Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Reddit SEO. There's plenty of people in the SEO community looking to use Reddit as part of their marketing strategy. And there's no one better to have on than David Quaid when it comes to actually trying to get rankings in Reddit and obviously a lot of interaction and engagement on Reddit. So David, let's jump straight in. I'm going to throw you in the deep end. And how should people be looking to do Reddit SEO?

David Quaid: Great question. So, I think, I think first of all, people need to take a step back and go into Reddit and go in on a hobby and, and learn it from that point of view. If you're going to go in from a marketing point of view, you're going to fail. You're going to have a horrible experience. You're going to get kicked out and you're going to hate Reddit for the rest of your life. I've seen so many people get Reddit wrong. Um, especially in marketing, more getting it more wrong than right. And Reddit is on a, a consistent hunt for spam. So all of Reddit's systems... So think of Reddit as a federal country, right? So think of the United Kingdom, you've got England, Scotland, Wales, but you also have Yorkshire, London, Manchester, Birmingham. All of these communities are, are in it for their community. And any outsider who comes in just is, is wearing a, a target on their back, right? So I've heard CEOs say, "Look, I went into Reddit to help people find my product and to help solve their problems." That, that is a... That's a non-runner statement. You can convince yourself of that all day. That ain't happening. And Reddit is merciless. Once you've got an account banned on your IP address, good luck coming back again on a different, on the same IP address. Forget about it. It's not going to work out. You really, really have to pay it forward. And you really have to know how Reddit works. And if you're going to do Reddit for SEO, you have to understand the community that you're trying to do it in. And you have to know that what you're doing has to help the Reddit community lots, lots more than you. Now, if you can see gaps in Reddit and you can help that community grow its conversation base and its user base, you'll absolutely fly through. And it's the same as any other website, right? The same things apply, rules apply to Reddit as everyone else. The first thing to check is, does Reddit already rank for this, right? So, if Reddit's already ranking for best SEOs or best GEO tactics, you're not really going to stand a good chance of ranking for that. So, you've got to do your keyword research. If you have a SERP tool, you probably want to, uh, set up a SERP report for Reddit for your SERP tool and see, is it already ranking? And then you can find the gaps, right? Or you use the public, uh, SERP database that Ahrefs and Semrush all publish and look where Reddit isn't ranking and find those gaps and then target the communities you want to. But you have to make sure that the mods and the community are not going to flag that post. Right? So, you've got to build up a reputation. You've got to do such a good job. It's a bit like how Google's clamping down on PBNs and farms. You have to do such a good job at building a link farm that you almost have to be a good CNN, right? You have to be a useful, valid site that they want to send traffic to. And that's not an instantaneous process. I know a lot of people are, um, in awe of these bot farms that are being set up on Reddit where they warm up these accounts and these accounts start posting. Any moderator worth their salt can see those bots. They can start to see telltale signs in how they're commenting on things. They use words like, "Frame," "I'm curious," "What does the community think?" It, it's so repetitive. It gets, it gets boring. So, I think these bot farms are, are, are slowly being brought down by Reddit. So, I think if you're going to do it, you're going to have to do it by hand and you're going to actually have to invest time and do it enthusiastically. Um, coming in and recommending your product... It's not like LinkedIn or X, where on X you can post what you want and if people are interested they'll start following you. You can't just go to Reddit and post what you want. Uh, communities are, you know... Think about, um, those little human forts the Celts built before the Romans arrived in England, and anyone who looked different, had more technology than them, they, they barricaded themselves against that. And, and that's really how Reddit communities, um, operate, I think.

James Dooley: Do you feel that knowing that majority of SEOs want the desired outcome? They want the click back to their website and that's the main reason of doing it. And I get you saying you need to build up, like, your karma or you need to build up, like, your profile and stuff like that. Do you think it's worth investing in? If you, if you didn't have a Reddit account at present and you was a local plumber or a local electrician, do you think it is worth spending the time and the effort on Reddit to build that rapport up to provide value in hope that sometime people might then say, "Where can I get hold of you from?" or something like that?

