The Reddit SEO Advantage, Harnessing Communities to Drive Organic Growth Ep.615

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing SEO Podcast. My name is Matt Bertram. I'll be your host for today. I have a great lineup of a ton of experts coming to you very soon. I'm going to be doing a lot of recording next week. I know I took a little bit of a hiatus. We over-traveled this summer. Things were very busy. Hopefully everybody's getting back and into the swing of things and want to deliver you some great content. There's a lot of things changing with SEO. I also, in my hiatus, I was doing a lot of trainings. We had launched a small business coaching program. What else? We onboarded a ton of new clients and we've hired some new people, so I've been really busy on my end. I've been doing a lot of work and training and onboarding and trying to do it all. I thought I should get a podcast out to you guys, let you know what's going on, as well as let you know what to expect coming up. We're going to be doing a series on Amazon ads and e-commerce. There's some new programs that Amazon's launching. We don't talk a lot about that, but we have some experts coming on to do that. We do actually a lot for Chris's supplement company. They're launching new categories on Amazon for local deliveries. Actually they're highlighting furniture right now and a lot of changes. I think it's very exciting. I want to bring some experts on about that. I have some other series that I want to do as well. I also have some big names that I've had on my other podcast. We had the head of IBM Global Sales and Marketing on my other podcast. I've been doing a lot over there. I apologize for slacking off, but I'm going to get into the routine here. As we move through to Thanksgiving, I'm going to over-deliver you a ton of content because that's what we want to do. I guess hopefully that

covers the potatoes. If you're a small business and you're looking for a coaching program or if you're a marketing manager that you're just overloaded and you need some support, we have some small business and mid-size business solutions where we do full brand management. You can check over at EWRdigital.com for some of those services if you're interested. I also am recording the day after the most recent presidential election. While I'm not going to speak any politics on this, I do want to talk to some things regarding the marketing side as well as a little bit of news in the industry before we jump into the meat. There was an ad that was put out, and I will put a link to it in the show notes, by RFK. RFK recently supported Trump, whatever your opinions of that are. He put out an ad called Trump Derangement Syndrome Ad. If you have not seen this, this is brilliant marketing. There's a lot of things that are starting to happen in this campaign, and they really have the last two years. Ever since Obama, digital marketing has taken a forefront, and I love to watch what's going on, but I'll put a link in the show notes. It didn't take a lot to do this ad if you're in the industry, but it's so powerful to break down barriers, to open up people, and really, what are you trying to do with marketing? You're trying to automate sales online. You're trying to influence somebody. You're trying to move somebody from point A to point B, and there's some real power in this ad as far as who it's speaking to, what it's trying to perceive, and also putting a light spin on a pharmaceutical ad. I know we've been getting hit with a lot of pharmaceutical ads, and I was in the pharmaceutical industry and advertising, and so it just really spoke to me, and I just thought it was brilliant. I'll put that in the show notes for you to check out. Also something I think that's

super big news from a search engine standpoint, this was last month. Google was ruled a monopoly. I know that's shocking. Either you already knew that it was a monopoly, or you never thought that they would rule against it. I think the biggest thing that's going to happen is Samsung and Apple are not going to be able to default put Google on the OS systems of the phones. I think there'll be some appeals, and there'll be some different things, but if you think about Silicon Valley, if you think about even Amazon, the strategy is pick a segment and own it, and basically get a monopoly style lead in that space. You want to own that space, and then move on to a new segment. That's really how Silicon Valley's operated for a long time, and Google's done it great. They still have roughly 90% market share. Now I think there's a lot of other things happening. I think people are searching differently. I think people are getting their information differently, and Google's adapting with it. If you've been in the search engines, you see the AIs coming up in the searches. That costs them money. That's computing power to process that. I don't know how long that's going to last for, but it certainly is interesting. There's also a search engine out there called perplexity.ai. Landed a client recently that put in SEO agency perplexity.ai something, and we came up. It was interesting because he called me, or he called the company and he's like, the only reason I'm talking to you guys is because you came up first in this, and then basically one of our digital marketers that answers the phone connected him with me, and then got on the call with him based on what they were looking to do. He was like, oh man, I also listen to your podcast. That was a pretty cool connection. Really what I want to be talking about today as transitioning into some of the meat here is SEO is really, really powerful for a fractured

