Conductor vs. Google Search Console

Conductor has proven to be an effective tool for tracking our organic search visibility, researching trends and content topics, and beginning our optimization journey in the new AI-driven world of search. The platform is exceptional for collaboration and is easy to use. Having deeper integration of search-related AI data and tools, organic shopping, schema tracking, and suggestions would further improve an already excellent product offering.

Incentivized

If you just want to understand how much traffic you're getting from Google organic search results, and study the queries and landing pages that make up this traffic, this is a great tool. If you also want to figure out where you may be missing opportunities or making it hard for people to find your site, this can help with that. However, GSC is not going to give you step by step instructions for how to fix SEO issues, and won't help prioritize anything either. It's essentially like a car dashboard, but doesn't do any driving or tell you how to drive.

Incentivized

• Keyword research (includes related terms, types of terms, high ranking pages, search volume, and more)
• Content guidance and briefs (you can use built in tools to get specific optimization steps and create content briefs within the tool)
• Competitor research (compare how competition is ranking and track organic market share)
• Support (dedicated team support, regular check-ins, built-in requests for deliverables/support items, options for requesting work with partner organizations, excellent training materials, and live chat within the platform)

Incentivized

• Provides details on what other sites contain backlinks to your site, along with the page they direct to within your site
• Displays impressions and click throughs for Google search queries
• Individual page performance by location and device category as it pertains to generating clicks leading to your site
• Basic indexing and readability issues within your site
• The new interface that just rolled out is much easier on the eyes

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I'd like more instructions about how to respond to certain errors I see - it can be difficult to understand when you see a red error message what it really means and how to fix it.
• I'd appreciate warnings being 'ranked' somehow to understand what's really a big deal, and what might be a minor issue.
• Search analytics is helpful but not comprehensive - you can only go back so far in the data, and can't see all the search terms that are sending traffic to your site.

Incentivized

Conductor enables high-value SEO activity. There are a lot of moving parts in SEO and I'm always open to products that fit our requirements, but Conductor has built a stronger argument for its value after we subscribed than it had when we subscribed -- that's rare.

I check features like the InsightStream every Monday to monitor any major losses or gains in performance. These are easily digested and save me tons of time searching for these insights manually. If there's anything "worth calling home about" I can easily add insights into a workspace and create a report to communicate these results. It's super easy to use Conductor with a team and across departments.

It's easy to use, but some features are lacking a clear explanation. Somethings don't always match up. For example, the Core Web Vitals often doesn't match what you would see in the Chrome Lighthouse report or the Google Page Speed Insights tool. The tool itself is a little too basic and has to be used alongside other SEO tools and other Google properties such as Analytics

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Always works when I've needed it

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Sometimes reports can take some time to load

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It's been sort of off and on in the 2 years I've used it. The live chat has been really helpful many times, and they're quick to respond. We had different support contacts but they've all been good. I think they've recently changed the way they provide support that I believe will be more dedicated and hands-on

Incentivized

As with all Google software, your primary source of help is their forums, their knowledge base articles, or whatever tutorials you can find on the web. Often answers on their forums are not straightforward and may not address the actual issue you're experiencing. The KB articles are typically written like instruction manuals - for better or for worse. Tutorials on the web may vary, but the odds are good someone out there had the same questions as you and was kind enough to document their experience.

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Our in house SEO manager trained everyone. It was easy to learn and he was well versed with the product. Any questions we had he was able to answer or reach out to support to find the answer

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I definitely recommend their professional services for getting started. It got our account 90% of the way to where we needed to be in order to gain value from it. In fact, I'd suggest that with few exceptions (such as, you have a staff that is already familiar with the platform and doesn't need any help), the quick start services over the first 30-90 days should be a standard part of onboarding with any new client. It definitely got us to the point of gaining ROI from the solution and, in turn, will make it easier to justify renewal and continued investment in it.

Incentivized

We tried Surfer SEO before Conductor. It just felt like it didn't have enough to offer in comparison to Conductor. There was a shortage on everything that you could do in the platform and it felt like the lack of in-depth tools caused us to miss out on making sure our content that we're putting out is the best it could possibly be.

Incentivized

We are using Ahrefs and SEMRush along with the search console. Ahrefs helps in creating our backlink strategy while SEMRush for content gaps and opportunities. Search console is more preferred as it is completely free and data comes straight from Google. But you cannot see backlinks and ads in search console.

Incentivized

Many features

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• The Live Edit feature in Content King has given me the ability to make changes on the fly without having to wait for developer time to make simple edits.
• I have been able to gain back hours of time that I previously spent on aggregating data across tools when preparing on-the-fly reports for management.
• Every morning my dashboard provides me with a new insight or answers a question I may not have even thought to ask. This has added to my workload, but it's also helped to become better at my job.

Incentivized

• I have used Search Console for every web project I have worked on. The results have always been outstanding.
• Surprising insights can be gained from the keyword analysis. I have discovered multiple profitable channels that weren't even on the radar.
• AMP has been a game changer over the last few years and this tool makes it extremely simple to ensure your pages are mobile friendly.

Incentivized