Spam-Free Reddit for SEO Webinar: Visibility, Reputation, Community

Reddit is no longer just a place for niche discussions. It’s a powerful channel for AI search visibility, brand reputation management, and community-led growth.

In this webinar, Andrew Shotland breaks down how brands and SEOs can use Reddit strategically—without getting ignored, downvoted, or banned. You’ll learn how Reddit influences AI-driven search results, how to monitor and protect your brand’s reputation, and how to create and grow subreddit communities that deliver long-term value.

Whether you’re looking to increase visibility in AIO, build trust at scale, or own conversations in your niche, this session will give you the boost you need.

You’ll learn:

• How Reddit content feeds into AI-powered search visibility

• Practical approaches to brand reputation management on Reddit

• When (and how) to create and grow your own subreddit communities

You can view Andrew's slides here.

Watch the webinar

By the way, you can also subscribe to the Sitebulb YouTube channel! And register here to be the first to find out about upcoming webinars. 

Read the transcript

Jojo Furnival

Hi, everyone. We are back with a special webinar today. We've got a super insightful workshop with Andrew Shotland on how to increase visibility in AI overviews, build brand trust, and community with

Jojo Furnival

yes, you guessed it, Reddit. Like, I don't know about you, but until pretty recently, the word Reddit prompted in me an immediate

Jojo Furnival

weary face emoji or eye roll. Or combination of the two. But I got curious last year, and I started a subreddit for JavaScript SEO. I'll put the link in the chat in a minute. And since then, I've actually been fascinated. This was, by the way, inspired by having a chat with Andrew at SEO San Diego. So and I have been

Jojo Furnival

delighted and fascinated to see people joining my community, joining the discussion, asking questions, helping one another out on the topic, and no spam in sight. So and I think this is the kind of vibe we can expect from Andrew as well today.

Jojo Furnival

My name is Jojo. I'm marketing manager at Sitebulb. And if you aren't familiar with Sitebulb already, it is a website auditing and crawling tool. If you do tech SEO, website crawling, or auditing at any level, Sitebulb can probably help.

Andrew Shotland

Thanks, Jojo. Hello, everybody. Super happy to be here. Fun fact. Local SEO Guide was a very early adopter of Sitebulb

Andrew Shotland

when it first came out, and I would think of Sitebulb as screaming frog on steroids. So if you haven't checked it out, check it out. Anyhow, so

Andrew Shotland

yeah, like Jojo just said, I don't think I mentioned the word Reddit at all maybe in, like, 2023, maybe once, or in 2024. In 2025, I think, like, if you'd looked at my taxonomy of words I used, Reddit was probably in the top 10. And certainly in 2026, it's pretty high up there. So we're gonna walk you through some experience that I've had and my company has with Reddit and kind of how you might want to approach Reddit or think about Reddit in your marketing mix. So we're just gonna jump right into it. Let's make sure I can do pagination. Alright. Here we go. So for those of you who've been living under a rock, Reddit is huge, getting huger. Last reported 110,000,000 daily average users. 21% year over year growth — this thing is a rocket ship. Reddit markets themselves as a place where people come to make decisions. So, according to Reddit themselves, 77% of people who use Reddit use it to consider purchase options. I know whenever I'm looking for something to buy I often find myself on a thread on Reddit just reading the pros and cons. I personally find it much better than reviews — it's really like

Andrew Shotland

people having a conversation about it. This is kinda cool. In 2024, Reddit was the number six most searched Google US term.

Andrew Shotland

I couldn't find data for 2025. Google's top search terms thing was kind of weird this year or last year. According to the Reddit CEO, people came from Google 23,000,000,000 times in the past year. And according to some data,

Andrew Shotland

it appears in 37% of Google's SERPs last year. And featured in 95% of product review queries. So it's kind of everywhere you wanna be if you're selling something. And what you've probably noticed, if you've ever looked at the Google suggested search results, almost every time, particularly if it's a product, Reddit is appended in the list. So AirPure Fiber Dorm Room Reddit, best iPhone case Reddit, best niche cheese Reddit, best comedy movies Reddit,

Andrew Shotland

and then how to do SEO Reddit.

Andrew Shotland

And I would say this has been a trend for quite a while, but what it shows is that people are — the human race is now conditioned to kind of look for stuff on Reddit, and they use Google to find the Reddit stuff they want. So Reddit is in high demand. And basically, two quarters ago, the CEO of Reddit said basically anybody using Google is gonna end up at Reddit. And the reason for this is really probably twofold. One is that two years ago, Google did a deal with Reddit to use its data to train its AI, Gemini, on it. And

Andrew Shotland

we think as part of that deal, it put Reddit up in front of a lot of the search results, basically to get more people through the system to get more data. And so Reddit, over the last year or two, has been showing up everywhere in Google. But it's also a good service.

Jojo Furnival

Andrew.

Jojo Furnival

Andrew.

Jojo Furnival

Quick. Quick. Quick. Quick. Your video is gone.

Jojo Furnival

Yes.

Andrew Shotland

No. Hold on. Let's

Andrew Shotland

let's see how we can do that.

Jojo Furnival

There we go. You're back. You're back now. Don't know where it went, but it wasn't just me. So

Andrew Shotland

I wonder if I'm — is it gone again?

Jojo Furnival

No. Now you're back. You're back now.

Andrew Shotland

Super weird. The Internet. Okay.

Andrew Shotland

That's alright. So,

Andrew Shotland

anyhow, Google, we believe, is basically pushing people to Reddit. And people are going there. So several reasons why it's a place you might wanna be. Because chances are, if you have a customer, or if your clients have a customer, they're using Reddit to figure out if they should buy something from your client or their competitors.

