Many businesses benefit from making their brand as ubiquitous as possible, and Reddit SEO has served as an excellent tool for motivated businesses willing to participate in conversations while minding the rules of the platform and community.
Like other social platforms, Reddit is a place where businesses and brands can advertise and have a voice, but it’s also a much different environment than most other popular social platforms. As such, there are a handful of significant caveats that, if not minded, can turn users and associated brands into a joke or even plunge them into obscurity.
But, when executed correctly, a brand can exist as a valuable resource while extending its capacity to connect with people, thus providing a slew of benefits.
Here, we’re going to discuss viable strategies for Reddit branding, such as Reddit cross posting, and cover the bases for avoiding costly mistakes when using the platform as a brand.
Follow the Golden Rule: Be a Human on Reddit Above All Else
As previously hinted, non-Reddit-savvy brands have historically performed poorly on Reddit because they approach it like most other social platforms.
This is exactly what drove an account owned by the game publisher EA into the dust after it posted a comment to a thread in r/StarWarsBattlefront in response to a user’s frustration over the layers of microtransactions baked into the Star Wars Battlefront II, preventing them from playing as Darth Vader.
Here is the record-breaking comment in all its glory. | Source: Reddit
If you’re not a Redditor, it may not seem like something so wrong as to earn a Guinness World Record in 2020 for being the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.
As we can see in the Reddit post (and in the rest of the comment history for the short-lived EACommunityTeam Reddit user), they attempted to use the account to justify their actions, which completely misaligns with the general sentiment toward their microtransaction-heavy pricing strategy.
Social media, in general, isn’t a great place to save face unless coupled with an affirmation of a collective sentiment expressed in a thread. However, this is an extreme case, as most businesses see little benefit (or worse) because they attempt to use a common tactic that’s never worked on the platform.
The number one problem businesses have on Reddit is attempting to work their business into every conversation, as this tells users, mods, and the platform that you’re not as interested in participating in discussions as much as you are telling others about your brand at every opportunity.
When a brand does this, it gains no benefit from Reddit SEO or Reddit branding and risks becoming a mocked topic.
Fortunately, most brands don’t have the problem of being widely despised by their customers, like EA, who have been at the center of conversations on anti-consumer practices for over a decade alongside other notable developers. Instead, most brands reap little benefit from Reddit from being overzealous make other, easily avoided mistakes.
Instead of swinging for fences, brands need to approach Reddit like golf – here, technique and grace are crucial to making par (or better) on the course.
Understanding Your Audience: Finding the Right Subreddits
If you or a trusted brand representative can commit to appropriate Reddiquette (“Reddit etiquette”) and authentically participate in conversations, create an account right now and look around for personally interesting subreddits where you can add value, insight, or simply entertainment.
Spend time, ideally months, simply talking to people and responding to others as a person would – do this not just to build karma but to establish a trail of posts and comments that demonstrate there’s a person behind the account as you demonstrate expertise.
Follow the diagram above during this time and keep the execution portion of your Reddit effort on the backburner – spend time learning and enjoying the platform first and foremost as you get a feel for Reddit’s unique (often clever) user interaction dynamics. | Source: Curtis Adams on Pexels
While you do, identify niche communities relevant to your brand. As you spend time on the platform, you’ll often encounter active, relevant subreddits you had no idea existed – keep an eye on these groups and begin sharing your thoughts without dropping links or mentioning your brand.
Read the room as you engage in discussion – in addition to referencing community rules, note how users respond to other business mentions. Pay extra close attention when a user represents (or is suspected of) a brand to see how the community engages with the account.
When you do begin to share things, do so subtly and avoid sharing anything sales-y or BoF (Bottom of Funnel), as your main goal should be providing value to conversations above all else.
Reddit SEO: Optimizing Content for Discoverability & The Power of Cross-Posting
Assuming you’ve established a trustworthy account, you’ll have better odds leveraging visibility-boosting strategies, like Reddit cross posting or simply sharing branded content, without the community ripping you to pieces and turning your visual assets into degrading memes.
Let’s look at a few techniques available to brands who are well-trained to the ways of Reddit.
1. Make your own subreddit for occasional business posts and to engage with users
An excellent way to get links on the platform is to create a subreddit you moderate. A couple of great examples of brands that effectively use Reddit are Mint Mobile and Adobe – each has a respectable number of members, several moderators, and most importantly, both pages look a lot like an active support forum.
