Why switch from Conductor
This migration is a change of category, not of vendor: from software your team operates to a service that performs the work. It is the right move when the licence surfaces more work than anyone has capacity to ship.
Arise GEO vs Conductor
Side-by-side table on scope, model, pricing shape and guarantees — including where Conductor is the better buy. Read the comparison →
If three or more in-house SEOs log in weekly and the recommendations are being actioned, keep the licence. Platforms earn their cost when there is a team behind them; the failure is capacity, not software.
Signals it is time to move
- →Seat utilisation is low and the weekly digest goes unread.
- →The backlog of surfaced recommendations is older than two quarters.
- →Renewal is approaching and nobody can articulate what the licence changed last year.
- →AI-search visibility is reported but nothing in the organisation acts on it.
The migration, step by step
Roughly six weeks end to end. Steps run in order; the change freeze overlaps the handover deliberately.
- Step 01You / procurement · Day 1
Find the renewal date and the true seat count
Enterprise SEO licences renew annually with a notice window, often 60 or 90 days. Pull the order form, note the deadline, then check actual usage: how many seats logged in during the last quarter, and how many reports were opened by anyone outside the SEO team. That usage number is the whole business case.
- Step 02You · Day 1–5
Export the historical data you cannot re-create
Rank history, share-of-voice trends, keyword groupings, competitor sets, page-level opportunity scores and any annotated change log. Search Console only retains 16 months; the platform's longer history is genuinely valuable and it disappears at midnight on the termination date. Export to CSV and store it outside the tool.
- Step 03You · Week 1
Separate what the platform did from what people did
List every recommendation the platform surfaced in the last two quarters and mark each one shipped, ignored, or unreviewed. If the ignored and unreviewed columns dominate, the problem was never data availability — it was execution capacity, and buying another dashboard will reproduce the same result.
- Step 04Us + you · Week 1–3
Rebuild measurement on tooling you own
Wire Search Console and GA4 into a warehouse or reporting layer you control, port the keyword groupings and competitor sets from the export, and re-establish rank tracking on the tracked set. Owning the pipe means the next vendor change costs you nothing in continuity.
- Step 05Us · Week 2–4
Replace the workflow layer with an owned backlog
The genuinely useful part of an enterprise platform is the queue of prioritised work. We replace it with a ranked backlog in your own tracker — each item scored on revenue exposure, effort, and confidence, with the acceptance test written up front so 'done' is not a matter of opinion.
- Step 06Us · Week 2–5
Run the audit the licence was standing in for
Full crawl and render reconciliation, log-file review where available, index coverage versus intended coverage, schema and entity graph validation, and an AI citation probe across the major engines. This is the diagnosis a platform reports around but does not perform.
- Step 07You + us · Week 4–6
Cancel in writing, then rebaseline
Send notice inside the window in writing, confirm the data export is complete before the account is disabled, then agree the metrics the next 90 days are judged on. Do not cancel before the exports are verified — reactivating a lapsed enterprise account to retrieve history is slow and occasionally impossible.
What to keep, not bin
Risks and how we contain them
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Historical trend data is lost at cancellation | Export rank history, keyword groups and competitor sets to CSV and verify the files open before notice is served. |
| The team loses the reporting cadence the platform enforced | Replace the tool's weekly digest with a scheduled report from your own stack in week one, before the licence lapses, so the habit never breaks. |
| You swap a licence for a service and still have no execution capacity | Agree up front who deploys changes — your developers, your CMS team, or us. The audit is worthless if the backlog has no owner with merge rights. |
Frequently asked
Will I lose my historical data if I cancel?+
Yes, once the account is disabled. Export rank history, keyword groups, competitor sets and any annotations to CSV, and verify the files open, before notice is served. Reactivating a lapsed enterprise account to retrieve history is slow and sometimes not possible at all.
Do you need us to license a platform for you?+
No. We bring our own crawl, log analysis, Search Console integration and AI-probe tooling. If you keep an existing licence we will work inside it rather than duplicate the spend.
What replaces the workflow and reporting the platform gave us?+
A ranked backlog in your own tracker, with each item scored on revenue exposure, effort and confidence and carrying its acceptance test, plus a scheduled report from your own data stack. You keep both when the engagement ends, which is the point.