Andrew Shotland

Some data from Profound, one of the AI tracking services. Reddit is one of the most cited sources in AI search. We see this over and over again. So for Google AI overviews and ChatGPT, you know, depending on the month, it may go up and down. But

Andrew Shotland

in general, it's consistently one of the most cited sites. So let's dive into a little bit of how Reddit works. For those of you who are closer to my age and probably don't use Reddit too much, it's basically a social network of communities. So the communities are called subreddits. And those are basically sections of the site that are about shared interests. It could be about a city, a music group, JavaScript SEO, or whatever the thing is — there's a subreddit on pretty much everything on the planet. And in each subreddit, there's basically a posting and commenting function. You can share links, images, videos, the usual, and create threaded conversations. And then there's a voting system where people upvote and downvote comments and posts. And then there's an algorithm to rank all of these things — this is where Reddit decides what's gonna be shown. So pretty much your typical social network, just the key organising principle is topics, let's say, or shared interests.

Andrew Shotland

And then, yeah. So if you go into a thread, you can see there's this up and down voting on comments. And there's a lot more detail to it, but basically that's how it works.

Andrew Shotland

OK. So,

Andrew Shotland

one of the key features of Reddit is they spend a lot of effort on engagement gamification. Meaning they're trying to get people to use Reddit and interact in Reddit in all sorts of ways. And so the thing to look at — this is a user profile for a Redditor called look at that bacon. And you can see that on the top right, they have something called Karma — five thousand four hundred and four Karma. And karma is basically a point system that you get for doing things on Reddit. Like, if you set up your profile, you get, like,

Andrew Shotland

10 karma or something like that. If you post a comment, you get, like, a karma. If

Andrew Shotland

a 100 people reply to your comment, you get a lot of karma. And so basically they're trying to constantly prompt you to engage on Reddit by giving you little digital rewards, and you get these achievement badges. Like, if you post a twenty day streak, you get a twenty day streak badge. And

Andrew Shotland

I think if you start using Reddit, you find that these things are actually remarkably effective at getting you involved, because you're like, oh, yeah, I need to keep up my — I did it when I first created a new account last year. I did, I think, six months. I got a six month streak of posting every day. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna keep that going. Another characteristic of Reddit is self-policing. Every community has a mod or moderator. Or several moderators, and they create rules for their community. And this is one way that Reddit has been relatively good about keeping spam out of Reddit — the mods tend to police their communities pretty harshly. So they set a bunch of rules, and then if you break the rules, they'll penalise you, mute you, kick you out. And I think the mod model is pretty scalable, because every community has a mod.

Andrew Shotland

The way that — so I live in Pleasanton, California. This is the subreddit for Pleasanton. The way that the ranking works — the default right now, it changes every once in a while — the default right now is the best posts. And basically, best is some algorithmic determination of whatever people like the most, whatever they respond to the most, whatever they share the most, that kind of thing. But there are several other filters. There's hot, new, top, and rising. And if you're trying to kind of get visible on Reddit, you're gonna start as new — here's a new post. But what you really wanna get to is rising and hot. And that's where creating a lot of engagement around your post can work. And those are the kind of stages you have to get through to be considered the best.

Andrew Shotland

So how do you go from new to hot?

Andrew Shotland

Well, the algorithms are constantly shifting, but in general, this is how to think about it. So if you post something new, you need to start getting upvotes.

Andrew Shotland

You need to start getting comments and

Andrew Shotland

comments on comments — so discussions — and then you need to start getting cross posts: people sharing your post in other subreddits. And then, basically, you wanna avoid negative engagement. So as an example, downvotes are a lot more powerful than

Andrew Shotland

upvotes. So you wanna have many more upvotes than downvotes. And then time is of the essence. You really don't have a lot of time for your post to go, quote unquote, viral in a subreddit. It's basically gated. So let's

Andrew Shotland

get into that a little bit more.

Andrew Shotland

So

Andrew Shotland

basically, comments seem to be the most effective way to get a post to

Andrew Shotland

go up to the top in a subreddit. And basically, having multiple threads happening under the post. And what you see in a typical

Andrew Shotland

subreddit or a typical post, the comments don't need to be, like,

Andrew Shotland

you know, Shakespeare. A lot of Reddit comments are one or two words.

Andrew Shotland

Like, word. Right? And

Andrew Shotland

so

Andrew Shotland

when you're kind of working on getting people to interact with your threads, don't feel like you need to be writing full sentences and things like that.

Andrew Shotland

So

Andrew Shotland

basically, a lot of our clients come to us and say, okay, we know our customers are on Reddit. How do we get traffic

Andrew Shotland

from Reddit? How do we do that? And basically, what you wanna do is be able to get linked from Reddit — and not all subreddits allow links.

Andrew Shotland

Some are pretty open about it. Like, hey, link all you want. Some are like, never link to another site from our subreddit, or we'll kick you out. You can actually use Reddit to find the subreddits — Reddit search has gotten really good over the last six months. But there's also a billion other

Andrew Shotland

websites and tools that have created tools for Reddit. So as an example, this is a subreddit finder where you can say, hey, I wanna find subreddits on this topic that allow links, and it will give you a bunch of subreddits. So you could use Google to find these things.

Andrew Shotland

Again, you can just use Reddit search, which

Andrew Shotland

basically has embedded AI into their search. You can say, hey, find the top 10 subreddits on beer that allow links, that kind of thing.

Andrew Shotland

The way to really go

Andrew Shotland

viral on Reddit, or at least get popular, is to use data and emotion.

Andrew Shotland

Like, it's no different than any other social media site. So as an example, Greg Abbott is the governor of Texas, and he's kind of a jerk to certain people. And he's anti-choice. And so this picture is of a Redditor who basically posted — they're like a dog groomer. And they put a pro-choice bandana on Greg Abbott's dog and took a picture of it. And that, of course, went super viral in this subreddit, which is called — the user's name is OJ Simpson's Glove. The subreddit is Austin, which is a city in Texas. And so

Andrew Shotland

what we encourage clients to do is to take content that they already have on their site.

Andrew Shotland

If they have content, and rewrite it, except add a more social media, emotional spin to the headline. And lead with the most interesting data, and definitely be opinionated. And we found this to be a pretty good model for getting content to be a bit more popular on Reddit. It doesn't work every time, but

Andrew Shotland

instead of writing new posts every time, you can take your content and repurpose it.

