My Reddit SEO strategy for B2B brands
+ 3 biggest pitfalls of growing visibility via comments on Reddit.
There is a huge rise in demand for Reddit SEO services now, because it has already become obvious for brands:
Reddit threads appear 1-2 times in Google's top 10 for almost all informational and commercial keywords.
Reddit threads appear in AI chat responses and citations, because Reddit has tons of unique, detailed answers to popular questions, you won’t find anywhere else.
It creates a positive feedback loop: more and more people join Reddit as new active users after finding this forum via Google search or AI chats.
Now, Reddit is the 7th most visited website in the world according to Similarweb.
This is also an Ahrefs chart that covers only organic search traffic growth.
x10 growth in 2 years, from 100mln to 1bln monthly visitors!
I’ve been playing with all possible Reddit SEO growth options for the last 2 years.
I helped grow visibility on Reddit only for B2B brands, like Ivanhoe Digital (my Looker Studio templates business), Sitechecker, Favikon, and others, and developed my own framework for how to do it properly.
Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:
2 only mindsets for Reddit growth
1. Anonymous
In this case, you try to hack the algo by following the steps:
Hire a freelancer, or an agency, or build an in-house team.
They buy old anonymous accounts or create new ones and warm them up.
They use multiple accounts to publish as many comments and get as many upvotes as possible.
They simulate discussions, publishing both posts and comments from their own network of accounts.
This is the most popular approach. It reduces the cost of one brand mention and has the opportunity for scaling, because you delegate these tasks to junior marketers.
However, it has 2 huge problems: trust and advanced Reddit tactics to reduce spam.
To win trust, you have to explain why this product or service is the better solution in a specific use case and what your experience of using it.
It’s hard to scale, because you need either expensive, experienced marketers or advanced workflows of building legends around your accounts, and generating meaningful, deep comments via AI chats.
Also, Reddit has one of the best anti-spam algorithms. Warming up accounts requires resources.
It’s very similar to backlinks in Google. Everybody buys them, but because backlinks have become more expensive, it becomes a great filter. As a result, win only 2 types of businesses: the ones who found a way to acquire backlinks organically, or ones who ready to invest a lot of money into it for a long time.
2. Brand ambassador
This is the approach I use. I promote only B2B SaaS brands I know, use, or build. It’s not scalable because it’s hard to outsource, but it helps to win trust and win first places with own comments organically.
In this case, I use the best practices of building in public from X / LinkedIn. I share my experience, mistakes, lessons, and best practices.
However, often this is not enough. Anyway, you have to involve other people to upvote your comments and posts. If you won’t do that, you’ll lose to those who does it.
3 only methods for Reddit promotion
Leave comments
This is the main method most companies use and sounds like an easy task, but there are 3 pitfalls.
1. Finding threads that are worth attention
1.1. Topics that are already at the top of Google for your keywords
This is the fastest way to start. You can get the first results in 1 hour!
Some of them are already 1-2 years old, and sometimes you can't leave a comment there because they are achieved or deleted, but in 50% of cases, you can.
When I started to do this 2 years ago, I could leave comments with links to my websites. With this approach, it was easy both to get traffic to your website and track conversions from this channel.
Due to these comments, Reddit is still the 3rd biggest traffic source to Ivanhoe Digital.
Now, Reddit and subreddit owners are more and more restricting such comments.
That’s why in 90% of comments today, I leave only a brand name and share links only when people ask for that.
In this case, you have such options to track your efforts:
Check the number of views under your comments (it’s hard anyway, because you have to do it manually).
Check the impressions growth by brand search queries in Google Search Console.
Check the number of direct messages you get from people interested in your product/service.
1.2 New threads for category keywords and your competitors' keywords that constantly appear.
For this case, I described how I use the free Reddit keyword monitoring tool to get real-time notifications on new posts or comments.
Primarily, I target 2 types of keywords:
competitors’ brand names or competitor brand name + alternative;
bottom- and middle of the funnel keywords with high intent.
This requires constant efforts, and it’s harder to measure the ROI. The most valuable threads are ones that:
will become viral on Reddit;
will start ranking in the top 10 of Google SERP;
will be included in the answers of AI chats.
But you can’t forecast it when the new post appears! This is a game of numbers. 1 comment can pay back 100 comments that didn’t bring results.
The only tip here is to save links to all such threads and review them once per quarter, to see whether some of them started ranking in Google's top 10, AI chats, or became viral.
2 Drive your comment to the top in the relevant threads
This is the big pain. Constant commenting isn’t enough. The highest visibility gets the post itself and the first comment.
