8 Top Tips to Using Reddit for SEO

Need to find other ways to boost your websites SEO and increase traffic? Or looking for new, relevant and valuable content ideas? Reddit can be an excellent resource to solve these problems and this is a quick guide to using Reddit for SEO.

What is Reddit?

Reddit was founded in 2005, and even outside of SEO, there are chances you have heard of Reddit. It has grown significantly and successfully since it started. 

Boasting of a collection of millions of forums, known as subreddits, Reddit is the seventh most popular social network and calls itself ‘The front page of the internet’. 

By the end of 2019, Reddit reported a growth of 30% of their monthly active users, reaching 430 million users. Now in 2020, there are more than 2 million communities on Reddit so there is no shortage of topics and users to reach.

Allowing its users to post a variety of content including text posts, videos, links, images and commenting on other posts. 

Reddit can be a place of overwhelming information and communication. This is why actively using Reddit will help familiarise you with the platform. These top tips provide you with best practices and how to effectively use Reddit for your SEO strategy. 

10 tips to using Reddit for SEO

Subreddits

Subreddits are specific online communities dedicated to a particular topic. Containing all of the posts and threads associated with the subreddit. There are subreddits on a massive variety of topics from general topics like r/fitness or extremely niche topics such as r/BirdsArentReal.

With such a variety, over 2 million to search from, you want to find subreddits that are relevant to your brand, niche and audience. 

Using the search feature, type in relevant topics. Filter the results by selecting ‘Communities and Users’ so that you find as many relevant subreddits as possible. 

Thankfully, most subreddits have a description and you can preview the posts to ensure that it is relevant to your website. You can also join as many Subreddits as you like but ensuring they are still relevant to your niche. 

Research Content Ideas

Joining relevant Subreddits is a great place to conduct content research. Visiting the communities, you can filter by Top or Hot Topic posts to see posts with the most upvotes of the day, week, month or year. 

Additionally, when visiting a subreddit, search for common terms such as ‘how to’, ‘how do you’, ‘tips’ and ‘I’m struggling with…’. These results can also be filtered by hot topics, top posts or comments to show the maximum engagement.

Make sure to click ‘show results from r/…’ so that you obtain results from the specific subreddit and not Reddit itself.

Use the results from both searches to inform your next content ideas. This also ensures that the content you create is relevant to your audience and are current problems that require solutions. 

Language

You can obtain many content ideas from your audience on Reddit, however, the language they use is also important in your research. How does your audience speak about the topic? What words and phrases are used most?

This leads to long-tail keyword research that can be the focal point of your content. As the language used will appeal to your audience, you are more likely to attract traffic and attention from your audience.

Engage

Language is also important for the next tip, engagement. 

Reddit does not appreciate marketing and the communities can become tightly knit. Therefore, posting links for promotion can have potentially damaging effects on your Reddit profile and your business. 

New accounts are not trusted by the community or the social network. Therefore, to begin using Reddit for SEO, you have to start with participation. Build a relationship with the users in the community by responding to posts with valuable and useful comments. Showing that you are a real person and not a robot just for marketing.

Build Karma

Karma is like a points system. You can earn karma points from posts and comments and the up or down vote you receive on them. The higher the karma the more trusted a source you are. Also contributing to your links being do-follow rather than no-follow.

Therefore, participating in subreddits is essential to build up Karma and be seen as a trusted source. resulting in your posts being better received and engaged with.

Share your content

As you have conducted research using your subreddits, you will create relevant content but sharing it on Reddit also needs to be relevant. As you are engaging with your audience and building trust, then you can begin adding links and posting yourself.

Reddit statistics show that posts with questions receive more comments and posts without questions receive more upvotes. Additionally, posts usually get more engagement when posting the entire content rather than just a link. 

There are many ways to optimise a post by adding tags such as [Article] so that users know what kind of post they are reading. Creating powerful titles to attract attention and providing unrivalled value. Engagement is another factor that can lead to links being transformed from no-follow to do-follow links. 

Video Posts

In addition to well-optimised posts, video posts have shown to perform much better than text posts. Resulting in the best external links that receive the highest upvotes. 

Therefore, repurposing content can be an excellent SEO tool to use on Reddit. With the potential to increase traffic and for building do-follow backlinks.

Avoid Repetition

Reddit only allows 10% of your submission to be from the same source. Not only is it important to continue to engage without submitting links, but it is also important to share content from other sources to keep your posts diverse.

In addition, posting the same comment or content on multiple subreddits will not be well received. Often users may be part of various subreddits in the same topic and seeing the same content will be received as self-promotion. This can result in lots of downvotes and poor engagement which negatively impacts your Karma. 

Actively Use Reddit for SEO now

Reddit does appear to be a complicated social network that can take a lot of work. However, when used effectively by applying these 8 tips, Reddit fit an excellent and lasting tool for SEO.