market. If people don't know who the market leaders are or they don't have a referral or something like that, they go to Google, and you want to own a lot of the different SERP phrases that people are looking for, and that builds credibility all the way through the funnel. Another big component, and another big news story I guess that happened is Reddit did a deal with Google. I think it had something to do with a lot of the AI content that is starting to proliferate across the internet, and Reddit has a real community. If you've ever tried to post in Reddit and you're not part of the community, you'll just get shunned out. They hate spam in that community, and different subreddits really protect what they're doing. Google did a deal with Reddit that they're starting to show up on the first page of almost every different kind of search result. There are certain categories that they're in, so they don't show up in every one of them, but they show up a lot. You all know how much traffic that SEO gets, and you need to be on the first page, higher up on the first page, and Reddit continues to show up, and you get community news associated with that. It's all done by Reddit and Google, so if you're not thinking about, hmm, maybe I should be advertising on Reddit or even other social media platforms, that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today. The analogy I used with a client I guess earlier this week was SEO is a tool. SEO is a very, very powerful tool to increase trust, authority, to show up at all stages of the sales funnel. However, it's still one channel, right? When you're running advertising campaigns, you're using multiple channels, you're trying to reach people in different ways for different capacities. Certainly if you're running ads, I don't like running all awareness campaigns, which hits the same person and you get that brand lift, but it doesn't reach a lot of people, or

it doesn't get people to the site, or it doesn't focus on conversions. Those algorithms are tweaked to run a little bit differently, so you want to run a layered campaign. Also, if you're wanting to run streaming radio, or if you're wanting to do OTT or CTV, you can't track clicks sometimes, right? You're looking for broader, higher-end awareness as you build that funnel. I love SEO. I started off actually on the paid side, but I love SEO and I really dove into it because it just checks so many boxes, and the ROI is so there, and you want to really maintain the real estate after you stop spending ads. Do we use ads? Do I love ads in campaigns? Absolutely. I'm not like all SEO or nothing. I think these things work together, and the analogy that I was getting to is if you have a door open in your house, let's just say, and maybe that's not a great analogy, I don't know, but you have a door open and you're trying to get a breeze coming through the house, or let's call the breeze traffic, and you just have one door open, and some air will get in there, it will circulate, what have you, but if you open a window and a door or two windows, and now you've got a current flowing through there, it gets powerful enough to sometimes slam a door if that's ever happened to you. You have a window open or a door, and you open another door, and the other door slams, that current gets really strong. I like to use paid to support the SEO campaigns. A lot of people like to go paid first, and then they want to layer in SEO, or a lot of people don't even get there, and just want to keep paying, but you're targeting a different kind of customer. You're reaching somebody differently, but when you can start using both hands, let's use that analogy, you get a lot more effective of what you can do if you just

had one hand. I love SEO. I love paid ads. I love influencer marketing. Again, these are all different tools, and you're not directly influencing people in Reddit, but you can be advertising in that group in a way that is acceptable to the community, and you can get brand exposure that way. I don't think a lot of brands are thinking about this. Reddit is on the first page of almost every search. You can target the subreddits of where people are searching and Reddit showing up, and then advertise on that platform. I think that's phenomenal. I don't know how much experimentation you've done with the type of people that are in those subreddits, and you want to do some research based on that. Also, you want to do some research based on the type of people that go to your site. Where else do they like to go? What else do they like to do? There's ways to figure that stuff out, and one of the things you might want to look at is what Reddit subgroups might they be interested in, and where might they be hanging out if you're going to catch people there. You've got to hit people so many times before you're a valid consideration of what you're trying to do, or what you're trying to influence, or the storytelling or messaging you're trying to perceive, especially the bigger brands. You want to be omnichannel. You want to be everywhere. Now there are tools that help you tie this stuff together. There's some really great platforms out there. If you look at ROAS on some of these e-commerce channels, as well as what you're doing when you're doing other things, not just one channel, you see huge benefits. One example is when we ride streaming radio. We do terrestrial radio, but I have a partner that does that, or an agency partner that does that, and we've been on some multi-agency committees. We're not running terrestrial radio, so don't call me about that. I know enough about it, but I don't do it.

