Reddit For SEO: How to Start Promoting through Reddit?

Every American knows that Reddit is the #1 forum. On it, people share everything, from recommendations for choosing an ointment for blisters, to their opinions on who will win the election.

Along with this, Reddit is a great tool for SEO promotion. We will talk about what SEO Reddit is.

Reddit: Facts and Statistics

Reddit is the fifth most popular website in the USA and the thirteenth most popular in the world. This data was taken from Wikipedia and is dated July 2019.

Two years ago in 2018, the number of Reddit users surpassed 330 million. At the same time, the number of active communities was approaching one-hundred-fifty thousand.

Since its founding, the format of Reddit publications has changed slightly. The posts and comments written by users who earned good karma began to be appreciated because they did not spam, they created relevant content, maintained activity, etc. 

All of these factors indicate the same things that Reddit can and should be used to promote third-party web resources. However, to maximize the benefits of your actions, it is important to understand who uses Reddit.

So, the vast majority of active users on the forum are people in the 20-30 year age range. The main objectives of their visit are:

• Finding the solution to a problem (the ointment for blisters).
• The desire to discuss or simply to become a passive participant in a discussion about breaking news topics.
• Looking for entertaining content (memes, gifs, etc.) just for fun.

What can be said, even the top YouTuber PewDiePie could not stay away from Reddit’s memes. He devoted an entire section of his blog to discuss them:

But you have to understand that Reddit, like similar sites, such as Quora and Tumblr, does not like explicit advertising. Thus, your intentions should be as transparent as possible for forum users. They will only vote for you if you give them valuable content.

Reddit is a Web Platform with the Mass of Diverse Content

As you know, you can find anything on Reddit. There are funny memes, lengthy discussions about the situation in Syria, and talk about news concerning the discovery of a coronavirus vaccine.

Members of the Reddit forum also love to share their experience of purchasing products/services from certain brands with each other. There is more about this below.

Reddit is the Self-proclaimed Ambassador of Famous Brands Like IKEA, AMD, Nintendo, etc.

Since the beginning of its existence, Reddit has served as a platform where people can recommend something to others. 

So, at some point, these well-known brands were able to gain a good reputation (partly, thanks to Reddit):

• IKEA (Reddit’s followers loved this brand for its non-standard advertising campaigns and its artsy furniture).
• AMD (in fact, Reddit users just decided to win the fair popularity for this brand against giants such as Nvidia and Intel).
• Nintendo (if we recall the average age of a Reddit user, this is not surprising).

On the other hand, the Reddit forums have managed to damage the reputation of Nestle, Louis Vuitton, and Disney. These brands have been exposed to being bad to:

• Their employees (this is about Disney only paying many of its employees minimum wages).
• Buyers (Nestle, as well as many other global corporations, often sacrifices the quality of their products and earns just from the big brand name)
• The environment (fashion house Louis Vuitton simply burns their unsold collections at the end of the season).

Reddit

This leads to the logical inference, that the right publications on Reddit help create a good image for a brand and expands its target audience.

However, in this article, we will discuss methods of promotion via posting on Reddit that are much more fast-acting.

Features of the Moderation of Posts on Reddit

Reddit has an extremely transparent list of policies for inappropriate posts and comments that are marked as spam and automatically deleted. Here are some examples of spam:

• The publication of identical comments in the same thread.
• Repeatedly posting things unrelated to the topic of the thread.
• Posting overt advertisements and comments with links.
• Making posts with malicious links.

In general, it seems unclear what is considered spam in the context of Reddit. Now, let’s talk about how Reddit posts work to promote sites in Google search results.

How Does Google Rank Pages on Reddit?

How to build local SEO Reddit

As you may know, user resources, like Reddit, often use the nofollow tag. This is what signals Google’s search robots that the specified link does not have a reference weight, in other words, you cannot click on it. This attribute appeared in 2005 as a means to fight spam that is created by external links.

Using the nofollow tag allows you to reach the necessary indicators for site ranking. After all, it is thanks to these publications that Reddit manages to maintain its optimal position in SERP.

As for the UGC (user-generated content) tags, they are added after the nofollow tags and are the qualifying attributes that help Google decide if this kind of content (that is within the tags) should be considered for the ranking. Along with UGC, there is also the Sponsored attribute, which also serves as a hint for robots as to whether or not the link should be considered when making the queue for search results.

Thus, Reddit helps to attract new streams of targeted (including user localization) traffic to a promoted web resource. At the same time, the value of this web platform for search robots is preserved by prohibiting clickability of links. Because if the user is interested in the site that you are posting on Reddit, they will simply copy the link and search it.

