Craig Bedard

The man behind both the wheel and the periscope of this fleet is Craig Bedard. After starting with a few tours in retail and restaurant ownership, he navigated into digital ops in the late ‘90s. From here, he retrained for software development before weathering the tragic dot-com crash of 2000 that caused everyone to stop partying like it was 1999. Craig regrouped in web design at Critical Mass Calgary, where he worked with a long list of Fortune 500 accounts including Mercedes Benz USA, Dell.com, Albertsons, Visit Las Vegas, NASA, Hyatt.com, Proctor & Gamble and a boatload more. His success with these campaigns resulted in a transfer into a new division that nerdy civilians were calling “SEO.”

Search & Deploy

Craig’s full-time work and side projects built so much interest that he launched his own full-service web, development and SEO operation named iAppeal. If you can’t tell from the classic iName, this was in the mid 2000s. Eventually the fad sank, which is good because otherwise Battleship would probably be called iAyeCaptain. By 2011, iAppeal was rebranded as Redline for what we assume was excitement over the upcoming release of Fast & Furious 6. The new agency expanded on iAppeal’s skillset by adding content marketing and video production to the mix, and growing their team to 25 operatives spread across both hemispheres. Notable missions included Absolute Poker, Tattoo You, and Leap Frog — the last of which was pitched on Dragons’ Den.

Nerds Double Down

The team’s expertise saw them land in Google’s Top 3 keywords for several lucrative industries, most notably online poker. Over its 15-year run, Redline enjoyed creative recognition from The Anvils, Hashtag Awards, Webbys, Rosies, and the One Show. Much like what he recognized for SEO, Craig saw a need to supply code for marketing agencies’ unique digital demands. In 2021, Nerder was born. The new coding agency was purpose-built for development, but clients kept asking where to get toplevel SEO strategies for their new sites. Craig and his Nerder partner, Cameron Prockiw, started drafting plans for a new, battle-hardened SEO vessel reinforced with strategic content marketing. It was time to sail back into “The High Sees.”

Full SEO Team Ahead

In 2022, Craig and Cam cast off yet again with Battleship — an armada of ultra-modern SEO tactics that help smart companies ride the strongest currents to success. If you’re reading this, it means our skills successfully pulled you into our harbour. Now it’s time to see what this fully functional Battleship can do for your next wave of business.