I don't do the media buys, and also I like the digital component. You see what's going on, so I like going that route first, but anyways, when you do something like that, you get a bunch of people searching for your specific brand, because they can't click on a link, so they search your brand. Well, Google loves when people search for brands. You get a lot of brand lift. If you're trying to do X, Y, Z, or whatever you're trying to achieve, having people search for your brand might be part of that formula, and that's really fantastic, or if you're trying to do other things and you need a strong brand presence, that's one way to do it. I think Reddit is a fantastic way to do it, and so just to go into that a little bit more, there is an article by Search Engine Journal, and again, I'm slacking. I haven't written an article for them in a minute. We've been really, really busy, and we've launched some of our own properties, and we've got a lot going on. I've been asked to be a fractional CMO of a number of companies that we've been doing marketing for, and we've just kind of knocked it out of the park, and they just, I guess, want more of my time, and the agency is doing well, and I have more time to give, but okay, so there's an article, Search Engine Journal, Reddit Strategy to Attract Advertisers on Interest-Based Targeting, and so this goes into a lot of detail on why this might be a good solution, and also, it talks about how Reddit's been investing in AI-driven advertising solutions to reach better people. You've seen that with Google. There's a continuous change, and really, what they like to do, even on other social platforms, is here's what you want the title to be, here's your description, and then AI will generate five different titles, and then you can click on the ones or modify them, and then run them, and then do some A-B

testing to figure out what messaging's working best, and I think it's been working fantastic, as our experience has been. Also, some of these platforms, some of these social platforms are really, really rudimentary, and so you can't get good data, or you can't get good targeting. We have a couple of nonprofits that we're trying to target a specific person. Some of these platforms don't really give you a great way to target it, so you're trying to kind of get close, as like a Venn diagram, trying to lay over as many characteristics as you can to try to get it right, but again, brand lift standpoint, you want to be omni-channel, you want to be everywhere. Some of the key takeaways, okay, and it's all the way at the bottom. I will link to this in the show notes, but key takeaways for marketers and business owners. Reddit's unique audience targeting capabilities allow advertisers to reach users based on their demonstrated interest, even if they aren't directly related to the advertiser's product or service. See, I think that that's fantastic. If you think about the customer journey, how do you reach these people? This can help uncover new opportunities for the audience expansion and engagement. The platforms focus on facilitating authentic conversations, key, while passionate communities provide a trusted environment for brands to connect with their target audience. However, marketers should approach these communities with respect and aim to contribute value to the discussion. So if we're talking about community management, right, so there's people out there that do community management. I think it's highly effective. Facebook groups, there's LinkedIn groups. Getting involved and adding value to a community you're part of, not just going in and pitching is really key. A lot of community job boards or chat boards, same kind of context. It's just Reddit's aggregating a lot of that community and have really enhanced the features. And if you haven't been on it, that's one of the places, in addition to Twitter or X, where I now get my news because it's real time.