If you left a valuable comment, the first one (because you did it immediately after notification from F5bot), you have high chances to get organic upvotes and become the 1st comment in the thread.
However, it’s hard to replicate, and you can’t get these results when commenting in the old threads.
To get the 1st place, you ideally need about 5-10 upvotes for your comment. To get this, you need to constantly involve other people with live accounts to upvote for your comments, because the anti-spam systems on Reddit work very well.
At the same time, anti-spam rules work separately at the level of the entire Reddit and separately at the level of different subreddits. Often, even upvotes from users with old and trusted accounts aren’t counted if they didn’t take part in a specific subreddit before.
Some of the popular subreddits can block you not only for a link, but for mentioning a brand or even just the phrase "DM me". So you have to be very attentive to each subreddit's rules.
However, even getting the 1st place with your comment isn’t enough.
3. Leave comments with rich context to increase conversion
Anyway, you need sales, not just visibility. Sales come from trust. The short comment “try this product” lacks trust.
This is the hardest to delegate to an outsourcer, because fake comments are easy to read, and Reddit users are some of the most aggressive and will downvote you harshly.
Publish your own posts in popular subreddits
Answering questions is easier than creating new topics that engage people. Also, admins of subreddits check posts for spam more strictly than comments.
Sometimes, even threads without brand mentions, with a great engagement and 100k views, can be deleted after 1-2 days. Below is an example of my post with a data study that became extremely popular on the /SEO subreddit, but was deleted after 2 days.
Anyway, publishing own post is one of the valuable methods because:
Some subreddits approve posts about your product and services.
It’s a great option to get feedback from your ideal customers.
You can share your product in comments later.
You can attract attention to your profile and start getting DMs from potential customers.
Also, consider that you define the title and text of the post, and these are the main parts of the content that Google evaluates by which keyword to rank this thread.
So, publishing posts is the main way of growing traffic, and via parasite SEO tactics, similar to parasite SEO on Medium.
However, people create much more content on the same keywords on Reddit. To win first place in Google SERP you must have both a better content and better engagement (it means many comments and valuable comments).
Create and grow your own subreddit
Popular subreddits are the fastest way to get a lot of reach, whether via virality or ranking in Google, but it’s hard to do because the admins of such subreddits strictly review posts.
Launching and growing your own subreddit requires a lot of time and resources, but the outcome is 100% power to decide what to publish.
For example, 1 month ago, I suggested Favikon team create a company page on Reddit. Jeremy Boissinot, CEO of the company considered this idea seriously and started acting immediately (btw, he just launched his own newsletter with influencer marketing data studies).
He designed a Reddit page himself, started posting the first content, and allocated the team resources to grow it as fast as possible.
After 30 days, there are already 100 members and 8k impressions. I believe until the end of the year, there will be 1,000 members and 100k impressions.
You can create the subreddit designing it as a company page, or design it as a niche subreddit around your topic, for example /b2binfluencermarketing. I see 4 reasons why this is a must-have for popular brands to launch such pages.
1. Own a narrative
There are many niche-related subreddits, but they often have too few interesting posts, and they don't give you the option to publish news about your company.
Growing your own interesting subreddit around a high-level topic (in this case, influencer marketing), you can become the first place your potential users visit to ask questions, read news, and get help.
2. Attract a new audience from Reddit
This is the most interesting. Reddit has a similar feed algorithm as LinkedIn / X / Substack and shows you threads not only from subreddits you subscribed to, but also from relevant subreddits based on your interests. If you publish engaging content, Reddit will promote it.
3. Win more Google SERPs
Google indexes Reddit threads faster, better, and longer than LinkedIn posts. A lot of the content you create isn't worth publishing on your website, but on a scale, it can generate a lot of new users to your threads on Reddit by long tail keywords.
4. Add one more channel to serve your customers
Reddit is the best place to ask questions, and there are a lot of people from all over the world now. Add this channel to help your customers succeed, and you win their hearts.
Reddit SEO for enterprises is different
A week ago, I talked with an SEO at a big enterprise B2B SaaS brand. She shared that they also work with Reddit, but in most cases, it’s not a game to get more visibility. It’s a game of reputation management.
When you are the leader of the market, competitors are ready to spend a lot of resources to destroy your reputation by publishing fake, bad stories from anonymous accounts.
In this case, your team still has to get notifications from F5bot every time your brand is mentioned, but it’s important to train your team as customer success agents and product marketers. They have to know well what people like and what they don’t like in your product, and should be able to extinguish the negative.
That’s all. If you run a B2B SaaS brand and feel that I can help you with the growth on Reddit, write me on LinkedIn.
P.S. Don’t miss my previous posts: