Unlocking the Power of SEO and Content Marketing for Ecommerce Business Growth

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Suzie Cyrenne is the Co-founder of Zumalka, a company that delivers natural and homeopathic pet supplements for holistic pet wellness. For over a decade, Suzie has nurtured and cared for pets in over 70 countries through Zumalka’s natural alternatives and the company’s dedication to pet well-being.

A certified homeopath who co-founded her first business in 2013, Suzie's roots are deeply entrenched in entrepreneurship. She is also the Co-founder and COO of Buster Fetcher™, an automated tracking system that helps businesses cut shipping costs and boost profit margins. In addition, Suzie hosts the Women Powering Ecommerce Podcast, inspiring others with valuable business lessons for exceptional leadership.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Suzie Cyrenne emphasizes the importance of SEO for her ecommerce business
• How Suzie leverages consistent content creation to drive traffic and sales
• Quality over quantity: prioritizing in-depth content that resonates with your customers
• Suzie’s proven blog outreach and SEO strategies  
• How testing and optimizing can help convert your readers into buyers
• When should you hire an SEO specialist or CRO auditor?
• Scaling and growing your ecommerce business with freelancers

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In this episode…

Generating relevant and productive traffic to a website is a primary goal for online businesses. However, many online brands are still determining the most effective approaches for getting leads. How do you generate leads that, in turn, grow your ecommerce business significantly?

Founder and seasoned entrepreneur Suzie Cyrenne navigates business with the mindset that content is critical to realizing ecommerce growth. Creating relevant content and in-depth guides has been fundamental to her entrepreneurial success, seeing a skyrocket in traffic and sales on her ecommerce website. According to Suzie, SEO and content marketing have numerous advantages over traditional advertising methods and paid ads. With content marketing, businesses can gain customers’ trust by delivering messages that resonate with them. Content provides long-term value when combined with strategic outreach, SEO optimization, and CRO audits.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce Podcast, Raphael Paulin-Daigle sits down with Suzie Cyrenne, Co-founder of Zumalka and Buster Fetcher™, as she unpacks her SEO strategies for increased visibility, traffic, and sales. Suzie highlights the benefits of SEO over paid ads and provides tips on how to make the most of your content marketing efforts. You will also learn how to scale your business with freelancers and conversion optimization tactics for increased ROI.

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Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle on LinkedIn
• SplitBase
• Suzie Cyrenne on LinkedIn
• Zumalka
• Buster Fetcher™
• Women Powering Ecommerce Podcast
• “How To Scale a DTC Brand Using Freelancers” with Chris Meade on the Minds of Ecommerce Podcast
• “How Understanding Their Customers Led to 1400% Growth” with Ben Smith on the Minds of Ecommerce Podcast

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Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle e-commerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Mind of Ecommerce.

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Episode Transcript

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‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  0:06

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode, as founders and executives take us through a deep dive into a strategy, so you'll get to learn and grow your online sales. I'm Raphael Paulin Daigle, your host and today we have Suzie Cyrenne, who is the Co-founder of Zumalka and Buster Fetcher. We're gonna talk about how she's using SEO to bring significant growth to her businesses. And I'm super excited to have her here. So without further ado, Susie, welcome to the show.

‍Suzie Cyrenne  0:49  

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm super grateful to be here referral,

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  0:53

Of course, of course. Now, obviously, in this episode, or in this podcast, I should say, you know, we tried to be as actionable as possible, cut to the chase, and really dive as deep as possible within 15 to 20 minutes. And you've mentioned SEO. But before we actually dive into SEO, I'd love for you to tell us a bit more about your ecommerce business specifically. So zoom Mocha, and just maybe give us a couple of highlights of how you've grown the brand. And what's the brand about? You know, yes, in the last couple of years,

‍Suzie Cyrenne  1:28  

Absolutely. So my background is totally different. I used to be a dental hygienist. So nothing to do with Ecommerce. But I was just looking for a completely new challenge. And my husband had been in the ecommerce space for a couple of years making websites. So we just like decided to build our own thing and give it a try. I still loved everything around help. So I we have this wonderful opportunity of creating a website around an Easter ecommerce store around natural products and remedies for pet. So that's what we decided to do. It was it was fun, it was a whole new adventure. But up to today, 10 years later, we still have that brand. We love it. And we're just serving, mostly I say, US-based customers. So it's been very exciting.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  2:14  

Amazing. Um, before we started recording this, you mentioned that SEO was important for you for a couple of reasons. But I'll let you tell the audience. Why is SEO important to you and to your business? When I think a lot of the brands we're seeing today, you know, they're really only thinking about paid ads. And they're overly reliant possibly on Facebook ads and Google ads. So you mentioned that was a motivating factor for you guys to explore different things. So tell me a bit more about that.