Andrew Shotland

You don't always — you shouldn't always use your website. I think the

Andrew Shotland

knee-jerk reaction is that if you're linking to your own site, that's gonna — 99% of the time it's gonna be seen as spam. So an

Andrew Shotland

effective tactic we've tried is setting up content on a third party site like Medium or Beehive. Because a lot of different people use that, and it's considered, basically, like, oh, I'm just sharing content versus I'm sharing my site's content. So

Andrew Shotland

it's gonna depend on the subreddit you're targeting, but that's a simple thing to do — set up content on those sites.

Andrew Shotland

You should think of your profile on Reddit as a conversion asset.

Andrew Shotland

Meaning, if you start to kind of engage on Reddit,

Andrew Shotland

the people you're engaging with — some of them are gonna wanna know more about you. They're gonna go look at your profile and kind of sniff you out. They're gonna see who you are. Do you have enough karma? Like, if you have

Andrew Shotland

very little karma,

Andrew Shotland

they're gonna think you're just a spammer. But if you have, like, a million, they're gonna think, oh, this is a real legit person. So basically, have a description about what you do. What's your big offer to people? Have links to your website, your social media, anything notable about you. And

Andrew Shotland

basically help people understand who you are.

Andrew Shotland

A key to success on Reddit is asking and answering pain points — not too dissimilar to SEO content. Right? And so we do a lot — we don't just do local SEO. We work for SaaS businesses and ecommerce businesses and stuff. But we find this kind of stuff for local businesses is really effective. So you go into your city's subreddit, and

Andrew Shotland

basically you

Andrew Shotland

start

Andrew Shotland

posting on stuff you know is already a pain point. As an example, this is an example of a mover

Andrew Shotland

who

Andrew Shotland

put a post called moving to Pleasanton. Tips on how to get settled in and connected to the community. And this is exactly the kind of thing — if you go to your city's subreddit, you'll see there's always, like, every couple of weeks, someone like, hey, I'm new in town or about to move here. Does anyone have suggestions for great restaurants? Or places to live, or realtors to talk to, or whatever? And so if you can basically be asking and answering those questions, you can start to increase your visibility because a lot of people find those useful. And you can look at other subreddits. So I can look in the San Francisco subreddit and see what's popular there and do the same — basically copy it

Andrew Shotland

for Pleasanton.

Andrew Shotland

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

Andrew.

Jojo Furnival

I think you've lost your video again.

Jojo Furnival

Now it's back.

Jojo Furnival

Don't know what it is.

Andrew Shotland

You know what I bet it is? When I'm on the other tab too long, it kind of thinks I'm asleep or something.

Jojo Furnival

Oh, wait.

Jojo Furnival

Oh, okay.

Jojo Furnival

Alright. Well, sorry. I was just — because it's, you know — I'm thinking of our

Andrew Shotland

I bet

Jojo Furnival

later audience and how everyone wants to see your face rather than a

Andrew Shotland

Of course. No doubt. Yeah. You know what I'll do is, I'll just, going forward, I'll just keep popping back in here every two or three slides just to see if we can

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

Okay. Sorry. Right. I know. Right?

Andrew Shotland

This is how

Andrew Shotland

this is like SEO. This is how you learn. You kind of experiment with the algorithm.

Andrew Shotland

What, try to test it, like,

Jojo Furnival

This is how you know we're not AI.

Andrew Shotland

Well, maybe AI is setting this up to fake you out.

Jojo Furnival

This is live. This

Andrew Shotland

Right?

Jojo Furnival

Yeah. Sure. Alright. I'm going now.

Andrew Shotland

So

Andrew Shotland

alright. Back to our regular programming.

Andrew Shotland

Alright. So Reddit is also — like I said, Reddit shows up in Google a lot. So you can use Reddit for SEO.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

basically, our framework for our approach is: you find the subreddit that ranks for your topic — pretty easy, you just

Andrew Shotland

see it in Google. You go in and you post about the topic you wanna rank for. You don't use

Andrew Shotland

SEO-type keyword-y stuff. You wanna

Andrew Shotland

basically use more natural language, because the moderators in your subreddit are gonna think you're just gaming their system if you don't

Andrew Shotland

you know,

Andrew Shotland

you just wanna basically talk like a person.

Andrew Shotland

And basically, you need to get comments and upvotes. And I'll talk a little bit about this in a second. But basically, if you can't get comments and upvotes

Andrew Shotland

and shares, you're gonna have to do it yourself. Meaning you're gonna have to kind of artificially do it. So you have to be prepared to, let's just say, give things a little push.

Andrew Shotland

Right? Gonna pop back here for a second. Now I'm gonna pop back here. So

Andrew Shotland

in our experience, Google really favours posts with a lot of comments. So you might post something and it might get indexed in Google in five seconds. But it's not gonna rank for anything until it gets a substantial amount of comments. You basically have six to ten hours after the post was made to really

Andrew Shotland

get the thing prominent in your subreddit. That doesn't mean it won't rank after the fact.

Andrew Shotland

But that's really the sweet spot. If you can get a lot of activity going in six to ten hours, you have a much better chance of the post showing up at the top of the subreddit you're in and for Google to show it as one of its recommended links. So time is really, really key.

Andrew Shotland

Okay. So one of the things that we advocate brands do — that Jojo showed you that she did — is to create your own subreddit. Super easy to do.

Andrew Shotland

Basically, you determine the topic of your community, and it could be

Andrew Shotland

whatever. Like, I like lamps as an example. Or it could be much more specific. Right? So best lamps in the UK or something. And then

Andrew Shotland

you wanna basically tag it and design it. You can add all sorts of designs to your subreddit. You can actually buy digital stuff off of Reddit — that's a big part of their business — to beef up your design.

Andrew Shotland

And basically, you wanna start publishing on it. And once it kind of feels full,

Andrew Shotland

or starting to feel filled out, that's when you wanna start promoting it. So you don't wanna just open up a subreddit with nothing in it and say, hey, I'm open. You wanna kind of add some stuff so that people who get there find some value to it.

