SyncWith, founded by a visionary team from Canada, emerged from a deep-rooted passion for metrics and data. Drawing from their experiences in previous businesses, the founders embarked on a mission to simplify business growth using metrics and data-driven insights.
Today, SyncWith serves customers like Zapier, Nextdoor, and GitHb, (to name just a few) providing them with the means to consolidate data from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, and more.
In a recent Q&A, Founder Alex Black shared his journey to SEO excellence and how Cloudinary helped them achieve their optimization goals. As a founder, Black recognizes the power of SEO in attracting self-serve, inbound users, and Cloudinary’s image optimization became the key to improving their website’s performance.
- Who is SyncWith? Can you share a bit about your mission, what inspired you to start the company, and who your audience is?
SyncWith was started by a small team from Canada. In our previous businesses, we spent a lot of time working with metrics and data. When we started SyncWith, our goal was to make it easier for anyone to understand and grow their business using metrics and data. Our theory was that many businesses are run using spreadsheets and that we could unlock a lot of potential value by making a business’s data easily accessible in a spreadsheet such as Google Sheets.
Today our primary focus is on marketers, making it possible for marketers to pull together the data they need to manage their digital marketing efforts, from sources including Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify and more.
- When you were building out your website and product, you mentioned your next step was to focus on SEO. How has Cloudinary helped you with that?
SyncWith’s sales and marketing is all inbound self-serve, meaning potential new users discover us on the web or in a marketplace, where they can try out our product for free, and then subscribe to a plan if they want to use it on an ongoing basis.
One of our first steps was to audit our technical SEO, specifically our website’s performance and page load times for users. A lot of our website’s images were very large and took a long time to load for users, especially on mobile devices. Cloudinary made it possible for us to fully optimize images for all devices, reducing page load times for our users.
- What specific pain points and hurdles did you face before Cloudinary? And how has Cloudinary helped you overcome those challenges?
Before using Cloudinary we had to manually optimize our images to ensure they weren’t too large. Often we didn’t get around to doing this, or if we did we were only able to optimize images for a single device type (for example).
- Why is image optimization important for your business? How many assets do you manage currently?
Image optimization is important to us because SEO is an important channel for us, and Google uses website performance as one of its many ranking signals. We have several hundred assets in the media library at Cloudinary.
- Which Cloudinary capabilities do you use/rely on the most?
The main capability we use is Cloudinary’s “fetch” feature to seamlessly pull images from our site, and then deliver them in optimized formats. We rely on Cloudinary to shrink file sizes of our images by optimizing their quality, and by serving them in the best-supported format, and by reducing their size based on device type (e.g., mobile versus desktop).
- Can you tell us one thing you like (or love!) about using Cloudinary, and/or was there a big aha moment once you started using Cloudinary?
Once we discovered the Fetch feature it became extremely easy to use and fits well into our workflow. For us, this means we add images to our website the way we always did and we don’t need to upload them manually to Cloudinary. For more about our success with Cloudinary visit: https://syncwith.com/blog/website-image-optimization-cloudflare-cloudinary.