It's, what is it, citizen journalism, I think might be the term for it. And I mean, I'll give you an example. There were some fires in Rio Dos in New Mexico, and we have some friends there, and it's in the big news. And essentially, the national media wasn't really covering it. On Twitter, I was getting real time posts for people, and I could search for different things, and I could see what was going on real time. And then I was getting things that were in the news cycle two to three days before anybody reported on it. And look, if you're a blogger out there or you're trying to hit your numbers on view rates or trying to be a reporter, I mean, Twitter X is really key. And I think, really, Reddit is a great way to get feedback from quantitative research that you're doing on different brands. I think there's really a big way to leverage this community, but you got to get involved with it. And I know a lot of people don't always have time to do it, and that's why advertising to that group in that community is a way that you approach it in a way that is professional, but you're not trying to spam something in there organically, which never works. Think about the person that goes to a networking event, which they're coming back, and we've been busy with some conferences and stuff like that. But that person, don't be that person that has a bunch of business cards that walks up to a group that hands their business card to everybody, doesn't ask what they do, whatever, and then they leave. And they think that someone's going to buy based on that. And a lot of the things that are happening in person just happen in line. It's just a different platform or a recreation of that human experience. And that's kind of what that is. You're just kind of spamming it, and that business card will get deleted by a moderator, or it'll get hidden or

buried, and no one looks at it. And I would tell you, that's the thing I actually dislike the most on X or Twitter, whatever, is just the nonsense. You know, I'm sure that someone's going to come out with an AI filter that only showing me the relevance. And I like kind of how it's starting to hide it and say, like, okay, these are relevant comments. The rest could be spam. You know, I think a lot of these platforms are maturing in what they're doing, and it's becoming less Wild West. But again, you want to optimize for what is happening currently that you're an early adopter for. And I would tell you that if you're still listening to this podcast and you're still getting value, take action like nobody's really advertising on Reddit. Everybody outside of Facebook and Google really are just getting crumbs from the advertising spin that's happening. I think you want to really spread it around, and you should really consider Reddit. Okay, so Reddit heavily invests in AI driven advertising solutions, which can help marketers improve targeting, optimize ad placement and enhance creative customization. Staying informed about new AI features can help advertisers remain competitive on the platform. Also, I think that this is a great way to see what other tools I'm seeing AI getting integrated into a lot of different tools we're using, and it's making them better. And it's making the people that are power users of them more efficient. And I think that now more than any other time, change is happening, and you want to change with it. As Reddit expands its ad offering, it remains committed to balancing monetization and user experience. Marketers should be mindful of this balance and aim to create non-intrusive ad experiences that align with user preferences. So I'll give you a great example of this. The Super Bowl, right? The Super Bowl, people make ads that are entertaining. And I mean, I watch the Super Bowl specifically for the unveiling of specific ads, but people don't mind ads if they're entertaining,

or they're targeted properly. So it's offering a solution to you. I'll give you an example. I think a lot of people listening may have been exposed to a recruiter, executive placement person at a time, a headhunter, right? And if headhunters are calling you and you're not interested in a role or a job or whatever, it's kind of like, hey, I'm not interested. It's kind of like, you know, it's a spammy call or it's a pest or I don't know what term you want to use, but it's not helpful to you because you're not in market for a new job. However, right? If you just, you know, brushed up your LinkedIn profile and you're looking to take that next step in your career, or you just went through a review and you didn't get the pay increase you wanted, or, you know, somebody, a boss or somebody's rubbing you the wrong way and you're looking to make a change and a recruiter calls you with a fantastic opportunity at the right time, right place, right message, right? Then you're like all ears, like, hey, I'll talk to you for whatever, like, how can I help you? What do you need? That's kind of how advertising works. And that's why all this data is so powerful in digital marketing. You're not just, hey, let's run a print ad and just hope it goes well. Let's buy a billboard and just hope that, you know, the 13% of people that are driving by this actually see it and take action. You can make changes. You can change messaging. You can see what people are doing. Like there's so much more that happens. And I think that one of the things I see more than anything else is when I look at competitor brands for clients in all industries, you just got people doing really bad targeting, to be honest. Local companies that are advertising nationally and maybe only service 25 miles from a geographic area, and they're just running these ads nationally and they're spending a bunch of