Andrew Shotland

So as an example, about six months ago or so, I started my own subreddit

Andrew Shotland

called Local SEO for AI.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

what I did was I just got the subreddit. I started

Andrew Shotland

adding content and basically I just found stuff that was interesting that was happening at that moment about local SEO and AI. And

Andrew Shotland

each of these posts probably took me three minutes to do because you just write, like, a little paragraph, you do a link, maybe get an image, and then you post it.

Andrew Shotland

And what I found was that

Andrew Shotland

after about 10 posts,

Andrew Shotland

it started to kind of

Andrew Shotland

get much more visible on Reddit. Meaning, Reddit was suggesting it to people who were searching for relevant topics. And I'd say within two to three weeks, I think, it got over 100 members

Andrew Shotland

and over a thousand visits. And there really wasn't much to it. And

Andrew Shotland

you can see down at the right, it gives you a little dashboard that shows you how many people are coming to your site. And what I found was as I posted more, I kept getting more and more members.

Andrew Shotland

Like I said, Google indexes Reddit URLs very quickly. So basically, if you look at r/LocalSEOforAI, you can see everything's indexed. And I'd say usually within a couple of hours, a Reddit post is indexed even if it's junk.

Andrew Shotland

For any of that, you look at the Local SEO for AI subreddit now, it's kind of garbage. I haven't posted in it probably in three months because I was like, oh, this is fine. But now I have to actually keep it up. So my guess is it has, like, two members now. So

Andrew Shotland

an important factor in Reddit marketing is you have to kind of stay in it and stay engaged, or else it's just gonna wither on the vine. The good news, though, is that there are a million people like me who created subreddits and then kind of moved on to other things. So you can actually try to take over dormant subreddits on topics that you like, especially ones that were created, like, ten years ago. And so a good little exercise is to have someone on your team go find every subreddit on a topic and find the ones that no one's posted in for, like, a year. And then there's a process where you can try to claim

Andrew Shotland

the dead subreddit. That could be really good because you already have a very high quality set of content. You already had a ton of members in it. So you just have to light it up again, and it might start attracting those members again.

Andrew Shotland

We recommend one way to start is to become your brand ambassador. So you don't have to necessarily create a big subreddit if you don't want to. You can just create an account.

Andrew Shotland

So like, Purple has you as the user. So u/purple — you can see Sam's Club, which is a client of ours, has a Sam's Club subreddit. Basically, becoming — just creating an account for your brand, or someone at your brand, like

Andrew Shotland

I don't know, like, Emma at Purple —

Andrew Shotland

basically, you can go into any subreddit, any post, and start interacting as the brand or as a representative of that brand. And that can be a really good strategy. As an example,

Andrew Shotland

this screenshot on the right shows a plumber who goes into their local subreddit

Andrew Shotland

and every once in a while,

Andrew Shotland

says, hey, I'm a skilled plumber, and

Andrew Shotland

I have some time right now.

Andrew Shotland

Ask me anything. AMA — that stands for Ask Me Anything. And what you find is that when you do this at a local level or on any topic, you get a ton of people asking you questions because everyone wants free advice.

Andrew Shotland

And this is a great way to kind of expose people to your brand and your business, and it's also a great way to get customers, because what I find is every once in a while when I do this, someone inevitably pings me and says, hey, can we talk about an engagement?

Andrew Shotland

And if you get really high engagement on these things, they'll start to show up in Google. So if you say, I'm a plumber in London, and you get a ton of engagement, the next time someone's searching for plumber in London in Google, your thread might show up.

Andrew Shotland

So really, we recommend everyone do these things. It's really easy to do. And if it doesn't work, like, no one shows up, well, what did you do? You just made a

Andrew Shotland

silly post and got no engagement. It took you one minute.

Andrew Shotland

Now Reddit — because it's such an epicentre of the universe type thing now — basically everyone and his brother is gaming the system like crazy. So as an example, you can go to the site signals.sh. I'm not suggesting you do. And you can buy Reddit comments. You can buy Reddit upvotes. You can buy accounts. You can buy all sorts of

Andrew Shotland

stuff to game the system. And what you'll find is that there are plenty of agencies that will

Andrew Shotland

sell you Reddit marketing. And really, what they're doing usually is, oh, we have access to a thousand old Reddit accounts. And so we're just gonna go comment —

Andrew Shotland

use them to comment and post on your behalf. And that right now — I'm guessing, because how can I know — I'm guessing 95% of all Reddit marketing, all organic Reddit marketing, is that kind of stuff. And 5% is probably people actually building

Andrew Shotland

their own subreddits, really getting humans to engage, and doing it the human way. Because basically, it's very hard to scale

Andrew Shotland

doing it with humans. As you can imagine, any of you who are social media managers —

Andrew Shotland

really, what we see most social media managers doing is broadcasting, meaning they're posting stuff on Facebook, etcetera, and saying, hey, there's a special today. But interacting with people and seeking out people to engage with and post to and stuff is a whole different thing. And if anyone's figured out how to scale that, let me know.

Andrew Shotland

Back to our little tab here.

Andrew Shotland

K.

Andrew Shotland

So,

Andrew Shotland

if you're gonna try to run a subreddit with multiple people, you have to be aware that Reddit has gotten pretty good at sniffing out spammers. So

Andrew Shotland

if you have multiple accounts using the same IP address, that could get your account banned. You definitely should clear cache if you're using multiple accounts. You should use multiple VPNs. And use as many different browsers as you can find. You wanna make your digital footprint as different as possible every time you log in if you're using different accounts.

Andrew Shotland

So one of the things we looked into

Andrew Shotland

last year was: do brand mentions on Reddit help you rank in AI? We've seen a lot of data that suggested that getting your brand mentioned on important sites would help with AI. So we wanted to test it in a kind of rigorous way. So we basically hired one of these spam companies

Andrew Shotland

and said, hey, give me a thousand accounts.

