Insight into Conductor's Users

CMO

As CMO of a fortune 1000 company, John is tasked with overseeing all marketing efforts - offline as well as online. In the abstract, John understands the potential value of ranking well in natural search, but the lack of clear direction, investment opportunities, and industry accepted best practices limits his ability to focus marketing activities in SEO. His department's investment in search is limited primarily to paid, where he knows that $1.00 invested generates $3.45. The work that the SEO consultants and agencies do is mostly 'magic' to him - and it seems like it is to them as well. 80% of people searching for his products don't click on paid ads - but without a system in which to invest, and quantify the results, John is keeping his marketing dollars in paid.

Natural Search Marketer

Jane was an early adopter of SEO tactics, and knows her SEO down cold. She was hired as an in-house SEO by a leading online consumer electronics retailer to help generate more traffic. With over 1.5 million pages- she has her work cut out for her, putting together a plan of attack for the hundreds of thousands of keywords, page, and external links that fall under her purview. Applying her knowledge of SEO to a single page is easy - but how does she identify the pages that need work, and which ones will have the greatest bottom line benefit? The company's internal tools are non-existent, she struggles with keeping track of the ranking for the sheer volume of keywords, and she relies entirely too much on free scripts and tools that could disappear at any time. Jane has also identified several global changes that would reap immediate benefits, but require infrastructure investment - and she needs a clear way to define these benefits within her organization.

Content Providers / Publishers

Greg runs the highly successful online magazine DadsAtPlay.com. Greg has lots of great content - and is interested in both growing traffic and finding new ways to monetize that traffic. For the first objective, Greg uses Conductor very similarly to a search marketer, making sure his pages are optimized and measuring where to put his efforts. In addition, Greg has decided to join Conductor Links, and monetizes the below-the-fold, unused inventory.

Search Agency

ABC-SEO is a full service search agency - providing their clients with on site optimization services, web development, email marketing services, and paid search management. The search team managing multiple domains suffers from several maladies; while other groups can provide hard ROI numbers to their clients, they must rely on anecdotal evidence (at the best) to justify their actions. After the initial 'redo' where they optimize the existing content, there is also only sporadic work as new content comes on board, making it difficult to keep recurring billable hours to the client. Finally, because so much of the SEO work has traditionally been heuristic, when personnel change, it is difficult for ABC-SEO to make a seamless transition of work on a client's project.

Next: The Science of Search