How To Leverage Reddit For Your SEO Needs

Reddit is an open social media forum, where users vote up front to decide what’s good and what’s junk from currently trending stories on the web. Links that generate curiosity levels among ‘Redditors’ bubble up towards the top of the community ranking. Reddit as such, is not your usual social networking platform and so if you are trying to leverage it for your link building campaign then you’ll have to adhere to certain norms otherwise it may probably result in an embargo.

But there are some ethical SEO practices that you need to follow to derive benefits from Reddit’s social marketing platform.

What is Reddit’s SEO connection?

It still is a sort of mystery for SEO’s, whether or not the external links that you generate therein are your nofollow or dofollow links. In fact, all the links submitted to Reddit as such, start out as the nofollow links. The Reddit links become your dofollow links only after you receive a score of two or greater ( score= upvotes- downvotes). Unless and until, the other users upvote it, these randomly submitted links will have no direct SEO value as such.

As seen above, It was a similar case with the new link that was submitted to Reddit which appeared with the rel=nofollow attribute in it. It’s a bit time-consuming procedure to receive the dofollow links from Reddit as such, and only if you follow the ethical Reddit ways of marketing to accrue the SEO benefits therein.

Basic SEO Practices of Reddit Marketing

Besides helping your SEO cause, the appreciation of your content on the Reddit platform comes with an added incentive of it being shared across other social networking platforms by Redditors. So, a regular text post that’s being shared across will lead to higher search ranking and consequently surge in the referral traffic. So, if you want your content to be appreciated by Redditors then just follow the below guidelines for ethical Reddit marketing.

1. Adding Value to the Reddit Community

The content that adds value to the other Redditors gets instantaneously upvoted and shared across other social platforms. So, if you are solving a problem or offering an opportunity or opened up a discussion forum or hosting an AMA opportunity to help other Redditors will get upvoted instantly.

Hence, a high-value post shared across the domain will enjoy a Top Community Feed Status for an indefinite period of time.

However, you can contribute such value added content only after becoming an active reddit user. And the Redditors will upvote your content only, when you happen to solve their community related business concerns on a regular basis.

Bonus Tip: When you share your blog post as “text post” to the Reddit community as such then don’t forget to include a link back to the original source. And if Redditors upvote your post then they are more likely to visit your website as well.

2. Honesty is your Best Policy

Honesty is the best policy and Redditors acknowledge this personality trait when they share your content. In fact, Redditors are more likely to upvote the “text post” submitted under your real brand identity. So, there’s no need for businesses to operate under a fake identity when posting content to the site. You can operate under the combination of your brand’s first name alongside your first name as your Reddit Id (e.g. Google_Sundar). Ensure that you update honest details about yourself and your company to post content that adds value to the Redditors community and get upvoted by them.

3. Avail your Expertise

When you start operating under your real brand name, make further engagement with the community Redditors by posting content that adds value to their existence so that they recognize your expertise and may further pose some relevant questions to you. If you are able to provide them with the solutions then they are more likely to upvote your content and share it across other platforms as well.

How to do it?

For instance, you can see how a Redditor operating under his real identity and shares his blog post as the full text and included a link to his LinkedIn presence. It was upvoted as the top post by the community Redditors and then he further engages himself with the community and responds to their comments and queries and Redditors shares his stuff with other Redditors.

How to utilize it for indirect SEO benefits

To receive indirect SEO benefits, just stick with your original identity and share valuable content and respond to their comments and queries as such. This can be achieved in many ways as below.

– Create Reddit Friendly Content

When posting your valuable content on Reddit’s platform, keep in mind that you are catering to the needs of a larger segmented market outside Reddit community as well.

So, if your post is well appreciated on Reddit then you may create an engaging blog post with a great headline and backed up by some amazing graphics to share it across the social media platforms. And if it’s a valuable post then it will be shared around generously to direct some serious organic search traffic to your site.

For instance, a blog post on iPhone Apps has the potential to generate innumerable responses from the users as such.

– Don’t miss out on  Reddit AMA

Reddit AMA’s are a great way to generate more SEO benefits in the form of links. Hence, if Redditor community considers you as an AMA expert then you will definitely get more shared links across your website, social media presence or your site’s landing page. Not only that, you will also get a fair idea about your target audience.

Conclusion

The actionable takeaway from our above discussion is that Reddit is not your usual social marketing platform. It’s better to start with honestly declaring about your own identity along with your brand’s name.

When your text post adds value to the existing Redditor community then the post gets upvoted as the top community post and shared across other social platforms, too.

This results in the conversion of the nofollow links to dofollow links for you to derive the SEO benefits therein. In this way, you can leverage Reddit’s marketing platform to harness it’s impending SEO benefits.

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