Andrew Shotland

I want to basically get 100 citations, meaning 100 brand mentions and 100 comments

Andrew Shotland

in relevant threads over a month. For a SaaS company we're working with. So I spammed Reddit on your behalf so you don't have to. And so here's what happened.

Andrew Shotland

Really, just look at this top graph. The top graph shows across 80 prompts we were tracking for this brand, their percentage of times they were cited in a prompt on Google's AI overviews. And so basically, they started out at about 8 or 9% of prompts they were cited in. But as soon as we started the test, they saw a 3x increase in a couple of weeks in the number of prompts that they were cited in. As soon as we stopped,

Andrew Shotland

the number of prompts went way down back to where it was. And we know they weren't doing anything significant marketing-wise over that time. And so what we

Andrew Shotland

kind of surmised from this test — and we've done this test several times and the data is pretty similar — what we kind of surmised was

Andrew Shotland

one, brand mentions

Andrew Shotland

on Reddit were a factor. Brand mentions on Reddit were a factor. And two,

Andrew Shotland

if you don't have a strong enough brand to have it mentioned organically,

Andrew Shotland

it's not gonna work for you unless you're spamming.

Andrew Shotland

Right? You need people to be mentioning you regularly. Otherwise it just floats right back

Andrew Shotland

down to where it was when you stop. And

Andrew Shotland

another thing — Lily Ray actually just published, I think, today or yesterday, I just saw it — is that your organic rankings are also affecting your visibility in Google's AI and ChatGPT's AI. Because ChatGPT is using Google search results as one of the datasets for how it shows something in a result. But basically, what this says is yeah, you probably wanna get your brand mentioned not just on Reddit, but on any

Andrew Shotland

citation source that you see in Google AI overviews for whatever topic you're trying to rank for.

Andrew Shotland

And just to show you some other data that happened with this test, this is Semrush's AI overview rankings for this brand, and you can see it went up as soon as we started the test. And then it started to fade — the number of keywords they were showing up for.

Andrew Shotland

This is their Google rankings, organic Google rankings for non-brand keywords. Each of those bands is a Google page. The bottom two are positions one to three and positions four to ten. We can see that the number of positions they were showing up for in Google Search Console went way up during the test. And page one keywords grew by about 50% over the time of this test. One of the reasons why we think the keywords went way up is because Google Search Console reports on when a URL actually shows up for a search. And what we think is that a lot of these URLs had AI overviews either on the SERP

Andrew Shotland

or they were in the AI overview. And AI overviews, I think, generate a lot more impressions than a typical search result. So some of this may be just that there were a lot of AI overviews generating a lot of impressions, versus them ranking for many more keywords. But we did see page one keywords go up substantially from this test.

Andrew Shotland

And this was the best data. These — kind of hard to read graphs — show non-brand clicks over the time period we tracked, over a year. Look at the bottom graph really

Jojo Furnival

We can't see — we can't

Andrew Shotland

and what you see is non-brand clicks have been declining steadily pretty much since AI overviews were introduced. We see that with a lot of SaaS brands. And what we saw was, when we did this test, it was the first time their non-brand clicks grew month over month, in July.

Jojo Furnival

Andrew,

Jojo Furnival

Andrew,

Jojo Furnival

Andrew,

Andrew Shotland

So we think this technique actually made a decent difference in their business.

Jojo Furnival

Earth to Andrew. Can you hear me?

Andrew Shotland

This is one of my favourite examples of how Reddit can work for a local business. I happen to be talking to the proprietor of the Admiral Pub in Seattle a few months ago. And he said to me that he had suddenly started to get a huge amount of people coming to his pub on Sundays to watch Premier League.

Jojo Furnival

Okay.

Andrew Shotland

And I said, oh, what did you do? He said, I don't know. I just

Andrew Shotland

put a page on my site called watch Premier League in Seattle. And next thing I know, people from two hours away are coming to watch. I said, you didn't do anything else? He said, nothing else. I said, you didn't post it on Facebook? You didn't post it on Reddit? No. Nothing. And what happened was

Jojo Furnival

One moment, please.

Andrew Shotland

he made that page, which is absolutely a good SEO thing to do. But then when I looked at the data

Andrew Shotland

on Facebook groups and Reddit, pretty much

Andrew Shotland

every other post about where to watch

Andrew Shotland

Premier League in Seattle mentioned the Admiral Pub.

Andrew Shotland

And so if you do this search now, chances are you're gonna see the Admiral Pub show up in the AI overview, show up as a citation source in the AI overviews, and show up like number one or two in the Google search results. And I think

Andrew Shotland

this is mostly because they are cited on sites like Reddit and Facebook groups. And people keep mentioning them. So

Andrew Shotland

you can do all the link building you want. I think

Andrew Shotland

these brand mentions, especially for local businesses, are really critical for

Andrew Shotland

getting you to show up in these systems.

Andrew Shotland

Oh, there he is. And this — for those of you who don't even realise there is such a thing as a forums tab, go check it out for searches you wanna rank for.

Andrew Shotland

We think the forums tab is basically a road map to what

Andrew Shotland

URLs Google's using to train its AI.

Andrew Shotland

So basically, those top ranking forums tabs for your keywords — those are the ones you wanna get engagement with.

Andrew Shotland

Move that tab over for a second.

Andrew Shotland

Come back. Alright.

Andrew Shotland

So

Andrew Shotland

we kind of think customer engagement is the new SEO. Meaning going into these sites,

Andrew Shotland

figuring out how to not be spammy and get people to talk to you and talk about you. And I keep telling my team and my clients — if I say it often enough, it'll actually come true — at a certain point, probably not too distant future, instead of being an SEO agency, we're gonna become a customer engagement agency that does SEO. I think something like that is the way things are going.

Andrew Shotland

The good news is most of your competition is not doing anything

Andrew Shotland

particularly significant. So as an example,

Andrew Shotland

we have a home health care agency we work with. Visiting Angels.

Andrew Shotland

And if you — they're in Fremont, California, one of their locations.