David Quaid: It really depends. You know, it, it, it depends on how much of your audience is reachable, right? Um, for example, if you're, if you're a plumber and a lot of your mates are in the same town, right? So, you're in Manchester and Manchester is somewhere you can, you can, you can service most of the town, right? It's not, it's not somewhere like in New York where if you're in New Jersey close to New York, the Bronx is out of your way, right? Or the far end of Queens is out of your way. But if you, if you and your mates have businesses and that's something that you really care about and you're going to be spending your spare time in that community anyway, then it makes sense. If you're just doing it purely to get links, I'd say it's not really worth it at all.

James Dooley: Well, what I'll give you an example here, right? Yeah. There was, there was a roofing contractor in Manchester. This is, this wasn't actually us, but was a roofing contractor in Manchester and he had provided quite a lot of value, um, within the Reddit community. Now I think it was last month or the month before, so many accounts got banned because of these bot kind of farms and stuff like that and everyone seemed to be spamming it just because Reddit has been ranking so well and getting so much kind of clicks from Google and, and people going to Reddit directly. And this guy, someone asked a question about, "Does anyone know the price of this type of roof?" And after, after doing... This is what... I've not seen it, by the way, his profile, but this is what he told me after seeing it. He basically said, um, "Fill in a form on this website and then I'll let you know the price. I can't give you a price without knowing." And yes, he put a link through to his website, but it was one of them where he was saying he, he was trying to give some value of saying, "I, you can't just give a price. There's lots of different factors. What type of tiles you want, what the existing joists are, is there going to be a valley, is there going to be hips?" Like, there's all these different parameters that change the price. But he said, "Fill in a form on this website and then I'll let you know the exact price." And then his account got completely banned. Like, what... How could you answer something like that to build up, like, for Reddit SEO, to build up your karma, build up your strength? Can you ever put a link in there? Like, how, how do you answer something like that?

David Quaid: It, it's very difficult. It's very awkward. You... So that's the problem with each community. Each, each community is different. There are some communities, for example, um, finance and stocks where links are very acceptable because people are constantly, uh, posting research material or graphs or need people to look out. And so you can't look at Reddit as a whole, right? Because every mod is, is, is different. Some mods might be CEOs. Some mods might be labour leaders, right? They might be in, in, in, in a union, right? And so the, the conduct and the type of conversation is going to be different. A CEO might be very open towards people doing business, whereas someone in, in a union may not, right? And so that's why you have to know the community. And so if, if, if five people start reporting your content as spam, you, you, you might end up in trouble. And you can't know everybody in the sub. So in that particular instance, I can see that happening because he put a link to a form. It doesn't matter about what you've done before. It really doesn't. Unless the moderators know you on a one-to-one basis and they can just suspend the, the post and send you a modmail, it's never worth the risk. I think you have to... So, for example, you could have the name of your business in your profile, right? And then say, "Look, the question you asked is very, very complicated. Here's how I... Here, here's the data I would use and here's how... Here's a formula I would use to calculate the cost." And say, "Look, this is very rough, but if you have three joists and if the pitch is this and if you're using tiles that are this size, here's your... Here's how I would work out your square footage." Or you can ask an LLM to do it. If the person can't figure out that you do quotes for a living and go to your profile where they'll probably see a link, then they're probably not smart enough to be a client, right? They probably don't earn, right? And you have to sort of go with that. You also have to trust that they'll probably just send you a direct message and then you can do what you like in the direct message. Um, but yeah, putting a link to your own website, it... The problem you might have is there might be competitors in that sub who don't know who you are and now you've put in Tommy's roofing.co.uk and now they know who you are and now they want to ban you, right? That's, you have to watch about. That's why, that's what makes Reddit complicated. It's not necessarily the mods or this or Reddit. It could be just you, you know, someone else. You, you came to Reddit to talk about where to watch footie on a Saturday and then suddenly maybe it's an upset customer or a competitor who, you know, they're going neck to neck with you and they want you out, you know? That's what makes Reddit so complicated and difficult.