‍Suzie Cyrenne 2:45

Yeah, absolutely. So definitely, I think a lot of people and I were there, too, we put a lot of money down that paid ads funnel, and it works. It works to a certain extent. And we still I still do paid ads today. But I find it over the years, it's just been so unstable. You're just so dependent or reliant on whatever they decide. So and it's been like that since the beginning. So I feel like consistent content creation is the key to success. And more than ever today. 2023. Like brands are just putting so much more emphasis on content. And that's definitely a great foundation to have so much more solid. So from the beginning, we decided to put a lot of effort into content. We put a break on that for a while, but decided that no, we really need to work on our content, the only thing it's just it doesn't pay off right away. I think that's one thing that kind of makes us lose our motivation to actually do the work. It's a lot of work before you see the results. But if you are consistent, it'll eventually pay off. So that's definitely why we decided that Google SEO, you can't really go wrong with that you just need to work your way through it and be on top of trends in but usually, yeah, it works out pretty well. If you're consistent.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  4:10

Perfect. Yeah. And we'll dive into your playbook in just a couple seconds. But you know, you're talking about a payoff. What type of payoff, you know, are, are you getting based on what you're you're able to tell us just so people know, you know, I mean, not every business is the same. So not everybody should expect the same results. But what type of payoff Have you seen from that?

‍Suzie Cyrenne  4:36  

So usually when we put a lot of effort into SEO on a weekly basis, eventually it pays off in traffic, it pays off in sales. The traffic that comes to you is definitely high quality. And we've seen several times almost like overnight in a month or so our traffic doubled or sales doubled. So but You can't really know when that will happen. So you just have to put the work and eventually you'll see like a dramatic increase in your traffic in Dallas. So that's the payoff we're talking about.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  5:11  

Awesome. And how long did it take for you guys to reach that payoff moment from when you started to really seem to get some traction?

‍Suzie Cyrenne 5:19  

I feel that a good rule of thumb is six months, approximately. So it takes a while. But usually, yeah, about six months, more or less. It's different for every website industry, and depending on the year you're in, but that's, that's a pretty good.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  5:35  

Yeah, awesome. Perfect. So you're talking about Khan? Obviously, SEO through content creation? Let's dive deeper. So what's the first step? What's the first headline? Ultimately? What's the strategy about what do you do? Do you just create any piece of content are there specific types of piece of content that you create?

‍Suzie Cyrenne 5:57

So my SEO approach revolves around creating unique and quality content, but more specifically, creating guides around expert advice. So the first time we actually discover this strategy, maybe a little backstory, when we first started to get into the SEO, we had no clue what we were doing. So first thing we did was hire an SEO specialist, we put all our eggs in one basket, and we just hoped that it would work. But that was a total fail, that person was just not the right person. And that's the thing we only knew a couple months later, it didn't do well. So we decided to hire an agency, we we thought maybe that we would have a little bit more control over that. And it worked out, okay. But we decided at the same time, eventually, when we saw those results, to just take matter in our own hands and try to find our own recipe. And that's what we did. So that brought me to create an ultimate guide, or first Ultimate Guide. At the time, it was called The Ultimate Guide to pet adoption. I had just done, I wanted to adopt a dog and I had no clue how to do it. And I was looking online, and like there's not enough information, there is just like not a complete one place to go to. So to find that knowledge and information. So I thought, hey, why don't let's create it, we're in the pet industry, I think it's gonna serve a lot of our customers at the same time, and it'll be useful or useful for for me. So that's what we did. That's what we when we started to discover our own little recipe, which was nowhere to be found, right? So what we did is we outreach to as many, many rescues and shelters that we could, in the US and Canada, as many as possible. Once we found all those, all those people to reach out to we send them an email. And we asked them for an interview. We asked to interview them through email, not a zoom interview, that would have been way too long, because I think we got about at the time, maybe 200 People who reply with a yes, well, I'm okay to interview you. Yeah, so it was a lot of people. So we're glad we did that by email, because it saved us time. But not only that, it just allowed us to actually have it in written to actually quote the experts. So that brought a lot of credibility for guides and articles. So we did that. And in exchange while we offered them to link back to their website, so that would provide them some good backlinks. And as a bonus, we featured them as an expert. So not only was that good quality content for us, but it was also a lot of shares for us in the end, because once we created the content, and we just invited them to share it with their audience, their their own clients, customers, and they they happily did, and their audience to share the content as well. So it was almost like infinite. And so that was good. It was a really good strategy. So that's when we really circling back. So in the end, we discovered that when you collect diverse voices, expert advice, expert voices, will Google value, the originality of your content, though, Google will appreciate the tone the style ideas within the content. So definitely, that was a winning strategy. So I think that was awesome. The first thing I could say,

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  9:27  

and Susie, so it sounds like that first topic on adoption that really just came out of a need. But I'm sure that you know, as you guys went on to create more guides, maybe there was a bit more of a strategy involved in finding the topic. So I guess my question is, how do you decide what to write about? Because obviously, it's a lot of effort to build such guides. Yeah. How do you pick your topics?