Andrew Shotland

And if you search for senior care, or elder companion care in Fremont, California, this is the Facebook group page that shows up

Andrew Shotland

in the SERP. And if you click on it, you can see it's just pure garbage — it's basically

Andrew Shotland

some junk post in a Facebook group.

Andrew Shotland

And so

Andrew Shotland

our thinking is if we can get our client to actually engage — or we engage for them — in these Facebook groups that are relevant to their area,

Andrew Shotland

we'll very quickly outdo these URLs and be able to show up in Google and AI.

Andrew Shotland

And the good news is most of the content

Andrew Shotland

to do this stuff already exists on your websites. You just repurpose it — it really doesn't take much to repurpose a blog post into a social media post.

Andrew Shotland

Reddit Answers is really like an amazing tool. It's really just Reddit search now.

Andrew Shotland

They basically merged search and answers. Basically, just go to it and say, what are the

Andrew Shotland

most common questions about getting solar?

Andrew Shotland

What's the best subreddit to talk about AI governance, if that's your topic? And you'll basically get a road map from Reddit about where to go and what people are talking about. You can even use this for SEO keyword research or topic research, like, what are people talking about for solar installation in the UK? And it will tell you here are the top 20 topics or something like that.

Andrew Shotland

That said,

Andrew Shotland

this stuff — I haven't updated this, I guess I should —

Andrew Shotland

Reddit Answers is growing in terms of organic traffic. When I last checked, it had basically almost a million visits a month from this. My guess is it's probably several million by now. So now more than ever, it's important to be on Reddit and be part of those answers. Reddit is basically caching their results pages for Reddit Answers. And I'm pretty confident that any system like Reddit, if they're not already doing this, they're gonna do it. Like, OpenAI hired an SEO person a few months ago. And I'm pretty sure they're gonna start

Andrew Shotland

— if they don't start caching OpenAI results and making them indexable, I'd be shocked, because they probably have billions of pages with good search data.

Andrew Shotland

Of course, Reddit is very sensitive to strangers coming in and trying to abuse it. You can see

Andrew Shotland

if you go to any subreddit now, people are constantly trying to spam it. So I think

Andrew Shotland

really, to succeed at Reddit, you need to be authentic. You need to be helpful. It helps to be funny. Reddit is a very

Andrew Shotland

funny place. There's a lot of jokes on Reddit. So the funnier you can be, the better off you'll be.

Andrew Shotland

So

Andrew Shotland

let's go here and back. So some easy things you or your team can do today or tomorrow. Set up a profile,

Andrew Shotland

warm it up by commenting, posting, and upvoting —

Andrew Shotland

you can even

Andrew Shotland

engage on subreddits that have nothing to do with what you're trying to — what your business is. As an example,

Andrew Shotland

we had a team member setting up a subreddit for a personal injury attorney — or a profile. And

Andrew Shotland

they love books. So they just went and started posting on book group subreddits. Because they really knew books. And they got a ton of karma points just by doing that. And so that's an easy way to warm things up. Have the team member who's doing this stuff start on stuff that they're actually interested in, not what's relevant to the business. And then be good about engagement, be respectful, be helpful, and then obviously reserve your subreddit if you might want to build it. You might as well grab it even if you're not gonna build it yet. But figure out your keyword and just grab it, or find a dormant subreddit.

Andrew Shotland

That's the presentation. There's a lot of

Andrew Shotland

Reddit lingo you'll learn. So I included a handy link to the Reddit lingo guide. You'll see if you get into Reddit, people are

Andrew Shotland

using these abbreviations all the time, like OP is original poster, AMA is Ask Me Anything, that kind of stuff, and Snoo is the Reddit mascot. Anyhow, that is the presentation. I believe Jojo will share this deck with you so you can share it with your family who will love it, and friends.

Jojo Furnival

That would be

Jojo Furnival

awesome, please. Not least because we did have a couple of technical difficulties partway through. But I'm sure we can fill in the gaps tomorrow when we share the deck. Thank you so much, Andrew. We've got some fantastic questions, so we are gonna go to them. I've got questions too, but I'm gonna have to wait, I think, because we're gonna have to start with this one. Which is

Jojo Furnival

I see Reddit being useful for B2C, but what are your thoughts on B2B? Is it worth looking into, especially if selling services as opposed to selling products?

Andrew Shotland

Yeah. Absolutely. I

Andrew Shotland

think — as an example, we're working with an AI observability

Andrew Shotland

SaaS company, and one of their targets is CIOs.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

you can go on Reddit and there are whole subreddits where CIOs do nothing but discuss CIO stuff.

Andrew Shotland

So

Andrew Shotland

yeah, services is definitely a thing. That said, here's a really good method. I assume you know there's a tool called SparkToro.

Andrew Shotland

Which was created by a guy named Rand Fishkin that you may have heard of. SparkToro does a really interesting job at estimating where your target customers aggregate on social media. So

Andrew Shotland

let's say it's CIOs. You put it in SparkToro. You can give a little description, and they'll say, oh, like,

Andrew Shotland

these guys all hang out on Quora.

Andrew Shotland

And so you use that tool, and that can give you a hint as to what social networks you should be focusing on. All the things I talked about here really apply to any social media site, Facebook or

Andrew Shotland

a little niche community. It's really just finding out where your customers are and then using this kind of approach.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

100%. I think

Jojo Furnival

we're — I'm giving Reddit a go, and we are obviously not

Jojo Furnival

B2C. So I can see there's a lot of value there for businesses. What is the best approach for responding to Reddit users in relevant subreddits to drive traffic back to the site — not

Andrew Shotland

Mhmm.

Jojo Furnival

spam link dropping, but do you respond to users conversationally, directly post links to the site, or is there a different or better approach?

Andrew Shotland

Sure. Well, there's no one size fits all. Right? So you have to kind of look at the subreddit you're in and

Andrew Shotland

see what the etiquette is there. If everyone's posting links, sure, post a link.