James Dooley: And then what about subreddits? So, if you was to create a subreddit, do you then have mods in there, like other Reddit mods in there, or do you own that subreddit and then you can decide on how things work?

David Quaid: Yeah, that's a great question. So, Reddit is like the, the UK Parliament, right? And it creates the, the rules and the international trade for the UK. And then you have devolution of power. So, like Wales and Scotland have their own parliaments. London almost acts like its own country sometimes. So once you build a subreddit, it's yours. And Reddit rarely gets involved unless you're accepting money, right? And this is where a lot of agencies go wrong, where a lot of companies go wrong. If they're accepting content because of business, they'll lose that subreddit very quickly. However, if you avoid that and if you own the sub, Reddit will almost never interfere with you. It's your sub. It's your rules. You can make up the rules on the go, whatever you want. You now have the challenge of attracting a community. And so it's, it, it's... It takes a lot to build a subreddit. There's hundreds and hundreds of empty subreddits and there's hundreds and hundreds of SEO and GEO and AEO subreddits that can't attract that, um, quality of people. And so you... There you really have to take a step back from your own marketing and your own business because now you have to attract potentially competitors and people giving, putting in messaging that you don't like. And you have to start creating rules and you have to also start creating spam filters. Once a subreddit starts to fill up with spam, it might look active, but people aren't going to want to be in there. So, keeping bots out, um, controlling that, that's a next level. I, I, I would say don't even think about that until you've at least been able to establish some sort of business or find clients through normal activity. Uh, building a subreddit is, is big work.

James Dooley: I want, I want to... I want to change the thing. I want to still want to talk about subreddits, but I want to go a little bit grey hat. Right. Okay. Right. So, we've got... You create a subreddit and then you specifically, even though you've not got really anybody from Reddit signing up to it and looking at it, but you start to run some, whether it's tier-two backlinks or viral traffic, and then the subreddit, like the post that you have, starts ranking within Google and it's manipulating the LLMs and it's getting traffic or it's feeding Gemini and AI Mode because it's ranking in the discussions factor. Does then it get taken down with regards to subreddits or does... Are Reddit kind of cool with that? So you've not got any... Or is it, do you struggle to rank those subreddits if it's not got any activity within Reddit, within Google?

David Quaid: Really good questions. I'm going to put my grey hat on, right, which I don't wear very much, but I'll put my grey hat on and answer this hypothetically. Um, while Google will show the number of members in a Reddit or how many votes, um, a particular answer got upvoted, um, we, we... The term for this is, um... Forget the exact name of the term, but surface data. Google calls this surface data. So it will show you that this got 70 votes and this got 30 votes or this is 5,000 members or this is a thousand members. But Google doesn't care about that. I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that Google interrogates the sub and they show subs that are more popular. Definitely not the case. Like any other website, only one page per domain can really rank for a topic and then everything else suffers. Um, although Reddit probably suffers less from cannibalisation than your average domain. But you, you're right. You could absolutely set up a blank sub with no members and then you can start, because it's your own, uh, forum, you could absolutely start posting your own content. What you have to watch for is if other senior moderators happen to come across it. So if it's, if it's not looking very active, they will put it in a deactive list and they do hunt out SEO and E3. So you, you have to make a little bit of an effort to make it look like it's an active sub, right? But yes, in those cases, if you, if you know what you're doing and you know how to grab the links and find the links that are free or influence the links, you could absolutely do that. You don't have to worry about building a whole community. Um, there are some communities that are very, very small, maybe only a couple hundred members that only 10 a day are active. Again, as you make... As long as you make it look like a legitimate one, you know, customised icon and you accept all the Reddit rules and you log in, um, you probably could go under the radar for quite a while. But once your account is suspended, that's it. And, and your sub... Your sub will disappear then. So you may need to have other mods to make sure that the sub, sub has survivability, right, in case of succession.

James Dooley: Can you do that? Can you, once you've created a subreddit, can you then have different moderators for that subreddit? How... What's the maximum amount of moderators in a subreddit of what you can have?

