Conductor to Focus Exclusively on SEO Technology in 2011 & Beyond

In the past few years we've seen the SEO industry grow up. In keeping with recent trends and what we know about the future, we're shifting our focus and will become exclusively dedicated to SEO technology.

2011 is off to an amazing start for Conductor.

We recently announced that we surpassed 100 customers using our SEO Platform and are officially the fastest growing SEO Technology company. I can’t express just how proud I am of that.

Every day we hear from customers, analysts, and industry experts that there is an enormous demand for bringing scale and technology to drive cost effective online customer acquisition for SEO. We are creating the technology for an entire industry to build upon. And I'm thrilled to have the best and brightest team supporting our market leadership.

We started Conductor as an exclusive link-building company focused on only helping the best brands build quality links to their most important pages. Since founding the company we’ve witnessed rapid evolution in the industry:

• We’ve seen customers invest heavily in natural search, and enforce the cultural changes and executive sponsorship needed to make SEO successful
• We’ve witnessed major brands transform SEO from a compliance function to a high growth revenue channel
• We’ve watched the growth of the in-house SEO
• We’ve experienced the emergence of the in-house SEO team
• We’ve seen agencies become more strategic and less tactical
• We’ve seen organic search become more about data and metrics than gut and guesses

We’ve seen SEO grow up.

As we witnessed these changes, we recognized there was the opportunity to bring greater strategic significance to our customers through SEO technology, and this became our SEO Platform. In the three years since we started building, and during the seven months since we publicly launched, we’ve watched Conductor become an integral part of numerous companies’ online marketing mix and part of the fabric of their marketing organizations.

With this rapid growth and adoption, we realized that to continue pioneering and driving this market forward we needed to focus 100% of our efforts and resources on this opportunity. Similar to the early years of many of the great B2B companies we admire, to continue being #1 at what we do, we need to focus on just one thing and be the best at it.

Late last year, a company interested in acquiring our link business approached us. After a 6-month due diligence process we realized that this firm was able to offer a more evolved set of services to our valued link customers.

Today we share that as of December 31, 2010, this company has acquired the link-building assets from Conductor and we will no longer be offering any link-building services. This was not an easy decision as we are very proud of the work we’ve done, our quality standards, and the brands we’ve helped, but it is time for us to focus exclusively on SEO software. We know that our link clients will be in good hands, and the knowledge gained from supporting many of the world’s most prominent marketers will be invaluable to our future technology development.

So now Conductor is solely focused on our Conductor SEO Platform, and extraordinarily thrilled about its successes. Creating a new product category is never easy; we are extremely encouraged based on overwhelming positive client feedback, and the favorable macro trends in SaaS and web-marketing. This has been an incredible journey and we are only just beginning. 2011 will bring many exciting announcements, events and new solutions from Conductor that are going to change the way the world thinks about driving revenue and share of voice from organic search.

We will continue to support our customers with the greatest engineering and customer success teams in the business.

We will continue to invest in research, thought leadership, and cutting edge software development.

We will continue to grow and give back to the community.

And we will continue to be the market leader in enterprise SEO technology.

Major thanks to everyone that supported us since we started, our amazing customers, and the best employees/Conductors in the world. I am looking forward to the next phase of our journey.

Welcome to 2011, the year of the SEO Platform.