Conductor Leads the Half a Billion Dollar SEO Technology Sector With 300 Percent Customer Growth Year-Over-Year

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Mar 6, 2012) - Conductor, the leader in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technology, is ready to take the SEO technology market into the next phase of accelerated growth with its Searchlight™ platform -- already the first, and most widely adopted cloud-based technology used by Fortune 500 companies to measure, improve and manage their natural search efforts in order to increase site traffic and boost revenue.

92 percent of all search-engine clicks on websites come from organic search traffic and Forrester Research forecasts the SEO technology market to exceed $600 million by 2016 in the United States alone(1). As the leader in this rapidly growing category, Conductor is well poised to continue its enviable growth trajectory and lead the market in delivering a highly scalable solution that gives brand marketers the visibility, optimization and automation to conquer the complexity of SEO, while harnessing its revenue-generating power.

First introduced to market in June 2010, Conductor Searchlight is a cloud-based marketing platform that has transformed SEO by giving marketers and brand owners complete control over every piece of the natural search process. No longer do search marketers struggle with the lack of transparency, insufficient resources or an inability to understand what is going on. With one simple interface, Conductor Searchlight gives digital marketers the ability to effectively stay ahead of the thousands of data points that affect their company's search ranking.

"SEO technology has reached its strategic tipping point -- marketers realize the tremendous gains to be had with natural search vs. the paid alternative -- and are looking for cutting-edge technology solutions that help capture web traffic, increase mindshare and convert impressions into dollars," said Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor. "Conductor's agile technology infrastructure and robust tool set gives brand owners peace-of-mind knowing millions of dollars won't be lost when search engines like Google make changes to satisfy consumer interests. With Searchlight, marketers have the insight, intelligence and real-time data to react quickly to change and stay ahead of the competition at all times."

Conductor maintains a stampede of interest by major brands as they look to replace manual and disparate tools with a strategic, enterprise-level SEO solution. Large brands like FedEx, Siemens and General Electric turn to Conductor Searchlight to optimize their natural search marketing programs. On average, Conductor Searchlight users triple the amount of keywords moving onto page-one by actively implementing the intelligence and recommendations delivered in the platform. Many customers report an increase in natural search traffic of more than 60 percent after deploying Searchlight.

On the heels of the most successful quarter ever, Conductor enters 2012 with more than 1000 brands supporting half a million keywords and more than 3.5 billion in SEO revenue.

A Future-Proof Technology Platform Readies for Big Data
Embracing the latest open-source technologies like Hadoop and HBase, and pushing the limits on rapid software development methodologies to build and release new product features, 2011 saw more than 150 releases to the Conductor Searchlight platform -- most notably universal search optimization, enhanced keyword discovery, international SEO capabilities and the first platform to leverage Google +1 for SEO intelligence. On average, Conductor pushes new code out four times a week, enabling customer feedback to make its way into production quickly.

The Searchlight platform was architected from the ground-up to easily scale to meet changing market conditions. This has proven to be a key differentiator for Conductor. As other solutions fail to keep pace with the ongoing, algorithmic changes made by Google, Conductor has easily risen to the occasion and prospered. In fact, Conductor's most successful quarters are directly tied to major changes announced by Google including "fresh" and Search plus Your World.

Conductor's highly responsive, robust and scalable technology infrastructure is equipped to handle Big Data requirements and deliver unprecedented insight into a brand's web visibility. Social media networks, blogs, machine sensors and location-based tools are generating a whole new universe of unstructured data that -- when quickly captured, managed and analyzed -- can help marketers uncover facts and patterns they weren't able to recognize in the past. With its social signal tracking of Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and the introduction of the SEO Cloud™, which allows third-party marketing platforms like Adobe Omniture to integrate and exchange data with Searchlight, Conductor is on the frontlines of turning digital Big Data into actionable marketing intelligence, collecting millions of search engine results weekly and storing more than 25 terabytes of historical data securely.

To meet the growing demand for its products and services, Conductor plans to increase headcount by as much as 50 percent in 2012. To learn more about career opportunities at Conductor, go to: http://www.conductor.com/about/careers.

About Conductor
Conductor is the undisputed leader in SEO technology, empowering enterprise marketers to manage and improve their SEO efforts and deliver provable ROI. The company created the first and most widely adopted enterprise cloud SEO technology solution, Conductor Searchlight™, which helps marketers scale natural search, monitor competitive market share and boost revenue. Conductor recently launched the SEO Cloud™, which makes it possible to blend SEO data and workflow across any other form of web marketing. Companies such as FedEx, Siemens, Autodesk and GE rely on the company's technology platform and team of experts to continually measure and improve their natural search traffic and revenue.

Based in Manhattan, Conductor was recently voted as one of Crain's Best Places to Work in New York for the second year running and was named as the 13th fastest growing software company in Inc. Magazine's latest rankings. Visit Conductor at www.conductor.com or on Twitter @conductor.

(1) Forrester Research, "US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016," Aug. 24, 2011 by Shar VanBoskirk