David Quaid: I don't think there is a max. I've seen subs with, like, 14. You absolutely do want to have other moderators, uh, in case anything happens to your account because if you're the only moderator, the account will go down with you. Or if the account is quite active, it'll become moderatorless and then anyone can apply to take it over. So, you have to watch for that. Also, if there's a lot of spam in your sub, another moderator can apply to have it taken over. So, if you've got someone who's... Let's just say you're doing, um, stock trading, um, and another broker notices that all the content is just from your blog, they could make an appeal to the... There's a specific mod subreddit, uh, called Requests where people can say, "Look, this sub is just purely, um, spam. I'll take it over." Um, so you have to watch for that. As long as your sub looks like an above-board honest... You're safe. That... You need to watch for that. So, if you're just going to post your own blog post, look out for that.

James Dooley: Yeah, it was more... I think one or two people, what they was doing, and it still seems to be live at present, is they was doing, like... I think you spoke about it on The Edward Show once or twice, where you've got your domain and then you go and build a supplementary domain for your brand plus reviews, right? And you're putting all reviews on there and all the best reviews that come from Trustpilot and, uh, G2 or Capterra or, or Yelp or whatever. You go and then start putting on these supplementary, um, domains. One or two of them was doing it where they was creating a subreddit for the brand plus reviews or brand plus case studies and all that they was doing was doing that. And then it started to then pop in. I don't know how they was getting it to show for the brand plus thing. Started to pop in on, on Google rankings for brand reviews and the, and the subreddit started to show up. And they just had review, review, review on the subreddit. And I'm like, surely that's going to get deleted. But it's been there for a long time now and it still seems to be working.

David Quaid: I mean, Reddit is vast. People that are on Reddit are very busy people. So, unless it comes up in their daily lives... But there's another way to do Reddit that, that's worth discussing in, in Reddit SEO, right? So, a lot of people quip often that, um, people search Google with Reddit and that they want to know... They want Google to return results from Reddit because they, they trust Reddit or prefer Reddit. I don't think that's quite true in all cases. I think sometimes people do that because the Reddit search system sucks, right? Like the X search system sucks. And so if you want to find something, you often just go and, because we're SEOs, we'll know how to put `site:reddit.com`, right? And not a lot of people know how to do that. You... Not a lot of people are trying to compete for Reddit content. So, um, what I do is, a lot of, lot of my projects is we build Reddit resource pages so that we can start... Because we're not... Not because we want to target Reddit, but we want to see what our ICP is searching for. So we want to start understanding what's their customer journey. What do beginners think? How do people start to think? And so we create these pages so that we can capture search volume because if you go to, um, Semrush or Ad Planner and put in something plus Reddit, you'll get a very narrow field of keywords because nobody wants to buy that traffic, right? So it's not a lot of information. But let's say you are a plumber or a bookie site and you put something about, um, betting and sportsbooks and things like that with Reddit in the page title. I guarantee within a week you'll see queries you've never thought of. And these are all coming into your Search Console that you now have as a, as a database. And you can now start to sort of picture, this is how people at the start are. This is where people in the middle are. This is the bottom-of-the-funnel search phase that you can do completely on your own. Um, which is a fantastic way of, of, um, one, understanding who's on Reddit and why and what they're looking for, and then how you need to position your content for that. Um, Reddit normally will steal most of the top positions, but the minute another domain offers itself, just because how Google's built, it tries not to return results unless you're using the `site:` operator, and most people don't do that. So, you can actually take that vector in as, as a much safer way of getting into Reddit marketing.

James Dooley: Yeah. Do you know what I love? I, I seen, I seen you talking about that and I thought it was a great episode. And very randomly, um, I added my YouTube channel, uh, into Google Search Console, um, which I think it was, like, maybe a month ago or something like that. And I could not believe the search volume and different queries that came up exactly for what you're on about for query and then Reddit, and the appended Reddit at the end. And it was... I'd never seen it in my Google Search Console for my websites, but I'd never really done anything targeting Reddit. But for some reason my YouTube channel, because I've mentioned Reddit quite a lot in the transcripts, the amount of times that plus Reddit was coming back. And I couldn't believe the search volumes of stuff where there was appending Reddit to the end. It was like, wowzers.

