Smallpdf grew by 60% on search traffic while reducing 90% of time spent doing so

In late 2016, as the site was growing and new features were being added, a lot of changes were constantly made to improve the site. Smallpdf offered its services in 17 languages at this point, catering to large followings in Asia, Europe and the Latin markets. Because of this, localization was of utmost importance to efficiently deliver updates to users. Before adopting OneSky, Smallpdf relied on freelance translators, which often hindered implementation due to several reasons.

For once, freelancers were slow to react to changes due to poor coordination and processing time. Even for company’s small team, the amount of workload increased remarkably due to this. Smallpdf was used to accumulate little changes and give them in bulk to the freelancers to translate. In turn, changes on the webpages were even more delayed due to long waiting time for translations.

Secondly, freelancers’ translations were often not up to Smallpdf’s standards regarding SEO guidelines. As a popular internet company, Smallpdf’s main English website was fully optimized for top rankings of SERPs. This result was not reflected through the translations, thus led to depreciated search rankings and user traffic. Furthermore, both operations and marketing team had to allocate additional resources in correcting translation quality, which further damaged the company’s productivity.

To solve this recurring problem, Smallpdf decided to outsource their translation work with OneSky. The benefits were instantly recognized due to seamless implementation, high flexibility and outstanding translation quality.

Best of all, this was all done with little effort and little coordination. OneSky’s automated solutions allowed Smallpdf to process translation requests for new features and site improvements within 1-2 days for all 17 languages. This process would have usually taken weeks to process with freelance translators.

Upon seeing how efficient OneSky was, Smallpdf decided to add 3 new languages (Thai, Hindi, Swedish), which were instantly online. On top of that, the translations were also in line with Smallpdf’s SEO requirements, which resulted in major improvements in SERP rankings for the vast majority of the new translated web pages. The Thai language proved to be the most lucrative of the three, with an increase in user base of over 500% in traffic in one year.

Smallpdf has experienced prolonged growth ever since OneSky was adopted in September 2016. Monthly users over SEO soared by 60%, going from 6 million in 2016 to over 9.5 million in 2017, a number that’s still rising. Although many factors contribute to this success, OneSky was one important for this increase. Over 70% of users are from non-English speaking countries. Particularly, growth in emerging markets such as China and India have more than doubled in this time. This places further importance on the need of localization for user acquisition, retention and satisfaction.