Reddit Is a Great Tool for Getting Quality Backlinks

Thus, Google search robots treat the text publications on Reddit just like other text-based web content. This means you can safely use the right keywords in your post and provide the backlinks to the site you are promoting.

This enhances the site’s position in search results and helps you attract even more of your target audience.

Reddit Gold for Distinguished Users

What is Reddit Gold?

For your Reddit profile to earn a good reputation quickly, you will need this gold. It is an intra-forum currency that expands the functionality of a regular user with useful features, like viewing the users who have influenced your karma, sorting comment by as read/unread, disabling ads, etc.

Also, with its help, you can thank other users and they can thank you, i.e for a good recommendation. In that case, the answer to the question “What does gilded mean on Reddit?” is logical. This is a comment that other users have thanked you for. You can learn more about gilded Reddit here.

There is nothing so peculiar with Reddit Gold without what your account will not be able to reach the desired level of karma. But it is the most gilded posts on Reddit that will help you acquire the features that facilitate your self-promotion on this vast forum.

Reddit in the Focus of SEO-Professionals: Is it Possible to Upgrade a Site Here?

Considering all of the above, Reddit is an excellent tool for generating traffic and attracting a target audience to a website.

So, if you manage to publish something truly valuable for Reddit readers, they are more likely to click on the posted link and visit your site. This way, you will get high-quality backlinks that will increase your website’s rating in the search results.

Benefits of Promoting with Reddit

So, let’s summarize the main advantages of promoting sites with Reddit:

• Attracting the target audience (Google’s search engine, like Reddit, focuses on keywords).
• Improving Google ratings with backlinks (needless to say, only if they are in posts with relevant context).
• Quick results (usually, an influx of traffic can be noticed within days of making posts with backlinks).

The Disadvantages of Promoting with Reddit

There are, of course, downsides to such methods, among which are:

• Problems with choosing a suitable community for writing posts/news/comments (if the subject is too popular, your post might get lost amongst the others).
• Focuses mainly on promotion in the US (this platform is less popular in other countries).
• It requires quite a lot of work (you cannot definitely know which post in which community will blow up because there might be a lot posted on-topic).

How to Start Promoting through Reddit?

And now it is time to find out how to properly create posts to promote through Reddit. Below you can find a step-by-step guide on how to use Reddit for SEO.

Step-by-step Guide for Creating Posts on Reddit

To begin your SEO with Reddit, just follow these four steps.

Find a Unique Reddit Community on an Appropriate Subject

The first thing you have to do is find a subreddit (thread or community) that is relevant to the site you are promoting, it might not exist on Reddit and then, perhaps, this platform is not for you. Since even if you decide to create a new subreddit on the desired topic, the chances of it becoming popular are very slim (unless you were the first to know about a touching rescue of some red panda that was in trouble and you do want to immediately share this with the forum users).

However, it is most likely that there will be several threads on your topic. Go through all of them and choose one (or those) that has the most recently commented on.

Whenever possible, do not focus on one thread, it would be better if you plan your posts for more than one that contain keywords that suit your theme.

How to find as many branches as possible?

How to search on Reddit for the branches that are necessary for promotion?

Before creating the posts for the subreddits you have found, you need to remember who your target audience is and what topics they are interested in.

You may be able to indirectly insert the link to your site. That is, for example, you have a pizza delivery service, you should be posting not only in the “Where is the tastiest pizza in NY sold?” thread, but also in other threads like “Recipes for delicious pizza” (you can write some recipe down, but at the end note that it is better to leave it to the professionals and link your delivery service), or “Italian Cuisine Recipes.” This is how at this stage you can significantly expand the list of threads.

In particular, when searching for potentially suitable subreddits for publishing, it is important to look at threads with these keywords or phrases; “Help me find…”, “Advise me ”, “Tell me, has anyone had this problem…”, etc. As practice shows, these are the most active among the rest.

Make a few quality posts, comments, news or GIFS off-topic in other communities

You will need these publications to gain credibility for your account. After all, if you just start posting with hidden ads, it is likely that they will be declared spam and deleted.

Do not bother with the subject of these threads on which you planned your posts and comments for your karma. The main thing is to make them sufficiently informative and meaningful enough as you need to get positive ratings from other users, right? 

