Zack Kadish started at Conductor doing keyword research nobody else wanted to do. Eight years later he’s Senior Director of SEO Strategy there, and on this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast he tells Jeremy Rivera what enterprise SEO actually looks like from the inside — the red tape, the cross-domain cannibalization nobody wants to hear about, and the SERP changes that are quietly eating enterprise organic traffic.
Keyword research to director, without skipping a rung
“I took the more traditional route — I worked from the bottom,” Kadish says. The job was tedious audience and keyword research, making sure clients tracked the phrases they actually cared about, until the obvious question surfaced: how do you get these to rank better? He picked the brains of senior SEOs at Conductor, sat in on their calls, and eventually got handed their busy work. “It was basically just page optimizations, but I was like, whoa, this is pretty cool.” Analyst, strategist, manager, director — and a front-row seat to a decade of Google changes.
SaaS with a human arm bolted on
Conductor is a SaaS platform — visibility monitoring, keyword and competitive research, Adobe and Google Analytics and Search Console integrations. But Kadish’s team exists because the dashboard alone doesn’t finish the job.
“Sometimes just having an SEO platform isn’t enough. Sometimes teams need an extra hand. Sometimes they want to talk shop or strategy. A lot of times they just want to vent because they’re the only SEO there, and they’re like, how do I explain this to the team?” — Zack Kadish
Jeremy recognizes the shape immediately from his own product-management years at Raven Tools and TapClicks: agencies become SaaS, SaaS becomes an agency, or you land in the middle because “there’s always going to be a squishy human space where you need to have more contact than just, here’s a dashboard, have fun.” Kadish’s range runs from very green programs that need evangelizing to mature in-house teams that don’t need him at all.
Why Conductor bought Content King
Content King — now Conductor Website Monitoring — came in because a solid technical foundation is table stakes and Conductor wanted the crawler in-house rather than partnered. The payoff is the integration: content, traffic, and keyword rankings sitting next to the technical picture, so you can ask why a page is underperforming and get an answer instead of a guess. “Is it from the technical standpoint or is it from the content standpoint? Or maybe it’s a mix of both.”
The lesson he volunteers is the unglamorous one: “it’s definitely hard to integrate a full product into your own.” They kept the standalone version alive precisely because some customers didn’t want the merge.
Cutting enterprise red tape
At a big-four accounting firm or an insurer, “even changing a title tag could take multiple weeks.” Kadish’s counter isn’t a better ticket — it’s widening the room. He pulls the other departments onto the call, breaks the silos, and explains why the change matters to the site rather than to SEO. Often the team discovers it can move more than it assumed, and that plenty of work never needed legal at all.
The question he asks at every kickoff is a good one to steal: how long did it take you to implement the last recommendation? “Because if we’re going to make the recommendations, we need to make the changes.” Time-to-implementation is the constraint that decides what a program can actually achieve.
The multi-domain conversation nobody wants to have
The recurring enterprise mess Kadish sees isn’t a vertical problem — it’s companies that own several domains doing the same thing, or an international site with language subfolders full of English content. The result is constant flip-flopping: international cannibalization plus cross-domain cannibalization.
“There’s always one domain that they care the most about and the other ones they don’t care as much about, but that’s not the same with Google. Google doesn’t know that… All five of your domains aren’t going to show up on page one for the same keyword anymore. Google needs to diversify the SERPs for their users and we need to do the same thing with our content.” — Zack Kadish
The SERP change doing the most damage right now
Two years ago his answer would have been the helpful content update, which “really, really wrecked” clients carrying thin content. Today he points somewhere else: result types. Discussion and forum results surfacing user-generated content for high-level questions, AI overviews, and in e-commerce the shoppable experience Google now serves on broad queries. “The combination of both of those have really drastically diminished the amount of traffic that we’re seeing for our clients.”
Track Reddit as a competitor
Kadish’s most concrete recommendation in the episode: put Reddit and the other forums into your rank tracking as competitors.
“Then you can start to see how visible they are for the keywords you care about, and what posts, what subreddits, what individual posts are showing up for those keywords — and then doing research off of that.” — Zack Kadish
That gives you two things. First, a live read on what your market is actually asking and what answers are landing. Second, a keyword set: those posts have individual URLs and they rank, so the phrases they win on belong in your own content — either to get sourced, or to compete. On the perennial authority objection, he’s pragmatic: “Some people argue, is it authoritative? Maybe not necessarily all the time, but if that person has firsthand experience, I would argue it is.”
Jeremy brings a case in point from Jared Mortenson at Real Men Apparel, whose TikTok lives drove real product decisions — fabric choices, colors — straight out of viewer questions, on the theory that marketing which doesn’t spark a conversation isn’t working. Kadish agrees and extends it back onto owned property: reviews, testimonials, and actually asking customers what they liked and didn’t. “Hearing it directly from them is the best way to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”
Competitive analysis when your competitor isn’t a competitor
When a SERP is full of aggregators and forums rather than rivals, Kadish treats it as a non-SEO opportunity: get PR and the wider marketing team involved and get the brand onto those surfaces. “People are searching in a lot of different ways. Maybe they don’t want to go directly to the brand if they’re in the informational or comparative stage of their journey… if we’re not on those places as well, they’re definitely not going to hear about us.”
One practical limit worth knowing: you can’t point Conductor Website Monitoring at somebody else’s site — that requires IP approval — so competitor watching happens through tracked keywords and comparison properties, then inspecting how much content they publish in which subfolders and around which topics.
AI in the platform, and the arms-race question
Jeremy asks about the Mark Williams-Cook style workflow — chaining an also-asked API, Screaming Frog, and ChatGPT into a content gap analysis that would have been punishing manual labor ten years ago. Conductor is building that direction into the product: a content guidance feature that analyzes new or existing pages against what the current top rankers are doing, and a writing assistant that reads your content and flags where to tighten or better answer the query.
On hallucination, Kadish credits engineering work on prompt design plus account-level context — tone of voice, objectives, audience — and is clear about the intended use: “we don’t recommend to create the content fully with AI.” The win is time. “It might have taken a full day to write this brief. Now it takes, let’s say, an hour.”
“AI is not necessarily going to replace the SEO industry or the content marketing industry or technical SEOs, but the people that are using AI will replace others that aren’t using it at all.” — Zack Kadish
He draws the line at volume plays. Publish hundreds or thousands of AI articles and you may rank and pick up traffic for a month or so, and then you get hit. “It’s not a long-term thing. It’s not scalable… because Google’s smart enough to know what you’re doing. And users are likely to.”
Who taught him
Asked for a figure worth studying, Kadish names Pat Reinhardt, Conductor’s VP of Professional Services and Thought Leadership — “he’s really the reason I got into SEO” — and points at Reinhardt’s monthly 30 for 30 webinar: the last 30 days of search in 30 minutes. “Definitely, I think, very underrated and under looked in the industry.”
Connect with Zack
Zack Kadish is Senior Director of SEO Strategy at Conductor in New York City. Follow him on LinkedIn, where he posts a monthly breakdown of AI overview movement across Conductor’s customer base. Conductor also publishes industry updates and training through Conductor Academy.
For more conversations like this, browse The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, explore the Unscripted SEO topical hubs, or try the keyword-research tool at SEO Arcade.