Andrew Shotland

But I think we all know

Andrew Shotland

— let's take LinkedIn as a case. Like, every one of us has

Andrew Shotland

said something smart on LinkedIn or interesting, been in a conversation, and suddenly someone pops in and goes, oh, that reminds me of a blog post I wrote.

Andrew Shotland

Or, oh, yeah. Wow. That's totally right. Have you seen this tool? And it's so obvious what people are doing. So everyone can sniff out

Andrew Shotland

a bad link, or an insincere link,

Andrew Shotland

quickly. So

Andrew Shotland

I'd kind of

Andrew Shotland

use yourself as the audience.

Andrew Shotland

Go, okay. What would I respond best to? And I think what you respond best to is

Andrew Shotland

conversation

Andrew Shotland

that's generally additive. Like, I'm adding value by responding to you.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

if I actually

Andrew Shotland

kind of

Andrew Shotland

like you, or like what you're saying, then trust the user enough to go and

Andrew Shotland

look at your profile, where all the links and marketing stuff is.

Andrew Shotland

Don't need to put your link in my face unless it's appropriate to the conversation.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

by the way, these conversations stay up forever. So

Andrew Shotland

maybe you had a conversation about your topic and you didn't put a link.

Andrew Shotland

Doesn't mean a year later you can't go back and add the link.

Andrew Shotland

And especially if the conversation ranks really well. But at the time of the conversation, I'd probably be very

Andrew Shotland

judicious about

Andrew Shotland

marketing myself.

Andrew Shotland

Because Reddit doesn't dislike marketers. It hates spammy marketers.

Jojo Furnival

The kind of time frame thing.

Jojo Furnival

We've got another one here.

Jojo Furnival

We've considered creating a subreddit related to our space, but we're worried about having to moderate it and it being time consuming.

Andrew Shotland

You too.

Jojo Furnival

Tips on cutting it down. I know — speaking of how you've already

Andrew Shotland

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

abandoned yours. No?

Andrew Shotland

You know what? I should really look into this. Next time we do this presentation, I'll figure it out. But thank you, Jojo. The

Jojo Furnival

Sorry.

Andrew Shotland

the

Andrew Shotland

there's probably a tool to, like, turn blog posts into Reddit posts. I guarantee you that exists.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland

So that might be one way — when you

Andrew Shotland

post on your blog, it automatically posts on your subreddit. But I don't think there's any —

Andrew Shotland

what's gonna happen to you is what happened to my Local SEO for AI. I just got distracted and stopped

Andrew Shotland

tending my garden, and now it's kind of fallow. So I think there's no substitute for human beings

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland

doing stuff.

Jojo Furnival

Do you know? I have one tiny suggestion as well, just in case this is helpful, which is getting more moderators, right, to help you out. So I've recently engaged experts within the community — in my case, it's the SEO community — to help me out moderating the JavaScript SEO subreddit.

Andrew Shotland

Oh, right. Yes. Yes.

Jojo Furnival

So that might be one route to go down, because you're right — any social network is

Jojo Furnival

time consuming when you do it properly.

Jojo Furnival

Right? I think that's the

Andrew Shotland

100%. That's a great suggestion. And if anyone wants to be a moderator on Local SEO for AI, let me know.

Jojo Furnival

the thing.

Jojo Furnival

Apply herein.

Andrew Shotland

Exactly.

Jojo Furnival

So for increasing karma,

Jojo Furnival

going off topic means

Andrew Shotland

Oh, like, so if I'm

Andrew Shotland

trying to sell SEO services, I go into a group about coffee because I love coffee, and I just start

Andrew Shotland

saying, well, here's how to roast coffee the right way. Like, that kind of thing. You know, just whatever — let's just say I love the group Stereolab.

Andrew Shotland

I'm in the Stereolab subreddit, and that's where I've probably got most of my karma — talking about stupid stuff about Stereolab.

Jojo Furnival

Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. So it doesn't have to be super relevant

Jojo Furnival

to what you're trying to

Andrew Shotland

No. You know, that's an interesting point, though. I've never really looked into whether, if you have karma from relevant topics, that somehow does something. I don't think it does. I don't roast my own beans, Patrick, but I did once and, you know, my wife kind of laughed at me.

Jojo Furnival

Oh,

Jojo Furnival

Oh,

Andrew Shotland

But

Andrew Shotland

maybe it's time again.

Jojo Furnival

So when searching for

Jojo Furnival

[insert a brand]

Jojo Furnival

plus Reddit on Google, what would you say are the key factors that decide what ranks on top in the Google SERPs? Is it upvotes? Is it comments, freshness, etcetera?

Andrew Shotland

I think it's super query dependent. But if you had to pick one, I think it's comments. Like, people going, yeah, this is great. And really substantial comments — comment activity, again, within the six to ten hours of posting it, seems to be the magic.

Andrew Shotland

But you can revive posts. We see this a lot with reputation management. So

Andrew Shotland

unfortunately, a lot of brands, if you search their brand name, there's a post in a subreddit that basically says, this brand sucks or has, like, a sketchy thing. And

Andrew Shotland

you can sometimes overpower that

Andrew Shotland

post by just creating another post in the same subreddit and getting more comments

Andrew Shotland

as quickly as possible. It's not foolproof.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland

But comments seem to be the number one thing Google likes.

Jojo Furnival

So following on from that — this is one of my questions. With the focus being

Jojo Furnival

squarely on comments,

Jojo Furnival

in your experience, do we think it's almost like keyword difficulty — like, relative to the niche of the term? I experimented with an AMA post recently, and that definitely got the most comments of any of the content that I had been putting on there.

Jojo Furnival

But I'm trying to gauge — is it enough? What sort of quantity are we talking about?

Andrew Shotland

I think you have to look at what you're competing against. So do your search in Google, see what Reddit thread is showing up there, and you can kind of see what the activity is on it.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

you wanna get more than that, as best I can tell. We're working with a

Andrew Shotland

startup that does DNA testing.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

they had,

Andrew Shotland

if you search their name and reviews, there's a subreddit post at the top that basically says — it's not the worst thing, but it basically says the problems with blah blah blah.