money. That's just bad targeting. And that's not helpful because that's not even a product you can service. So, you know, again, it's a tool. If you use it properly, it can be really effective. And I would tell you that digital marketing and SEO level the playing field with the big players. And if you're competing against a big company, because I'm doing a lot of stuff right now from a brand strategy standpoint on the oil and gas front, industrial front with companies that are trying to reach that market, that can do very advanced campaigns. And there's some really fun stuff that we can do because we can add these different channels. We can do the budget. We can build out little apps. So I did something for a candy company. And we worked with a partner, of course, like we don't build apps, but there's just awesome stuff that that you can do. But there's only like two people at that big company in that department that really care. Or like, let me give you just, you know, I'll make it up. But like, let's say there's five people or 10 people on the team that's actually who you're competing with. And they have actually a set limited budget. It's not the whole company necessarily. If you're competing in a niche market or they're trying to develop a market. Maybe there's like two or three people on that team that actually know what's going on or kind of driving the marketing component of this. And then like one of those people is just like not engaged, maybe because they're not in the office anymore. They're working remote. They're maybe not talking. Maybe they're focused on another project or they're getting pulled in this direction. But you probably have like one to two people that you're really, really competing against. And one of the people might be looking for another job or something like that. Like they're not like so invested. So if you're a small business or you're a medium-sized business and you're trying to compete

against these bigger companies, if you have a good strategy, you can do that. I'm about to publish a bunch of case studies. Okay. And our website needs an overhaul. We haven't put up stuff for a few years and we're working on the brand stuff. And I'm really excited about what we're going to be rolling out. But man, I have case studies explaining to you how to attack these bigger markets and how a startup can go up against like an $8 billion company and win. Right. And how do you win? You don't eat the whole elephant at one time. You eat it in small bites. You eat it in different niches and different segments and a little bit of here and a little win there and a little traffic here and a placement here and an ad conversion here and some branding on Reddit here. You're going to win and you're going to win it. You know, you're going to be getting that micro growth here and here and you're going to be wearing away here and you're going to be able to establish the brand. And if you niche down small enough and then you own that market, then you start expanding. Um, I will, I'm going to do, I'm going to try to do a, a like infotainment documentary with this sunglass company that we're working with. And, um, I'm going to be going and meeting with the owners and, um, I'm going to try to record the whole thing and, and put it out for people to kind of experience and see a, how that process goes to take a brand that was actually developed in COVID to go up against huge companies and when, but when one step at a time, not, not to take them head on. Right. And I have multiple case studies of how we've been able to do this and supplements and a number of other brands. So you have to be strategic with your marketing. You have to make sure that you're measuring what's going on. And

then step by step, you can, when you can reinvest and you can take that market because the big players might not be focused on you yet. And you can build up a big enough war chest to start taking them on. Now, of course you can go get private equity and you can raise money and you can go head to head. But I also don't think that that's a great strategy if you're not the market leader out of the gate. So, you know, I do blogs and, and talk about some of this stuff and, and, and really I've written a number of books on, on personal branding, right. Of how, how those can apply to all kinds of things, but overall brand placement, super important and SEO helps do that. Right. Okay. So let me, I'm digressing. I apologize. The platform offers that we're talking about Reddit here. The platform offers full funnel management solutions such as Reddit brand lift. So we're talking about that, like reaching customers, making them see an ad a number of times to, to remember that. Now, sometimes, you know, you gotta be careful that gets annoying. If you see the same ad like five times in one day, you're like, okay, I got it. Right. But conversion lift is pretty important. So, you know, sometimes people need a little bit more of a nudge. That's why I like with retargeting where you can change those messages as you reach them. So you're having kind of a one-way conversation with them and it's not incredibly hard to set up and it's super powerful. It's probably what I think most small businesses are missing most. They need to be looking into retargeting. A lot of times when, when we do audits of campaigns, they're running like branded campaigns, which is a whole nother podcast. I've done some in the past of what I think about that and how you should approach it, but the agencies or the freelancers that are doing that are trying to get metrics, right? Or in the affiliate

