How Stella Rising uses Conductor Website Monitoring for Enterprise SEO Auditing

Stella Rising (opens in a new tab) is the agency for rising star brands. Based on Broadway in NYC and in Westport CT, Stella Rising is a full service marketing and media agency, offering everything from strategy, planning, and research, to activation across both digital and traditional channels. Stella Rising serves big name clients like Drybar, Everlane, P&G and other fast growth / emerging D2C brands.

The challenge

Like most agencies, Stella Rising relied on desktop-based tools for executing crawls. Then they would manually sift through the data to conduct their analysis and compile their recommendations. This approach comes with two problems:

1. It is very time-consuming, and as people are an agency's biggest cost factor by far, that impacts the bottom line.
2. It is passive. Problems can only be caught during the regular crawling and reporting cycle, but not in-between.

John Morabito, SEO Director at Stella Rising, set out to solve this and went looking for a solution.

The solution

Stella Rising soon came across Conductor Website Monitoring. Although initially deployed as a monitoring solution to keep track of changes, it quickly became apparent that Conductor Website Monitoring was also the right solution for Enterprise-level SEO Auditing.

Conductor Website Monitoring proved to have all of the crawl information we needed, and enabled us to get a full crawl of million+ page sites.

These crawls enabled us to see issues with wasted crawl budget, make changes to the crawling and indexing directives, and see what sort of impact that had on the site.

We then deployed those changes to the client site and were able to greatly reduce crawling of the low quality pages.

LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)John Morabito, SEO Director, Stella Rising (opens in a new tab)

Due to Stella Rising's strong focus on D2C brands, most of the websites they are responsible for have a tremendous amount of content. This was right up Conductor Website Monitoring's alley.

Morabito:

Before Conductor Website Monitoring, we were not able to do this at the scale we’re doing now.

The results

Today, Conductor Website Monitoring is used by Stella Rising's entire SEO team for their SEO auditing and analysis work.

What they especially like is the ability to keep track of the progress being made. With traditional crawlers they'd have to wait until the next full crawl is ran, delaying that precious confirmation on things moving in the right direction. This lead to a massive productivity boost for the team:

With traditional crawlers, I would only extract things I need for a specific audit, which would make me do multiple crawls over the course of an engagement with a client.

With Conductor Website Monitoring, all the information is already there. For certain clients, it has improved productivity by as much as 50%.

LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)Aleks Merkovich, Search Engine Optimization Specialist, Stella Rising (opens in a new tab)

With Conductor Website Monitoring's continuous SEO auditing, Stella Rising has an immediate feedback loop, enabling them to stay on top of changes deployed by the client or the development team.

Finally, Stella Rising found that Conductor Website Monitoring also plays an essential role in the value-add towards their clients:

Conductor Website Monitoring is not just a tool we use internally to better serve clients, but it’s also part of a promise we make to clients to constantly be watching their sites. We often mention this is a tool we employ during a discussion with potential new clients explaining the value of the alert system.

Whether it’s the occasional outage or something like a development gone wrong, we’re able to report those issues quickly which adds a tremendous amount of value to the client relationship.

LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)John Morabito, SEO Director, Stella Rising (opens in a new tab)