‍Suzie Cyrenne  9:51  

That's such a great question. So we try to interview our customers once in a while survey them so we know that way. A, what are their main interest we make sure we, before we take a decision, we always go look back to our avatars and, and just make sure we always create content towards our personas. So but mostly interview them, because I feel that as we grow as a company or customer's needs will grow as well, or so their interest in the foundation stays the same, but trends are different. And that, for example, raw food is like a big thing, though, when eventually we discovered that people want to know more about like raw feeding your pet. So we did a guide on that. So that's definitely something we always try to do go back to our customers, because in the end, the information is for them first.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  10:44

Awesome. I love that you mentioned that because I was totally expecting an answer, like, oh, you know, we look at like h ref and things like that. And we have this tool and this tool, which I'm sure is important part of the process. But you know, I've always been a pretty loud voice when it comes to saying how important it is to talk to your customers. Because if I look at the work that we do at split base, where we build landing pages for  Ecommerce brands, or we do conversion optimization, our approach to testing Trifecta has always been about understanding the customer's pain points, needs and motivations to understand what needs to be optimized on a website or what needs to be written on the landing page. And those are things that Google Analytics or any tool with metrics can't tell you because your customers are human beings, you know, and numbers are numbers. So hearing that, you know, you value that, and that's how you come up with topics, I actually think is super smart. And, and, and pretty exciting, because it aligns exactly with how we see things as well. Now, So Suzy, how well how many guides? Do you create? Like, what's the cadence? Is it every month? Is it every quarter? I mean, it sounds like there, it takes quite a bit of effort, right? So so so what's the frequency for that?

‍Suzie Cyrenne  12:02  

We don't have like a specific timeframe for creating guides. Usually what we do, we create a guide. And then we because once your guide is created, that's just maybe 20%. And then you have to outreach, and there's so much marketing you can do around it. So depending on the industry topic we're doing well, we'll make sure that we do the marketing to an extent that we're satisfied, and then we can we feel like moving on is a good idea. So that's what we do. But I'm not gonna lie, we do change sometimes, like recently, we've decided to update all of our blog articles, which is definitely super important too. So it depends. You need to sometimes travel switch between projects. But in the end Amin what I'm saying today is definitely something will stay that will stick with us because it has worked for us for for so long. But I think it's not about the the the amount of guides you create, it's really around making sure you create good quality and you mark it properly the content,

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  13:03  

quality over quantity. I love that you mention outreach, writing and creating the content is only a small part of the actual process. Right? So so this is super important, because I think a lot of brands some times and I've been victim of that myself in the past as well, where we spent a lot of time creating that content and then publish it and then we move on without really milking everything we can milk out of something that we just published. So when you talk about outreach Suzy, what exactly are you doing? Are you just reaching out to those experts? Are you doing more left you know a bit about that?

‍Suzie Cyrenne  13:43  

We do a lot of things. Um, one thing I know we do that is has worked a lot for us is, for example, we'll take a look at our, the experts, backlinks and see are there any broken links or, or their competitors, maybe we'll take a look and see if they have any broken links and then check. And if they do, let's say four or four pages or anything like that, we'll just add that time outreach to them and offer to replace that broken link with our good content of which we'll be sending significant importance for their audience. So that's one thing we do. But when you go into the backlinking world of your competitors, or the experts that we interviewed, you find like a whole web of people you can outreach to and it's that is infinite you and there are a lot of strategies you can go around to outreach to them. But I would say that a lot of our strategies for while was around broken links and finding their competitors and actually offering for them to post or share or content to their audience. And that worked for a while for a long time actually.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  15:02  

Awesome, super interesting. Well, this episode and this podcast is brought to you by split base, a conversion optimization and landing page agency for E commerce brands. And obviously, since I'm the CEO was split base, well, I will ask a question about conversion optimization. So I'd love to know Suzy, what I see, you know, pretty often is, sometimes we have brands that get a lot of traffic to their blog, but that traffic is not converting. And if you have a lot of traffic, but no one's buying, what's that traffic worth? Right? So how do you get your blog readers to turn into actual customers?