Therefore, you can easily answer a mother’s question “At how many months did you begin feeding?”, with something like “My baby is 4 years old and I still feed him breast milk” and it does no harm. This is what an account warm-up looks like as part of the Reddit content marketing strategy described in the article.

Wait for a certain time to warm-up your account

Wait until your profile earns good karma from previous posts.

Your posts that contain backlinks must not get marked as spam. And only once you earn a good rating according to other users, you can start publishing hidden advertising in the subreddits you selected in the first step.

Start posting informative posts/comments with the backlinks to the site (or blog) in the communities you found in the first step

The first thing to do at this step is to determine which keywords the target audience is searching for when they find your site (and sites similar to yours). It is advisable to use at least one or two keywords in every post or comment. Although, of course, this is dependent on the length of the finished text.

You should not spam with the keywords, users immediately notice that something is wrong and minus your post/comment. It is also important to make sure to input these key phrases fluently so it does not resemble something like this: “I recommend you buy redfish in Voronezh in the “Ikorka” chain stores.”

Additionally, experienced SEO-professionals recommend following the Reddit user’s etiquette rules to join the guest community as soon as possible. Partly, this means that you should not get hung up on publishing your advertising posts with links, but you also need to interact with other participants in the thread, responding to comments, incite debate, and help with advice.

And this kind of content should not contain backlinks, it is enough to just use key phrases.

You also have the option of trying to create your own branch by sending a request to Redditor. If moderators find your request interesting for an audience, you can become the founder of a new topic. It can be strategically flipped in a way that would prove to be beneficial for your business.

Promoting on Reddit Using Multimedia

Here is another, nearly foolproof promotional tactic on Reddit.

As you know, Reddit has been posting with multimedia content (videos and GIFs)  for several years. And it pays odd because Redditors manage to amass more than one billion views of unique videos per month. So, why would you not use this kind of content format to your advantage?

Reddit indeed has one rule, to post a video, you must already have at least 10 published links and 10 comments.

Note that some SEO-professionals are rather skeptical about using a multimedia promotion, as the story about your brand in the video can be regarded as conventional spam. Therefore, it makes sense to choose a more sophisticated path for promoting your brand. For example, offering your viewers a solution to some kind of problem. And as a solution, you can easily mention the promoted site’s address.

The main thing is to not limit yourself to posting advertisements. And save some space in your SEO-activities for cute cat videos.

Paid Advertising on Reddit

And, finally, a few words about paid Reddit advertising. This is another option that you can use to promote your online business.

So, on the platform, there are two ways you can promote for free:

• Creating Reddit Promoted Posts in subreddits.
• Using banners.

The second option is only offered to large businesses, and not available through an advertising tool for the average user. Therefore, only the first option can be applied by those with a regular account.

For this, you just need to create a Reddit advertising account, in addition to the main one (guidance), and customize an advertising campaign. Reddit advertising costs are currently $0.75 per thousand displays (it is important to remember that this forum works on a postpaid basis).

Even if a post is promoted using the paid Reddit tool, this does not mean that you can neglect the other forum visitors and what they expect from you. Therefore, carefully read the guide above that analyzes the audience’s reaction to other promoted posts (preferably in your business niche), and only then do we pursue a paid promotion. 

Well, people have always been enthusiastic about accepting anything capable of generating controversy, ambiguous opinions, and a so-called public response. Thus, it makes sense to look for a marketer who creates high-quality, hype content that will help you write content like “this bleach helped me remove blood stains from my shirt, and now I appear clean before the police” rather than just a post about “how good this bleach is”.

As for customizing the advertising campaign, you will be offered choices for settings, such as:

• Geo-targeting
• Targeting by device
• Targeting by subreddit
• Targeting by interest

Additionally, you can specify the budget for the advertising campaign (the minimum being $0.50 and the maximum – $100), and you can also disable or allow comments (the first option can sometimes be useful, for instance, when something controversial is being advertised).

Now let’s talk about how long the posts are verified. It usually takes no more than 24 hours to moderate new advertising posts. If a publication is refused, you will receive a letter of explanation in your inbox. For the future, you will simply correct the post according to the forum’s requirements.

It is important to understand that the tool ads.reddit is not available in all countries. So, if you decide to promote your posts through Reddit’s paid advertising, just use a VPN.

As you could understand, Reddit is a non-trivial, but extremely effective tool for website promotion. By posting backlinks on a relevant post on Reddit, you create all of the conditions to attract a targeted English-speaking audience. e-commerce

Have you used Reddit in your SEO practice? In your case, is Reddit good for SEO? Share your experience in the comments below.