Reddit has been having a time! They are preparing to go public. Traffic has been growing like crazy!
In only 8 months ~20% of Seer clients have seen 6x growth in paid cost where Reddit is in the top 10.
According Semrush Page 1 rankings for Reddit in Feb 2023 was at 9.4M keywords, by Jan 2024, that number was 30.2M!
Now raise your hand if you are in SEO, SEM, Analytics or Social if you have analyzed this impact for your client and started developing strategies.
Good for you, please share with us too, let’s all contribute to the community. I think Ann Smarty did an amazing job of highlighting some great ways to get started with analysis and strategy.
This creates an opportunity for the cross channel, holistic marketer.
Sure is SEO getting disrupted yes, but people having questions isn’t changing with ChatGPT.
A holistic SEO / Search marketer will see this as an opportunity to grow influence in their orgs across divisions while helping the customer. Here are some of my early ideas.
Use Paid Search Query Reports To Trend Customer's Using "Reddit" in queries.
If you get paid search terms (Sorry PMax peeps), you can see how many of my searchers month over month are using the word reddit in their queries, how much is that growing?
We scanned all clients search terms to find out:
Across all clients, the one with the highest spend on queries that included the word "Reddit" was .2%.
The screen above isn’t great so let me tell you what we're examining. Each row is every client and we’re looking at what % of our clients spend was triggered by search terms with the word Reddit in the term. You can see its low for every client, largest one being .2% of spend (FYI all our top 3 are in financial services).
Action: This could lead the siloed paid search marketer to assuming, that maybe it isn’t worth looking into because my customers aren’t using it.
Use Paid Search Query Report AND SEO data.
We have already seen where customers are including the word Reddit above, and how much that is growing, but we miss out on where is Google’s organic results are showings that Reddit might be the right answer even when searchers are not including the word in their queries.
Almost 20% of our clients have seen 6x the amount of Reddit results showing up in the top 10.
One client went from 1.4% of their spend on queries that triggered a Reddit result to 35% in 8 months!
Data fun X2!!
When all the data is warehoused, you can just “play” here we can see that when reddit is in the top 10 and we outrank them, our CPA is $151, but it is $280 when Reddit outranks us, this let’s us hypothesize / play see what kind of queries trigger which outcomes.
Note: I always wanted to run cross SEO & PPC analysis when ever I wanted - that is why we built our data platform - it lets us validate cross channel hypotheses (paid, seo, social) whenever we come up with it with no engineering work. We can do this for any domain, for any client instantly, wanna know what your CPA is when Nerdwallet or Amazon.com shows up, we have already combined the paid and organic search term data to get you instant answers.
What if my data isn’t warehoused this way, like Seer has it can I do this!?
Remember we’ve been teaching y’all how to join PPC and SEO data yourselves for 5 years!! The videos might be old, but the process still works…we got those PowerBI videos for search professionals that show you how to join this data together yourselves. If you want us to record a custom video for this let us know!
These combined insights could lead to a very different strategy, than the siloed one of just looking at search terms where customers used the word reddit in their query.
Paid Search + SEO + Analytics data
If you have the analytics data, imagine a world where you join the analytics data in to see things like, referrals, if Reddit started showing up in the top 10 for 50% more of your keywords then you could see what is the trajectory of your Reddit referral traffic.
When people come to our site from Reddit do they behave differently / better / do they engage differently? That would be fun to do next. And since we have all the individual URLs we could also crawl those URLs find the words they rank for and run a quick sentiment analysis on that Reddit thread.
Do we find that when Reddit shows up and the thread mentions your brand positively that that cohort acts differently? I dunno, I’m also not a web analytics person, but I feel there could be gems there.
A few strategies you could deploy to get started once you join the data.
Strategy 1: Engage, like a human
- Analysis of Reddit Threads: Examining the content of Reddit threads that rank for a lot of your converting keywords, understand the sentiment, check the titles, etc. Reddit blocks ChatGPT from crawling its pages to summarize insights, you can copy and paste or use other LLMs to crawl the links (wink wink, llama)
- Respect the community: Reddit values authenticity. Avoid overtly promotional content. Instead, focus on honest, balanced perspectives about your products or services.
Strategy 2: Track and Analyze Reddit's Influence
- Monitoring Reddit's Impact: Keep tabs on the URLs Reddit ranks and their keywords, do you see more keywords ranking for that thread over time, maybe its getting more influential in your customer journey?
- Conversion Analysis: Examine referral traffic from Reddit. Assess if these referrals lead to different conversion behaviors compared to other sources.
Strategy 3: Consider Reddit Advertising
- Advertise: With knowledge of trending Reddit threads & URLs in your niche, explore opportunities for sponsorship ads.
Cautionary Note: Ethical Community Engagement
- Authentic Involvement: Consider engaging with Reddit moderators to understand how to contribute genuinely before just kicking in the door.
- Avoid Manipulative Tactics: Steer clear of strategies aimed at influencing top commenters or moderators. Remember the Open Directory Project? Moderating there became a real "side hustle" at one point in the SEO game. We don't want to see that happen here.
I’m not a redditor much, so please find someone who is before you engage, so you don’t get blown up for not following protocol.
Spam is going to be a problem for Reddit
Think about it, will we start seeing moderators getting "paid off" by brands to remove negative reviews? Especially with Reddit and Google now partnered, to use Reddit data to train their new LLM Gemini. I wasn't even thinking about this side until I bumped into Garrett Gillin of 215 Marketing.
That lead me to watching this great video on the extent of Reddit Spam, keep an eye on that space:
