Deepcrawl’s CEO Talks SEO Opportunities, Growth & Planning For 2022

If you’ve been in the technical SEO world more than a hot minute, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled across technical SEO platform Deepcrawl in your online travels.

It’s the enterprise SEO platform of choice for big brands such as Adobe, Disney, IBM, and Twitch – and the agencies and SEO pros who serve them, as well.

Aside from its product, Deepcrawl is also a thought leader in the technical SEO space via its webinar series and blog,  conference speakers, and contributing authors who generously share their expertise with the industry (including right here at Search Engine Journal).

I had the opportunity recently to interview Craig Dunham, CEO of Deepcrawl, about what’s going on inside his company – and in the search space as a whole.

He’s building on his background in martech and SaaS – and his history of helping to grow a software brand by $1.5 billion – to continue growing Deepcrawl as an industry-leading technical SEO platform.

In this exclusive interview, Dunham shares his plans for Deepcrawl, how his teams are faring in the remote work environment, what he’s learned truly matters in carving out a rewarding digital marketing career, and more.

1. What’s new at Deepcrawl – any exciting new hires, features, or other news to share?

Craig Dunham: We’ve got some pretty big announcements coming next year around our platform.

SEO, as you know, is an ever-changing field, so we’re always hard at work on new product features, upgrades, and building out events for our technical SEO community.

At the start of the pandemic, Deepcrawl took some time to really examine the directions we wanted to grow in. The whole world has experienced a lot of changes since the pandemic began and it was important to us that we spent the time to reflect and move forward with purpose.

We’ve revamped a lot of internal processes to better support our employees – not just during the pandemic but as part of our ongoing commitment to creating a fantastic company to work at. We’ve had new developments on the personnel front, as well.

We were thrilled to have Shachar Radin Shomrat join Deepcrawl not too long ago as CMO, building on her years of experience as a tech-focused marketing leader.

She is spearheading our marketing activities as we scale and helping to further cement Deepcrawl as the best technical SEO platform available today.

To support our ongoing growth, Panos Savopolous has also recently joined as our new VP of Global Sales, bringing with him a lot of SaaS experience acquired during his tenure with companies like Oracle and Beeswax.

I’ve also recently stepped into the CEO role here at Deepcrawl, after initially serving as COO. I come from a background in martech as well, having previously been part of the executive leadership team at Seismic, where I helped grow the brand’s valuation by approximately $1.5 billion in seven years.

I love the challenge to improve and to grow quickly in SaaS, and so coming to Deepcrawl at this stage in our development has been an ideal opportunity for me. I was inspired by the team’s innovative ideas and ambitions for what’s next and jumped at the opportunity to take on the leadership of the company at a time when technical SEO has never been more relevant.

As for the product itself, we’re making some big waves in the SEO space since launching the first-ever technical SEO automation tool in our Automation Hub. Taking a more expansive view toward our clients’ needs has helped inform new product ideas, evolve partnerships, and new events.

But we’re always working on new features and improvements; our goal is to have the world’s most intelligent and accessible SEO platform that can operate at an enterprise scale.

We’ve also been scaling up our customer success and professional services departments to ensure we partner with our clients in the ways they would expect and provide them with the expertise needed to better attain their objectives. We employ some of the world’s leading technical SEO professionals, and our clients leverage them as extensions of their own teams.

2. Did 2021 bring you any real surprises in the search space?

Craig Dunham: Organic search is always changing, so I can’t say we’ve been surprised by new developments. But it’s exciting to see how technical SEO is expanding and how search algorithms are improving.

We’ve been busy building out educational resources for our clients around Google’s Core Web Vitals, which were introduced earlier this year and heralded a new emphasis on page experience.

Of course, we’ve all also seen the increased demand from consumers and legislators around privacy relating to online advertising and paid channels.

Obviously, we’ve long been champions of organic search as a marketing channel, but with new developments around the paid digital channels, I think we’re likely to see an even higher degree of interest in the SEO side of things.

There are a lot of opportunities to be had for brands that prioritize organic search right now, particularly as the paid ad space is facing new challenges and fewer options for audience targeting.

It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot at Deepcrawl lately. I think we’re really in a search-first age, where there is a greater acknowledgment of its importance not just to marketing but also to a variety of broader business functions.

3. How has Deepcrawl evolved to accommodate the rapid acceleration of remote work?

Craig Dunham: We have offices across three countries and people working closely together in many different time zones, so the acceleration of remote work was, all things considered, a pretty smooth adjustment for our team.

Like many companies, we understand that business is a global opportunity. The importance of having a team in place that can work well together across geographic, cultural, and temporal differences was clear to us even before the pandemic started.

We were lucky in this sense because we already had the platforms and processes in place to enable the high level of collaboration needed within remote global teams.

Our company culture has always encouraged flexibility to ensure our people have the autonomy required to perform their best. The ‘hard part’ was already done—having smart, passionate people in place.

But the pandemic really accentuated how important it is for everyone to be well-equipped to work in flexible ways.

When COVID hit and it became clear that remote work was likely going to be a long-term reality, we provided funds to help our staff create better at-home workspaces and ramped up virtual opportunities to socialize.

We must thank our fantastic IT and HR departments for continuing to manage all the information, tools, and resources we needed, and of course our employees for taking the further transition in their stride and making it work!

4. Shifting gears to the upcoming holiday season – what can e-commerce retailers do to maximize visibility, engagement, and sales?

Craig Dunham: For the ecommerce industry, preparing for the holiday shopping season can be a year-round effort. There’s a lot that can be done through technical SEO to support visibility, conversions, and help drive revenue for online retailers.

Technical SEO is an incredibly powerful tool in the ecommerce space.

Utilizing a powerful SEO tool to audit your website and flag where your weakest points are is a great starting point to building out a robust SEO plan. I take a pretty holistic view of technical SEO and from that perspective, it’s important to understand how each part of your website works together to improve rankings and ultimately drive conversion.

For ecommerce at the enterprise level, you’re likely dealing with thousands of product pages across multiple categories. It can be a lot to manage but with the right tools, you can get the insights you need no matter how many pages are on your website.

When you’re working with a large number of pages on a site, you’ll want to do everything you can to help search engines identify your most important content and share those key pages to users so you’re not wasting crawl budget or driving people to outdated pages.

This can be tricky on an ecommerce website with thousands or millions of URLs. It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d want to do manually, so investing in the right tools and platforms can be an important step toward efficiently executing your SEO plans.

Ensuring your site architecture is solid is important, of course, that’s the foundational element for all of your URLs to be able to rank well. But you also want to make sure you’ve got your indexing and crawling directives set up correctly.

Not to mention, you need to ensure your content is understandable by both humans and search engines alike. If search engines can’t find and index your pages, your would-be customers won’t see them in the search results.

With more people than ever doing their holiday shopping online, it’s clear why SEO needs to be a priority for ecommerce brands!

User experience is also more important than ever — both for SEO in the wake of Google’s algorithm updates, and because users are much more likely to convert into buying customers if their experience on a page is smooth.

So keep an eye out for things like page loading time, broken links, and issues related to rendering and animations.

Many consumers are low on time around the holiday season so if they can’t find what they want easily and quickly, chances are they’ll go elsewhere.

Improving your SEO can help you keep your existing customers engaged — and can help new customers find you!

5. How do you feel the SEO space is changing and what should marketers have on their radar for 2022…