Why You Should Use Reddit for Keyword Research
Reddit gets an unfairly bad rep. Some people hear the name of the platform, and automatically picture nerds and internet trolls living in their parents basements. However, if you’re familiar with the website, you’ll know there’s a niche for everyone on Reddit. Any interest you could possibly have...there’s a subreddit for that. This expanse of information and niches is Reddit’s superpower -- and makes it an untapped goldmine for keyword research and content creation.
Why Reddit?
It’s tragic that Reddit is so misunderstood and misused by marketing professionals when it has one of the largest audiences on the web. In fact, in February of 2020, over 1.3 billion visits were measured to Reddit, making it one of the most visited websites online. These visits range from die-hard fanatics who frequent the platform on the daily to the one-time user looking for answers to a question. And that’s exactly what makes it such a powerful keyword research tool.
Users come to Reddit to find answers and talk about their interests. If you’re unfamiliar with the platform, you can search for anything in Reddit’s search bar, and two things will come up: subreddits specific to a particular topic, and posts that include the word you searched.
Subreddits
Subreddits, distinguished by an r/ in front of some name, are groups of people who talk about a particular topic. For example, r/keywordresearch. Users post about ideas, interests, news, and questions, and other users engage in dialogue in the comments.
There are a good amount of subreddits with millions of followers, like r/videos or r/animals. While these might be fun to scroll through aimlessly, these aren’t the depths of the internet that will provide you with any value as a content marketer.
There are subreddits for any topic you could possibly want to research. And yes, this means business and marketing, too! As an aspiring digital marketer, here are some subreddits I frequent for insights in the field:
Because users come to reddit to talk about things they like and ask questions, subreddits are essentially unbiased and honest search engines.
As a marketer conducting keyword research or looking for new content, searching subreddits is a great way to find out what people are actually talking about within your niche.
This also helps you write more SEO friendly headlines because you can study the language users are using to write their posts. How does your target audience talk about your topic online? What words and phrases do you see most often? In a way, noting language from subreddit posts is like taking advantage of user-generated content. After all, what resonates better with someone than something written in the way they like to consume or talk about their interests?
How to Conduct Keyword Research with Reddit
Conducting keyword research with Reddit is fairly straightforward, but we’ll walk through an example as further proof of how powerful the platform is.
Let’s say I run a small ecommerce store selling handmade planners. If I log onto reddit and conduct a simple search for the keyword “planner”, I get results for multiple relevant subreddits:
If we choose r/planners, we are directed to the subreddits home page. You can see from looking at the posts on the homepage that there are multiple places to get ideas for keywords and content: visualization, digital planning, “How I Journal”, etc.
Reddit defaults the results to the “hot” posts of the day, but you can also refine your search results within a subreddit to look at “new” or “top” posts. This makes it easy to find content that has higher engagement. If you want to niche down even more, you can refine your search to “controversial” or “rising” to get diverse results.
Narrow Down Content Ideas
When looking through subreddit posts, don’t limit yourself to simply scanning headlines. Identify posts with topics that are relevant to you, and look through the comments. This is where users have the most engaging dialogues responding to one another in threads and you can get the most specific content ideas.
The best keywords and content ideas usually come from discussions like the following:
“How Do I ____ ?”
“Anyone know _______ ?”
Long debates where it seems users are passionate about multiple sides of the argument
The most upvoted posts that have unanswered questions in the comments
Questions or discussion topics that have a lot of upvotes but very few answers in the comments
As you find keyword and content ideas, it’s a good idea to keep track of them in a spreadsheet or notebook to reference later. As you frequent certain subreddits, having a running list of topic ideas can help you notice patterns in posts and what kinds of questions are asked most frequently.
Reddit Rules of Thumb and Pro Tips
Using Reddit is a great way to generate ideas for content and find out the kinds of questions people on the internet are asking that you can potentially answer. However, it’s also an easy way to get lost in a rabbit hole.
Pick 5 Subreddits to Watch
A good rule of thumb for using reddit as a research tool is to stick to about five subreddits and frequent them. Similarly, watch out for subreddits with less than 20k members. There may be some good posts in here, but the low number generally indicates the subreddit is not very active and isn’t worth frequenting. You can still look through the posts, but be sure to refine your searches to the categories “top” and “of all time” to find the posts with the highest engagement.
Ask Questions, but Don’t Spam
Of course, you can do more than just silently lurk on subreddits. Reddit is a great place to ask for feedback or even have other users answer your questions as a marketer -- you’ll be surprised by the quality of some responses, too. What makes Reddit such a strong community is the effort more devoted users take to engage in meaningful conversations.
This in mind, be careful that you don’t spam subreddits with questions all day long about your marketing activities. This clearly indicates you’re conducting informal market research. Users will pick up on this and you may face the consequences.
Check out r/IAmA
r/IAmA, also known as “Ask Me Anything, is a subreddit where experts come to answer user generated questions for an entire day. There are hundreds of thousands of AMA threads, and nowadays everyone’s done one: Obama, Bear Grylls, even Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This is a great place to see the types of questions users are asking authorities in your niche. The comments sections in these posts are usually dense, and often contain other experts chiming in. What better place to find out what people want to know?
Can’t Find Your Niche’s Subreddit?
Don’t worry, there’s a subreddit for that.
If you’re a bit lost trying to find subreddits that are relevant to your business and field of expertise, check out r/findareddit to search for subreddits! There really is something for everyone.