batch update these keywords and add categories to them, give us an edge in reporting on keywords as well as making decisions based on these categories.
- Deep Crawl Site analysis through Conductor is a powerful scan tool. We have multiple SEO scanning tools, but Deep Crawl finds things that other tools in the industry have failed to find. We have been able to improve the performance of the site based on this tool.
- I would like to see a feature to manage the backlink disavow list through search console. If Conductor is able to add this, we may be able to drop one of our other tools and save some money in that area.
- Conductor has a lot of features and can be a bit overwhelming. It is a strength and a weakness, as it takes time to learn all that is available.
- Another feature I would like to see is more integration with GA, we leverage creating annotations in GA and it would be great to have those pulled into the Conductor dashboard automatically.
- We have seen increases in our conversion rate for organic users, increases in organic traffic, and increases in our more valuable goal completions from Organic.
This is a feature we were attracted to but have not fully leveraged. For us, most of our internal reporting comes down to a combination of custom GA dashboards, Excel, and PowerPoint. Then we also use other internal tools to look at where our leads came from and more. We did connect several of our GA goals to Conductor, however, we actively use almost all of the 20 goals allotted for in GA, and Conductor is limited to how many can be added. So this is not a very attractive feature for us.
Collaboration generally occurs when our internal content team is looking for how to boost the SEO elements of a content piece. Most of the time this means finding keywords and where to link them to. Through a combination of reports, including Conductor's Keyword Research Explorer tool, our SEO team provides a report to the Content team with suggested keywords and Preferred Landing Pages. Outside of those reports, each member of the content team has access to Conductor and can easily enter the topic they are writing about in the keyword research explorer tool and find keywords with links there, saving time between the teams. The SEO and Web team also leverage Conductor's Deep Crawl Scan to fix redirect chains on old content or fix other areas identified by this scan.
Occasionally there is a question from upper management for which term or phrase is better suited for our market. Using Conductor Explorer it has been easy to identify what our customers are searching for and how much Monthly Search Volume there is for these different terms. We have then paired the information Conductor provides with similar reporting from Google Trends to influence the marketing strategy by providing data first.
We have used Brightedge, SEM Rush, Screaming Frog, and Fuel Online. When we used Brightedge we had a much smaller vision of SEO and its value to the company. At that time we made a few link updates to different pages each month and that was primarily the entire SEO strategy provided by Brightedge. As we moved away from Brightedge we started working with Fuel Online who has an internal keyword tracking tool. Although we did see improvement in traffic, there was a lack of transparency with what they were doing to improve the traffic and we ended up deciding they were not providing significant long-term value to us. At that point, we were moving fast having our Web team implement a lot of technical SEO improvements from site performance to Schema and fixing broken links. We also at that time decided to get SEM Rush and Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog was attractive to the huge amount of data it can scrape and reports it can provide. The downside to this tool is that it is very technical-looking, and is not very great at displaying a priority of metrics specifically for SEO improvements. SEM Rush, we still use in addition to Conductor because it has a lot of great features. The site audit tool provides great value to see which errors need to be fixed as the highest SEO priority. And the ability to audit the backlinks and submit the disavow report to Google is very easy to use. Outside of that we occasionally check domain authority scores with MOZ or AHREFs. We use Google Trends to compare keyword traffic. We use GA custom dashboards to process and analyze our data, and Powerbi to integrate GA data with internal tools.
Our main reason for choosing Conductor was their broad package. The partner marketplace with content creation, offsite backlinks, and video creation ultimately sealed the deal for what we were looking for. Generally, our team is good at handling the majority of SEO improvements on site, but where we needed support was off-site SEO tasks or in content. Then there are all the details and perks with the number of experts at Conductor and the Explorer tool Conductor has. Over time we have grown to love what Conductor has been able to provide and we are still learning about more features Conductor has available.