How to Get Traffic from Reddit after Google Helpful Content Update?
You probably know that after the last Helpful Content Update, Google began to rank Reddit and other forums higher in SERP.
There are many examples of how webmasters get traffic from there by creating topics and increasing the popularity of their answers from fake accounts.
I haven’t tested such methods, but I decided to leave my comment on an old, unpopular topic, which is ranked in 6th position in Google SERP for my target keyword “ga4 looker studio template”.
I left my comment without expecting anything from it, especially since it is the last one in the thread and there are already links to other templates there.
Imagine my surprise when I went to analyze my traffic sources for the month and saw that Reddit had surpassed LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium, in which I invested significantly more time.
Now, from my own experience, I can say that working with Reddit can be more effective in attracting traffic than promoting separate pages on your website, especially at the beginning of a project.
However, remember, that this is a good source of traffic primarily for indie hackers and startups which didn’t find product-market fit yet.
This is also a good channel to learn more about the problems your audience is trying to solve. However this is not a scalable and predictable source of traffic, so you can’t use it to boost a startup on the growth stage.
2 methods to get traffic from Reddit
- Publish new topics in the relevant threads and place a link there.
In this case, you create a topic that you would like to make a leader in Google SERP. The challenge is to get many valuable answers in your discussion from the community.
Also, pay attention, to placing a link in the first message can be defined as spam by Reddit. So sometimes it is better to create a topic without any backlinks and then insert it in one of your replies.
2. Publish valuable comments in the relevant threads and place a link there.
In this case, you don’t create a new topic but focus only on the existing topics that ALREADY rank in Google's top 10 by your target keywords.
The only question is how to find such topics. The answer is below.
3 methods to find topics on Reddit to place your comments
- Check manually Google SERP by keywords your target and when you see there is a Reddit page in the top 10, place a comment in this topic. I’ve used this method.
2. Go to Reddit and look for threads with your target keywords. This is a more labor-intensive strategy because you will comment on many topics which aren’t ranked in top-10 and many of your comments won’t get enough search traffic.
However, it helps you to increase your karma and bring a real value to the community. And also remember that many searches appear on Reddit without Google.
3. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer. Filter all Reddit pages by your target keyword and sort pages by estimated traffic.
This is the point similar to the first idea, but using this way you can find much more relevant topics, because often you don’t know all keywords by which your customers can look for solution similar to yours.
So, overall, after this experiment Reddit became as important as LinkedIn and Twitter and I include it to my daily routing on social media.
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