Plow & Hearth Selects Conductor Searchlight to Harvest the Power of Natural Search

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jul 11, 2013) - Conductor, the first choice in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technology, today announced that Plow & Hearth, the trusted national catalog, retail, and internet company specializing in unique, enduring home and lifestyle products, has selected the Conductor Searchlight™ platform to improve natural search, drive website traffic, acquire new customers and support the company's digital marketing and business goals now and into the future.

As a true technology platform, offering the most accurate data collection infrastructure available, Conductor Searchlight enables Plow & Hearth to pull actionable data from the Web, from targeted domains and competitive websites. The scalability of the platform enables it to easily integrate with other third-party systems to create custom workspaces and reporting that combines business analytics with search data for total visibility into the success of search programs.

"As we continued to bring on new brands and build out or website and retail offerings, we needed to have an effective, enterprise-wide SEO strategy in place -- one that focuses on optimizing content for search on every product page and can easily track and monitor the competitive landscape to drive sales," said Brianne Keating Forst, Director of E-Commerce at Plow & Hearth. "With Conductor Searchlight, our SEO specialist can spend time on revenue-generating activity and training other departments on search best practices vs. spending time on manually tracking, monitoring and managing keywords. We estimate that the streamlined efficiencies brought by Conductor Searchlight, once fully integrated, will cut staff time and resources in half."

Natural search has become the most important source of inbound marketing -- outperforming paid search 2:1 and social media by as much as four times. As consumers continue to revolt against traditional marketing channels in favor of online searches, companies like Plow & Hearth are hiring SEO professionals at an unprecedented rate. With the hire of an SEO/SEM specialist, Plow & Hearth recognized that further efficiency gains could be had with an enterprise SEO platform. They sought an all-in-one technology solution that could automate keyword tracking and competitive analysis and provide accurate data and robust reporting across the organization quickly and efficiently.

"With the customized workspaces, workflow and reporting Searchlight offers, I will have the information and controls needed to optimize search on a daily basis, staying ahead of the competition at all times, and on top of search engine changes with little effort," said Leandra Parks, SEO and SEM Specialist at Plow & Hearth. "Searchlight will allow me the opportunity to easily create and share personalized workspaces for specific audiences including colleagues in merchandizing, the creative department, web development and product management -- helping to mobilize stakeholders across the organization to achieve greater success with cross-functional collaboration."

Conductor Searchlight has quickly risen to be the industry standard for enterprise SEO. The top four big agency holding companies, more than half of the top 20 Internet Retailers and more than 100 of the Fortune 500 use Conductor Searchlight to measure search market share, protect search revenue, and leverage cutting-edge technology to grow their businesses. With its market-leading vision, unrivaled technology and world-class customer success teams, Conductor continues to be the first-choice for organizations serious about online visibility and competitive edge. Companies like FedEx, BestBuy, Siemens and General Electric (GE), report up to six times more traffic and 15 times more conversions from natural search.

"SEOs need to keep pace with a highly fragmented, complex and fluid search landscape that includes daily changes made by Google, massive amounts of data to be consumed and analyzed, a crushing desire to displace the competition and the need to educate and engage organizational stakeholders and contributors on the power of SEO," said Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor. "We are proud to work with growing teams and cutting-edge companies like Plow & Hearth to drive site traffic, create new business opportunities and set a course for continued success."

About Plow & Hearth
Plow & Hearth began as a small retail store in Madison, Virginia in 1980 and has grown to become a respected national catalog, retail and Internet company with more than 5 million customers. For over 30 years, the company has been a trusted source of unique, enduring products for the hearth, home, yard and garden, helping customers create an environment that is comfortable and welcoming, warm and personal. As part of their product development initiative, Plow & Hearth works with artisans and manufacturers around the world to develop innovative products created from uncommon materials and crafted by hand. Special consideration is given to those products made with environmentally friendly materials as well as products that will encourage customers to be more environmentally responsible, such as composting products and energy savers. Every item they sell is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee. The Plow & Hearth Family of Brands also includes quality toys from HearthSong® and Magic Cabin®, weather instruments from Wind & Weather®, innovative solutions from Problem Solvers® and reusable products that replace disposables from Reuseit.com®.

About Conductor
Conductor is the global leader in SEO technology. Thousands of brands and enterprise marketers use its cloud-based SEO platform, Conductor Searchlight™ to measure, improve and manage their natural search efforts to stay ahead of the competition, increase site traffic and boost revenues. The powerful, highly scalable platform processes massive amounts of data quickly to give users real-time information for better, more informed decision making and to identifying new ways to increase share-of-search that will propel their businesses forward. Offering the most robust performance reporting and measurement tools available in the industry, Conductor arms marketers with the intelligence needed to tie SEO success to business objectives and demonstrate the value of SEO across the organization. One of New York City's fastest growing and most admired technology companies, Conductor is routinely recognized for excellence in business and corporate culture. To learn more, go to www.conductor.com or follow Conductor on Twitter @conductor.