This is because these spaces will predominantly serve a customer service function – you’ll attract fans, sure, but it will mostly be a place where people complain or vent. The nice part is that when a user is wrong or unfair, communities will often either ignore or police the responsible account, usually removing an obligation to feed the trolls.
Alongside the benefits that come with Reddit SEO, this opens doors to learning about problems and improving your product or service. It also provides guidance for your content strategies in producing marketing collateral, technical resources, or even simple FAQs.
Mods don’t necessarily need to build reputation like accounts that intend to participate in discussions outside your subreddit. However, it can help, so long as they abide by the same rules we’ve covered thus far in this blog.
Though Reddit ads can be effective at conversion for some products and services, most SEO juice here will be from traffic to links containing valuable resources on (ideally) your site or app.
2. Find well-optimized threads using Google to identify relevant places to participate in discussions
There’s a reasonable belief that if there’s useful information to be found on the web, like a working solution to a common problem, it will be on Reddit.
Unfortunately, despite many companies’ efforts to be the ultimate resource for information on their product, Reddit almost always does a better job. For a decisive and somewhat scathing example, look no further than the Microsoft Community (formerly Microsoft Answers), where most support isn’t provided by an actual community but rather by a highly criticized outsourcing process.
Google searches for your brand or problems your products or services solve will often produce results from Reddit, even without appending it to the query. These pages rank highly because they get significant traffic from users, even those without accounts.
If your brand is an online eyewear retailer, running a search like the one above would be a good way to find out what kind of Reddit results make it to Google. While most will be too stale to participate in the conversation effectively, they point to potentially useful communities where you can provide value.
Often, Reddit results in a search query will be too old to jump in and join the discussion, but you should at least join these communities and keep an eye open for opportunities.
As we’ve discussed, don’t go in for the kill by trying to peddle your wares; instead, seize the opportunity for a bit of recon. Like any new subreddit, participate in conversations and ask questions without linking to (or mentioning) your brand.
After you’ve established yourself and have read the room from cover to cover, you may be able to link to your solutions. For best results, summarize or rephrase anything you share, as it’s very easy to rub someone the wrong way by attempting to send them to an external resource.
3. Put quality first in everything you post
Not only is this part of the rules, but it should be common sense: the web has enough garbage floating around, and if you contribute to the problem by making unwelcome pitches, or upsetting users, you’ll either be ignored or laughed at.
With that said, you can (and should) entertain and use humor to connect with people when appropriate, ideally by sharing content from other channels like YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. For brands that do a commendable job in this area, check out Liquid Death’s YouTube channel, Duolingo on Twitter/X, or ALDI on Instagram, for just a few solid examples.
Remember: for Reddit (and really, all platforms), using the platform language correctly can go a long way, as long as you avoid some of the pitfalls (e.g., being unaware, cringy, unironically corny, etc.) that come with the territory.
4. Reddit SEO won’t be your bread and butter
Without diving into all the algorithm mechanics of why Reddit branding will function as a piece of an SEO strategy, know that it is highly unlikely you’ll turn Reddit into a revenue source. And if you try (outside of ads, where businesses report mixed results), chances of tarnishing your brand go way up.
Notice how Reddit doesn’t score as one of the top linking domains for either Adobe or Mint, despite having good subreddit examples. | Source: Moz
Just remember: manage your expectations such that Reddit is as a community relation tool for a brand first and an SEO boon second. After enough valuable material is shared, you will gain some organic benefits from Reddit SEO, but nearly as much benefit as you’ll gain from interacting with a community as a real person.
5. Use Reddit cross posting when it makes sense
Cross-posting on Reddit is similar to the sharing mechanic found on other platforms but works a bit more like content syndication across websites.
Successful cross-posting typically demands good rapport in each community where content will be shared. If you follow the rules we’ve covered, thus far you can effectively use this tool to share relevant content with multiple groups.
Don’t Try to Ruin Reddit With Unhinged Marketing
Hopefully, we’ve demonstrated that Reddit SEO is real, but a brand’s experience on Reddit is often very different from that on most other popular social platforms.
However, if you can be (or already are) a respected Redditor, you can extract substantial value from the platform as you provide value to others by simply having natural, honest conversations. This form of digital marketing is unique compared to other organic growth strategies and just one mistake can undo months of progress.
With Taktical Digital, a Reddit marketing agency, helping to grow your brand organically, you can be confident in achieving genuine engagement and sustainable success on the platform.
