Positioning analysis of Semrush versus Conductor using SmokeLadder
Video Transcript:
In this episode we’re looking at SEO platforms to see how Conductor can improve their positioning to take on market leader, Semrush.
Website messaging and positioning reviews of Miva and Shopify
Here’s Conductor’s home page. We can see their headline, increase demand, increase revenue, increase traffic from search.
Not the most differentiated position. It at least gives you some context around what they do so you know you’re in the right place, but not saying anything very different here. Coming down to their feature, highlight section, We’ve got research keyword, keywords and competitors, create winning content, optimize site health, track keyword rankings, Again, all things you’d expect from an SEO platform, but nothing that really jumps out as differentiated.
Let’s look at SEM rush. We can see their headline get measurable results from online marketing pretty straightforward.
Down in their feature section, SEO, content marketing, market research, and then this line, grow organic traffic with our complete and easy SEO tools and workflow. Kind of an all in one message, Again, nothing very differentiated here and kind of overlapped, really, with what conductor is saying. But SEM rush, of course, has the advantage of being the market leader.
Let’s take a look at our app and see if there are some additional details we can dig in here to find opportunities for conductor.
SmokeLadder Positioning analysis of Conductor vs Semrush
This is the analysis for conductor’s home page. We can see their total positioning score. They did quite well. Good points in value, good points in differentiation. We’ll talk more about that. A second.
Down here, we can see all the points that we grade them on.
All the these are this is how we grade every every site that we analyze across all twenty four points on a scale of one to ten. Over on the right hand side, these are the points where they scored the highest. So quality, integrate, marketability, reach, All good things, all things that you would wanna see potentially from an SEO platform. Let’s go to the differentiation tab though.
First, we can see how they score against, category averages that we do internally, and these are for comparing against research, other research tools.
We can see there’s some good separation here in different points coming down here. We can see integrate is a really strong one. Also generate revenue scalability.
Let’s come down though and see how they did against SEM rush.
So this is an analysis of SEM rush’s homepage overlaid with conductor’s homepage. So conductor in the orange SEM rush in the blue.
The the big picture story here is there’s a lot of overlap.
The the the shape and the fingerprint of of these charts are very similar. We can see some points where conductor is a little bit better, but we can also see some points where SEM rush is a little bit better.
We can see the details of why they got the scores that they did here, and then the strengths down at the bottom the top points here, and they’re not a lot of separation, but a little bit connects integrate again scalability.
I wanna hit on this integrate point because what’s special about integrate in this case, this is a point where conductor scored really high and has some separation from SEM rush.
Where Conductor has opportunities to win
This is this is the kind of thing that we wanna see when we’re doing this kind of analysis. Where does a brand score high and where do they have some separation? This might be an area where a brand could double down and improve their positioning.
If we come back over to conductor’s site, so we looked at their their feature set. If we keep coming down, we see some social proof testimonials, Keep on scrolling. We eventually get down to this integration section. These are all the different apps that that conductor integrates with.
We can see some project management tools. We can see Google Analytics. We can see SEM rush for some reason. I’m not sure why they would highlight that.
But this got me interested to kinda dig a little bit more into their site, and they actually have a video that talks about the platform overall.
And they tell this really compelling story about how they use integrations, and it shows how you can do your research around, you can do your content research, keyword research, and then you can integrate into project management tools like Asana or Jira, and put tasks straight into those project management tools for your team, build your content, and you can do an integration with your site where you can actually do live edits based on their recommendations directly into your site without having to go into your site and do editing separately.
And it integrates with Google Analytics so you can then track performance. You’re not just looking at performance of keywords, but you’re actually looking at performance of pages on your site.
This tells a really cool story actually around an entire workflow for a team and how integration plays into that. I think conductor would do well by not just trying to position themselves around this general idea of SEO, increasing leads, increasing traffic, all good things, but telling a story and building an identity more specifically around integration and how they create this front to back workflow for your team. If we come back over here, we can just look really quickly at the AI insights tab.
And down here, the the COO in the decision makers section is talking about the same thing. Their integrations with task management tools like Asana, Trello, Jira could enhance efficiency and productivity.
Again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg though in terms of their integrations. This is just the project management side. They can help with, again, site content, analytics, And then down here in the value prop, we can see the core value is this very generic idea just around SEO benefits and and functionality, but the expanded summary gets into integrating with the whole tech stack, but it’s buried. It’s not the lead. It’s just this supporting point.
I think that’s a real opportunity for them to to take that from a supporting point and really build a unique identity around that because that’s something that tools like SEM rush can’t necessarily do quite as comprehensively. This is just a superficial kind of initial analysis, but hopefully it gives you some ideas of how you can use our tool. You can take a look at your site. You can take a look at competitors. And hopefully you can find some opportunities for your brand to challenge your market leader too.