A Chat with Craig Dunham, New CEO at SEO SaaS Platform: Deepcrawl

Deepcrawl is a global technical SEO SaaS platform that empowers the world’s leading brands to develop their full revenue potential through one initiative most businesses overlook—technical SEO. Our platform provides actionable data and insights that help enable flawless website architecture at scale and help ensure websites are healthy and high-performing for both search engines and users alike.

The Deepcrawl Analytics Hub and Automation Hub have become the go-to technical SEO tools of choice for brands like Adobe, eBay, Microsoft, PayPal, Canva, Twitch, the Motley Fool, and all six major global group advertising agencies. For large enterprise companies, major publishers, agencies, and eCommerce businesses whose website page count often runs into the millions, our cloud-based Analytics Hub is an industry-leading tool for large-scale crawls and reporting.

After years in the technical SEO analytics business, we later built Deepcrawl’s Automation Hub to provide SEOs, marketers, and developers with more efficiency in their testing processes and protection from bad code releases that could otherwise harm a business’s SEO. And we’re continuing to build out new product features and innovative processes every day.

We’ve seen firsthand the impact technical SEO can have on conversion and revenue, but we know the ins and outs of SEO are ever-changing and it’s often quite complicated for busy in-house teams to stay current with the latest algorithm updates and best practices for organic search. So in addition to our SaaS offering, we’ve brought on some of the best organic search experts in the world to support clients every step of that way as part of our professional services team.

Your website’s overall health is determined by a wide variety of factors, encompassing everything from your site architecture and page speed to overall user experience, content, and authority. Technical SEO provides the foundation for a healthy, high-performing, and high-ranking website. Here at Deepcrawl, we’re excited to be building the tools and teams to help demystify and streamline the SEO processes that can improve website health for businesses worldwide.
 
 

 

How has Deepcrawl evolved during the pandemic?

 
The pandemic has obviously been a difficult experience for everyone, all around the world. Most of us have never experienced anything like it in our lifetimes. But major challenges also allow for new insights and opportunities to change things for the better. At Deepcrawl, we made the most of an opportunity for deep reflection and company-wide improvements at every level, for both our staff and our users.

On the people front, we’ve revamped a lot of internal processes to better support our employees — not just for the time being, but as an ongoing commitment to our company culture. We’ve ramped up our flexible working opportunities and have provided support for all our employees to create better at-home workspaces. Our team has worked across continents for several years now, and therefore it was easier for us to adjust to the new, flexible way of working that was subsequently adopted across the globe.

We’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about the future to evaluate what our company and our product offering should look like as we move beyond the pandemic—and we’ve got some exciting plans for what’s next. In fact, even during the pandemic, we’ve been making some very exciting new additions to our team to support our long-term strategy!

We brought in an experienced tech-focused CMO, Shachar Radin Shomrat, to spearhead our marketing activities as we scale and to help champion Deepcrawl as the best technical SEO product available today. And we’ve also been scaling up our customer service and professional services departments to ensure our clients have truly knowledgeable hands-on help whenever they need it.

And of course, as part of this evolution, I joined Deepcrawl earlier this year as COO, before moving into the CEO role this August. After getting my feet wet as Deepcrawl’s COO and seeing the team’s really groundbreaking ideas for what’s next, I was beyond thrilled when the CEO role was offered. I come from a background in MarTech, having previously been part of the executive leadership team at Seismic, and working on constantly improving and quickly growing SaaS platforms is something I really enjoy. After helping to grow Seismic by over £1.5b in seven years, I’m excited to now lead the charge at Deepcrawl as we expand into a new phase of growth.
 

What has your first month as CEO been like?

 
Having moved to the CEO role after serving as COO here at Deepcrawl, I was already very familiar with our team and product and already confident in our staff’s capabilities across our various departments. I’m lucky to have joined a team made up of so many smart, talented individuals – and I know I have a huge responsibility to both them and our customers. For my first month in the role, I’ve embraced that responsibility wholeheartedly and have been working with our other leaders to make sure we continue to go above and beyond in enabling everyone at Deepcrawl to grow both individually and together.

We’ve got quite a few new product updates planned as well, so it’s a really exciting time to lead the company!

Overall, I’m really pleased knowing that this is just the beginning of my journey with Deepcrawl. One of which is simply to get stuff done – and collectively we’re always striving to be better, which I think is pretty essential for any technology company. Having a strong foundation in the fast-paced world of MarTech, I already feel particularly well-aligned with the team’s passion for progress and our collective enthusiasm to work together to build something great.
 

What can we hope to see from Deepcrawl in the future?

 
Our team at Deepcrawl is full of curiosity and excited about building ever-better solutions, which means there will always be something exciting waiting in the pipeline. Without giving too much away just yet, we’re working on some quite innovative upgrades to the Deepcrawl platform, with a more expansive view toward the ways in which we can support our clients.

Having launched over a decade ago now, we’ve built up quite a lot of insights around not just technical SEO, but how websites’ overall health can impact many facets of a business in today’s search-first era. For now, I can say that our team is hard at work creating some of the best tools out there for businesses who want to stay competitive in our digital age.