Welcome Ian Read, Blink’s new Chief Technology Officer

Some big news from Blink – we’ve added Dr. Ian Read to the team as our new Chief Technology Officer.

We’ve known Ian a long time, and it’s clear that he brings skills that are not only in short supply in our business, but the SEO industry as a whole.

We talk a lot internally about how most SEO work is essentially data engineering by hand. By this we mean manually pulling together various data sources like Search Console, Analytics and site crawls before they can be analysed. This is slow, expensive and prone to human error – as well as hard to measure in terms of impact.

Ian has more than 25 years of data and software engineering experience, along with a Ph.D. in machine learning and natural language processing, and will be working closely with both our data scientist, Dr. Joshua Prettyman, and our data engineers, SEO analysts and developers to help bridge this gap.

This also includes the development of our upcoming SaaS platform, Macaroni. We’ll be announcing more details on this soon, but in the meantime, we’re looking forward to getting Ian introduced to our clients and settled onto the Blink team!