I recently helped a founder who was trying to launch a suite of PDF tools. He had no idea of how to reach his market and so as usual the first step was researching competitors.
A quick google search brought us to SmallPDF and we did a deep dive.
First up was the homepage.
Homepage
The headline and subheadline are strong and clear. The first thing customers want to know when they land on a page is "Am I in the right place?" and putting the positioning in the title ~ PDF helps them confirm that instantly.
They use their main descriptive benefit to paint the "dream" of "begin more productive" for the prospect... the rest of the site is supportive evidence for this simple headline.
Search Traffic and SEO
When I looked at the traffic I was shocked. I had no idea this niche attracts so much traffic. You can see that SmallPDF gets almost 30 MILLION organic monthly page views which is cool... but notice that they still buy ads.
Ads capture the buyers who are READY TO BUY NOW, and without them SmallPDF would be missing out on a lot of revenue. Most likely a new customer more than pays for the customer acquisition cost so it would be stupid not to use ads to attract more customers.
Notice how strong their organic traffic is. They show up in the top 3 results for tousnds of queries and yet they still buy ads.
Interesting they're not the biggest player out there. The site https://www.ilovepdf.com gets 200 million+ monthly uniques. There is room in any market for multiple players.
Studying ads is the best way to understand go-to-market strategies, messaging, and customer intent in my opinion. A quick glance at Smallpdf's ads tells us about a bunch of niches immediately. Also, note how these simple text ads are nothing special. Anyone could run one provided they have the budget and that would get the click (which is where most new founders get stuck).
SmallPDF has a bazillion pages in their sitemap and has pretty much every page translted into multiple languages which is the foundation of their SEO strategy.
They also run many other kinds of ads across Google's ad network... standard stuff.
Where they start to branch out is with LinkedIn. They focus on LinkedIn because their customers are corporate (they have no Meta ads). You can see their optimized LinkedIn page below.
You can click through their LinkedIn ads to experience their conversion funnels. If this was my market I would sign up for their mailing lists and walk through each step in their signup funnels.
A GTM Strategy
If I wanted to build a new pdf tool I'd probably test inbound demand and messaging with a boosted ad on LinkedIn or a search ad on Google. I'd be interested in knowing the inbound acquisition cost, whether my niche (probably want to pick one or two tools to start with) has demand (and how much) and whether my messaging can convert a lead into a customer.
I might try to run an event in place of an actual tool -- "PDF tool lovers meetup anyone?"... erm have to think about that... but the point is to try to get a chance to meet some actual potential leads so that I can understand who I'm attracting.
I'd probably pair that with answering questions on forums when people talk about PDF problems and my competitors.
Anyways, hope this teardown is helpful and let me know if you'd like some help executing a process like this.