Andrew Shotland

And

Andrew Shotland

we tried a spammy way. Like, we hired some guy who claimed to be, like, Mr Reddit, and

Andrew Shotland

basically

Andrew Shotland

got, like, a thousand people to comment and upvote, and it didn't move the needle. It didn't get

Andrew Shotland

these guys off. And I think the challenge is,

Andrew Shotland

maybe you've heard of the queries deserve diversity algorithm, which is

Andrew Shotland

reportedly what Google uses to

Andrew Shotland

take a neutral or positive search result and then add negative content. So

Andrew Shotland

your brand, especially if it's a notable brand, chances are there's always gonna be a negative

Andrew Shotland

URL, or negative sentiment URL on your search results for your brand because of this queries deserve diversity

Andrew Shotland

algorithm. So it may be very hard to dislodge it — you're fighting Reddit's algorithm and Google's algorithm. So reputation management — I've found it to be really tricky with Reddit in competitive spaces. To the point where I'm like,

Andrew Shotland

you know, it's what SEOs always say. Hey, man. The solution is to be better, not to not suck.

Jojo Furnival

Right.

Andrew Shotland

Like, that's the solution. And I think that really is the solution.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah. Just be better. Okay.

Andrew Shotland

Yeah. Just be there.

Jojo Furnival

So

Jojo Furnival

any tips on growing subreddit traffic? Post more, post frequently?

Andrew Shotland

I think posting frequently — so that the lights are on — matters, because I believe that's part of Reddit's algorithm for surfacing you in their search results. If you're not active, you're not gonna be surfaced in search results on Reddit. And that's how most people are gonna find your subreddit.

Andrew Shotland

That said, I think there's no substitute —

Andrew Shotland

it's kind of like,

Andrew Shotland

yeah, just think about virality.

Andrew Shotland

You're

Andrew Shotland

either gonna hit singles every day

Andrew Shotland

or you're gonna hit a grand slam home run. And the odds of hitting a grand slam home run are low.

Andrew Shotland

But that's what's gonna drive the most traffic — if you do something that

Andrew Shotland

accidentally hits a nerve and people respond to it. But I think if you're constantly posting good stuff

Andrew Shotland

and

Andrew Shotland

you get other people — the key is other people — to cross post it in more popular subreddits

Andrew Shotland

without it getting deleted.

Andrew Shotland

I think that's the key.

Andrew Shotland

So in Jojo's JavaScript SEO subreddit — every other SEO, so Jojo should come up with this, like, amazing thought about JavaScript SEO.

Andrew Shotland

And, has a little graphic and whatever. And

Andrew Shotland

a quote from me saying, yeah, I didn't believe it until I saw it, and it's true. And

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland

then get someone like Patrick to post it —

Andrew Shotland

actually, it wouldn't be Patrick because it's too easy to say those two people know each other. Get someone who seems unrelated to Jojo to post it in a big SEO subreddit.

Andrew Shotland

And be like, holy shit. Did you see what Jojo said?

Andrew Shotland

And that's

Andrew Shotland

kind of the trick.

Andrew Shotland

I think.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

Okay. I think we have time for one more, which is a me question.

Jojo Furnival

So I'm just curious. Have you

Jojo Furnival

attempted — you mentioned the process of attempting to claim an existing subreddit. Have you

Jojo Furnival

tried, and have you succeeded at that?

Andrew Shotland

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival

You have.

Jojo Furnival

Out of interest?

Andrew Shotland

Yeah. There's a whole process to do it. You have to have been on Reddit for a certain amount of time. I think it's, like,

Andrew Shotland

six months or something.

Andrew Shotland

Maybe a year. I can't remember.

Andrew Shotland

And then, yeah, you just — you can either

Andrew Shotland

ping the person who controls it

Andrew Shotland

and hopefully they're still alive and they'll

Andrew Shotland

be like, sure, here, I'll sell it to you for $50. Or there's a process — I forgot exactly — you can just search it on Reddit or Google. And you just apply

Andrew Shotland

to the mod community on Reddit. And they can kind of make it happen for you.

Jojo Furnival

Okay. Maybe that's the way then, because I

Jojo Furnival

pinged

Jojo Furnival

somebody who — yeah. And they replied, like, but they were alive.

Jojo Furnival

Which is, you know,

Jojo Furnival

the first battle won. But

Andrew Shotland

Thank God.

Jojo Furnival

then it kind of fizzled out. So

Jojo Furnival

yeah,

Andrew Shotland

Yeah. I think you have to — I've never been able to — I've never actually claimed one where the person responded.

Jojo Furnival

Did that go?

Andrew Shotland

I always end up in cases where someone didn't respond, and I think

Andrew Shotland

that's the thing —

Andrew Shotland

look, this thing's dead. No one's home. And it's bad for Reddit to have a dead community. So,

Jojo Furnival

Right.

Jojo Furnival

True.

Andrew Shotland

but

Andrew Shotland

your mileage may vary.

Jojo Furnival

Yeah. No. Okay. That's cool. That's interesting. Thank you. Alright. Well, we have two minutes to go, so I think I'm done with questions. And

Jojo Furnival

yeah, that's it. Thank you — thanks everybody for coming. Thank you for your fantastic questions. Do reach out to Andrew if you have further questions or you'd like to know more about local SEO. Huge thank you to Andrew. Of course, next month's webinar is especially for ecommerce SEOs. Looks like it's going to be on the 25th March. But keep your eyes peeled for when registration opens for that. Thank you again. Oh, and heads up — Andrew's daughter is looking for a work placement. There we go.

Andrew Shotland

My daughter, Audrey, is a freshman at Barnard College in New York City and needs a summer internship. So if anyone has such an internship, come my way. If any of you want to

Andrew Shotland

hit me up, I'm gonna put my meeting link in the chat right now, so you can

Jojo Furnival

There we go.

Andrew Shotland

book a call with me. Always happy to talk about this stuff for people.

Jojo Furnival

Awesome.

Jojo Furnival

Thanks, everybody. See you next time.