SEO TLDR #18: Reddit SEO, Benchmarking Your Content & The Value of Links
SEO TL;DR - 08/04/2024
Taking advantage of Reddit’s growing prominence in search?
Google Search Liason Danny Sullivan addressed concerns raised by Lily Ray on X about the prominence of forum threads, like those from Reddit and Quora, in search results for queries such as [weight loss]. Sullivan explained that despite SEO professionals' frustrations, general users find value in these forums, actively seeking them out for diverse perspectives.
On the one hand, it’s contradictory that forums filled with the anecdotal opinions of random users end up outranking carefully researched articles when Google emphasises EEAT so much. On the other hand, if users scroll through these articles to get to a Reddit answer, the algorithm will naturally put them closer to the top.
Forums like Reddit aren’t going anywhere soon; the graph below shows the estimated traffic from organic search that Reddit has received over the past five years (Source Ahrefs), and let’s not forget that Google pays Reddit $60 a year to use their data API so that it can scrape their content more efficiently.
This trend underscores the value users place on community-driven insights and discussions, making Reddit an essential component of any comprehensive SEO and content strategy.
💡 Tip! Here are three examples of how we advise forums can be used for our clients:
Engage Genuinely: actively participate in Reddit communities in your niche. Authentic engagement increases your visibility and credibility, making your content more likely to appear in search results.
Content Creation and Optimisation: tailor content to address popular topics within your target Reddit communities. Well-optimised, valuable content can rank well on Reddit and in Google’s SERPs.
AMA: host Ask Me Anything sessions in relevant Reddit communities. AMAs can boost visibility and engagement by providing direct interaction with your audience. Plan and promote your session well in advance, and be prepared to offer insightful, informative answers to community questions. A successful AMA can increase brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and generate content that ranks well in search results.
Want to improve your content? Benchmark against your competitors
If your organic positions are dropping and you're looking to update and improve your content, “it's not relative to previously, it's basically a re-evaluation of the whole site in the new online world & users expectations.”
That was the response by John Muller after another user asked why, after the Helpful Content Update, Google had dropped his site down from #1 to #14
This was all part of an interesting thread summarised on Search Engine Roundtable.
John also clarified confusion over whether the Helpful Content Update affected just the page level or the site level, to which he replied:
It's worth reviewing the quality of a website across the whole website. One way a site-owner can check whether an effect is site-level or not is to look at the data in their Search Console account. Picking a page that's a tiny fraction of the site's impressions is not as useful.
While anomalies exist with lower-quality sites ranking well, the overarching message from google is to focus on aligning your site with today's user needs.
💡 Tip! When looking at benchmarketing your content against your competitors who rank above you, the best place to start is by looking at your content’s quality and depth.
Identify topics they cover that you might have missed (keyword gaps). Analyse the keywords for which your competitors rank and how these are integrated into their content. This includes not just the primary keywords but long-tail phrases and questions too. Use this analysis to refine your own keyword strategy, ensuring you cover relevant terms that could improve your visibility.
Over-focussing on links is a "waste of time
John Mueller from Google recently shared on Reddit, encouraging web admins to shift their focus away from obsessing over link quantity and more towards holistic website improvements.
My recommendation would be not to focus so much on the absolute count of links. There are many ways that search engines can discover websites, such as with sitemaps. There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don't make your website better overall.
Despite some scepticism from the SEO/link-building community, John advocates for a balanced approach to SEO that values content quality and user experience over traditional link-building strategies.
How Google indexes pages
The third video in Google’s How Search Works series covers how Google Indexes Pages:
In this episode, Gary covers how processing and analysing a page’s textual content, key content tags, attributes, images, and video allows Google to determine some signals that help decide whether or not a page should be indexed.