‍Suzie Cyrenne 15:42

That is such a good question. And I think that's all of our, our challenge at some point. So what we do is, we go through a lot of the times, first of all, we make sure that whatever we post is something that's relevant, we try not, we don't just do blog articles to create content, we make sure that it's relevant to our customers wants and needs. And if we're going to add some links in there for two or three products, we made sure that, of course, we're just not just dropping a bunch of links, we make sure they're they're high quality. We, right now, just recently, we actually were having a little bit of that issue, what we did, we hired an SEO specialist, and who did a SEO audit, and now we worked on our SEO, we're it's an ongoing thing. And then we're just actually now working on our we just had a CRO audit done. And we're just, you know, optimizing that part for ourselves. Because what worked five years ago, doesn't work anymore, necessarily. So I think it's something you just have to do on an ongoing basis. So to answer your question, as of today, we're just having CRO audit done right now. And we're actually really excited to see what our specialists have to offer to us. And because at some point when you're a CEO, or taking care of your company, all the technical, all the technicalities, eventually the trends, we're just not on top anymore. So I think it's super important to go towards the experts and hire them. Because I'm not I'm not an expert at everything in ecommerce. I'm not gonna say that that would be untruth, though, I think at a certain point, we just have so much to manage that we just have to go to where the experts. So yeah, that's what we do right now hire expert to tell us where we need to work on in the end.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  17:39  

And that's a smart move. I think this is the type of thing right? Where there's also there are definitely some best practices around that. But ultimately, everything is different for every business. Ultimately, the next move right for maybe your business, or anyone who's listening to this, who's going through something similar, right? It's, you're going to have to try and test a lot of things. With some brands, you know, when we're looking at how do we get blogs to convert better? Well, some blog content doesn't do well, when you actually, you know, have a bunch of ads about your products in the blog post because people don't want to buy they come there for your content. Right. So sometimes it's about being a little more sneaky about it. And by that meeting, you know, just hyperlinking min casual mentions of your products here and there. Sometimes it's just better to get them to sign up for a newsletter to capture their leads, right? So I encourage anyone to who's listening to this, right? Do experiment with how you get blog readers to convert, because there's no one way of doing it, and what might work for one brand might not work for yours. Suzy we're almost out of time. But one question I definitely want to ask because I'm always curious is you've you've been growing this business for for a little while now, what are maybe three tools or services that you love and have used, you know, to, to, for you to be where you are today.

‍Suzie Cyrenne 19:00  

Um, tools and services, I'm going to stay. One of the tools that really has helped us in was to at the beginning, especially when you create an ecommerce or even if you're rebranding your website is to There's a website called usertesting.com. I used that a while back a hot jar, I mean their basic tools, but when there's an issue and you don't know what where to go, go back to your basics, ask your customers interview them. So yeah, hot jar. I mean, we always go back to that user testing non common was really, really good for us, um, and services, I would say, we we love to hire in-house now as much as possible. So if you're gonna use a service, talking about services, if you're gonna hire people, specialists, we love to hire people from Philippines. So there's this wonderful website called online jobs.ph which I love and I found such great quality people Oh, there are two and four marketing team to be honest, they're one of the best we've we've had so far. So that's definitely a place I go to. And I still do when we need talent, when we're trying to keep things lean, but still get good quality of work. And another another tool, I would say, Hmm, let me think about this one, I would just try this is a little

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  20:26

about a plug to Buster fetcher.

‍Suzie Cyrenne  20:29  

Oh, that's, that's true. That's true. We can do that. Um, well, if you are looking to, to save on and lower your shipping costs, which I think as an ecommerce is one of the things we're we're trying to do as best as we can. Shipping costs always go up. So best refresher of what we do is we help businesses lower their shipping costs without even changing carriers or just it takes five minutes. You don't have to change. We just analyze audits and tell you where you can you have savings that are waiting for you. So that's definitely I we use the platform for ourselves. And it's been so helpful. I love it.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  21:06

Amazing. So Suzie, if people want to learn more about you or your companies, where should they go? Where should they find you?

‍Suzie Cyrenne  21:14  

Your Zumalka.com That's our ecommerce, and busterfetcher.com is our other business and Women Powering Ecommerce podcast for women in the ecommerce space.

‍Raphael Paulin-Daigle  21:28  

Awesome. Thank you so much, Susie, for your time, it was a pleasure chatting with you. I really love this conversation. For anyone who's listening. If you're looking for similar episodes, episodes, where we talk about how to better understand your customer, listen to episode number 23, with Ben Smith of Disco, where we talk about utilizing customer insights. And if you want to talk about freelancers because Suzie did say that she loves leveraging freelancers, Episode 22 with Chris Mead of CrossNet actually goes in depth with how you know they've been able to scale using freelancers instead of full-time employees. So thank you so much, everyone. Suzie, thanks for being here. I'm Raphael Paulin-Daigle, Founder and CEO of SplitBase. If you need help with landing pages to reduce your customer acquisition costs or need help with optimizing your website for conversion, go to split ace.com. And we'll be able to help you out. Thank you so much. All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And well bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes Store, or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over a million dollars in revenue, and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com To learn more, or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me at Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.