space, people like to bid on your name because it's a high rate of a conversion, but it's not really helpful to the overall goals of the brand. So you want to make sure that there's alignment there, but conversions are good. So that helps advertisers assess the impact of their campaigns. Advertisers should use these campaigns and closely monitor the campaign reforms to optimize for better results. Again, you need to know what better results are. We're, you know, the small business coaching program, which is already really filling up pretty quickly. That's what we're going to be explaining. What I'm going to be doing in this is I'm going to be helping small businesses that want to take control of their marketing, take control of it, where I help kind of keep them out of the ditch and drive strategy. This is a kind of a pilot program that I'm launching. I have been coaching a lot of different agencies recently. And really, I had never really considered coaching, and it just seems like there's a lot that I could do to help. And so I'm getting some more time. And so that is kind of a direction that I'm open to going. And we've launched this small business coaching program at MatthewBertram.com. I was able to acquire my own name, so that's great. And if you haven't done that yet from a personal branding standpoint, you probably should. While Reddit presents exciting opportunities for advertisers, it is essential to approach the platform with a tailored strategy considering the user's unique characteristics and community dynamics. Marketers should invest time to understand the platform, ad offering, targeting capabilities, and best practices to maximize their success on Reddit. So I didn't go into a ton of tactics there, but I think that this relates back to the RFK ad about who their target audience is of his audience, and then what the goal of what he's trying to do is. And he's supporting Trump now. And so what he's doing is he's running the ad to try to hit people

that just are like anybody but Trump and break down those barriers to communicate a message. And then there'll be follow-up messages that he'll be communicating as we move into the election to move them on that path to consider voting for him. And again, not trying to get political here, I just think it is absolutely brilliant and it's a masterclass in marketing at the highest level with a lot of money if you watch what these political campaigns are doing and how they're positioning and what they're saying and even human dynamics of trying to get the other person to react and also understanding what the competitive landscape does and where they're weak and where they're strong and vice versa with a client and how to hit on those buttons to get somebody to take a certain kind of action or think a certain kind of way or move in a certain kind of direction. And so businesses use this a lot and we've done mostly stuff for nonprofits. I haven't done a lot of like political or public influence campaigns for businesses starting to do a little bit of that stuff now, but not like that's not our current wheelhouse right now, but super interesting on how you're moving the needle there. And just to kind of wrap up this podcast and I know I could keep going on and thank you so much. I know I hadn't done a podcast a long time, but if you are looking to increase revenue in your business, if you're looking to get a second opinion on your current marketing strategy, I know we're moving into the end of the year, maybe looking to make a change to get more out of your marketing, reach out to us. Go to EWRdigital.com, set up a free consultation with one of our digital marketing experts. We've been around 25 years. We have a fantastic program. The marketing strategy we're doing are working and I have been revamping a lot of what's been going on because the last 36 months has been like

a zoo. There's been more changes in the last 36 months in SEO than in the last 15 plus years. So we had to retool some things. We had to look at how things were changing and impacting and we've modified our strategies and our clients are absolutely crushing it. I need to probably read a testimonial here. We got a bunch of them across the internet. Please check it out if this is meaningful for you. Also, if you're a marketing manager and you're just overloaded and you're looking for an integrated agency to say, hey, I know what I want to do. I just need help doing it. Give us a call. Maybe we can help you out. We typically start a client with one or two different services. Our average clients are now six years plus with us and they continue to add services and grow because they're seeing ROI. And if you know that digital marketing works, but it just hasn't worked for you yet, let's get a second opinion. We'd love to talk to you. We'll be having some more podcasts coming out very, very soon. I am going to be interviewing a number of really great experts. I may start to release them sooner. I got like five interviews next week. So stay tuned and thank you for listening until the next time. Bye bye for now.