How to hijack Google search with Reddit for free SEO, customers and traffic

Reddit is quietly becoming one of the best marketing channels out there, and the businesses figuring it out are eating good.

What's happening right now is Google has started prioritizing Reddit threads heavily in their search rankings, especially for long-tail searches. ChatGPT is also boosting Reddit content in their recommendations since they trained on Reddit data. Reddit made some solid backdoor deals these past couple years and it's paying off.

Why Reddit works so well:

Word of mouth is still king across every industry. People are getting tired of the same handful of "authoritative" blog posts dominating search results. Searchers want real user opinions, not SEO-optimized fluff.

Actionable steps to take advantage of this:

I've been doing programmatic SEO for a while, but I tweaked my approach for Reddit and it's been working crazy well.

The process:

Hit up Ahrefs and find keywords in your niche with "very easy" to "easy" difficulty + 500+ monthly searches

Find an established subreddit in your space (older = better for Google authority, but smaller ones work for low-competition keywords). You can actually also create your own subreddit and grow it, then dogfood it with posts, though that's a seperate post.

Make sure they allow self-promo (there are ways around no-promo subs but that's also another post)

Create a simple post: "[Buffer text] + [long-tail keyword] + [product mention]". Example: "[I spent 2 months creating a] [reddit social monitoring tool], [its called Tool.com]

Either link directly or just name-drop so people Google you. (Direct link means more visitors but name dropping means they have to manually search for you which has its own SEO benefits)

The goal isn't for your posts to go viral - you actually want the post to quietly disappear. The beauty is Google picking up your long-tail keyword and ranks you without all the traditional SEO games with all the link building and syndication and waiting etc etc etc.

Real example:

Few months back I made a post about my ai shorts app on a trusted sub (created 2011, gets 9.5k views/week). I targeted the long tail keyword "free reddit story creator" and just casually mentioned my tool.

That post has pulled 4k views since then. Even at a conservative 20% CTR, that's 800 high-intent website visitors from a 1-minute post that'll stay up forever.

Go search "free reddit story creator" in incognito - my post ranks #1 above way more established competitors with tons more backlinks than me. Got my first two paying users from that post too.

A tip, this works for comments too. The actual number of comments on a post doesn't affect the post's rankings (which is great for us), but the content of a comment can rank just as high as posts if it's relevant enough. Bullet-point lists in comments perform especially well. An example would be to find posts asking "what are the best [X] tools?" and drop a helpful list that sneakily includes your product.

That's the approach in a nutshell. To be honest I've found this technique so viable that I created an entire tool called Mentionping.com to find the best Reddit threads to comment on. The immediate leads are nice, but the long-term search traffic you can hijack is the real gold.

In summary, Reddit + Google's new algorithm has offered a new avenue for smaller businesses to get found. Don't sleep on this. Let me know if you'd like me to write up more on this technique.

Good luck my friends