David Quaid: It is. It's absolute gold mine. Yeah, for sure. There's so much money there. Um, for sure. 100%. If you're in, if you're an affiliate, B2B, if you're in tech, cloud, cybersecurity, I think talking to an, an ad rep at, at Reddit, something like 37% of Americans under the age of 35 are on Reddit, don't have a LinkedIn account.

James Dooley: Yeah, it's the only way to... It's the only way to talk to these people. Is there any little tips and tricks then with regards to Reddit SEO that you see people not doing that you think they should have? Like, maybe even just little things like having a link in the bio or in the, in the profile and stuff like that. Maybe if they're setting up a new account, should they put any keywords in the Reddit name or anything? Like, what little tips and tricks have you seen over the years that has worked well for Reddit SEO?

David Quaid: I think if you are a business and you're giving lots of advice about, um, investing, retirement, house buying, that in your profile you should be findable. Don't go overboard. Don't turn it into a Linktree, right? But make sure you're findable. Um, make sure that you're paying it forward. So, you're giving top advice to people and you're not sort of, like, saying, "DM me, DM me." You know, a lot of, a lot more subs are adding DM blocks, right? Because otherwise, everyone just turns up with a, "DM me, DM me, DM me," right? And I think then with regards to ranking in Google, treat it like you would content on any of your other pages. You need to link to it. You need to grow it. You need to nurture it. Um, don't assume it's automatically going to rise to the top. Not a lot of parasite SEOs will tell you that, right? And then also, I think something I've never seen anyone talk about, create a SERP report with Reddit as the domain instead of just for your own domain. You, when you, when you buy most of these SERP tools, you get, like, four domains. Most people only have one or two anyway. So, set up a new SERP report and put in your primary keywords and see where Reddit's ranking and what the opportunities are. That will help in, in an hour. That'll give you a list of, of what potentially you could rank in Reddit for.

James Dooley: Would you, would you ever create... Just back on the subject of a subreddit or whether you'd use a subreddit or go into an existing already powerful kind of subreddit that's there. You do that... People are... You do great work with People Also Ask. So the long-tail questions that people are asking. Do you ever leverage Reddit for the People Also Ask questions and then answering it? And if so, how do you use that strategy?

David Quaid: Um, I do. I, I use it also a lot for, for videos. There's a lot of video-sharing subreddits. And so, um, Google obviously prefer... Google obviously has a lot of, um, demand for inventory for mobile users, right? So videos and things like that. Typically, when you post a video in, in YouTube, you only get one title. But re-sharing it on Reddit allows you to publish it with different titles and they can actually rank in Google. And they can rank in Google much faster and you could get into Google results in, in, in minutes. For those, you need to use an existing sub because those subreddits are getting crawled more frequently and they're assigned their own Googlebots, and that's what makes them fresh. Um, the type of marketing I do and people I know that do well on Reddit is really consulting and, and, and expertise and, and building relationships. And so by answering questions really well, um, in actual communities, you actually get the highest value in terms of, of response where somebody will say, like, "Oh, I think I know who this guy is," or, "I can see on their website they've got a link to their site," and they can... They'll come in through that way. And I think that is the very, very top and that's where I, I've seen it used well the most. Um, and then to a second degree where you're using it as a link factory, um, again, a little bit harder, easier to get caught. But if there... I think it doesn't matter as much to go and build your own sort of, like, subreddit.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's watching this, let us know if you think we've missed anything off with regards to Reddit SEO. Make sure you also check out David G. Quaid. Go and give him a nice Google search, see his knowledge panel, see everything that he's talking about in real time. And make sure you check out the links in the description. We've got plenty of other episodes where we're talking about building topical authority and SEO versus AEO and GEO. Edward, uh, Edward... David, it's been an absolute pleasure and thanks for having you.

David Quaid: Thanks, James. Cheers.