Reddit Keyword Research – An Online Entrepreneur’s Guide

I am not going deep to tell you what is Reddit because there are tons of information in the internet talking about it.

If you really don’t know about Reddit, a good place to start is go to Wikipedia and there is a YouTube video titled What is Reddit below.

The other useful resource would be from Reddit itself. You could possibly know almost everything about Reddit from their FAQ here.

Reddit's help desk gives a very good explanation below.

Reddit Keyword Research

Why we should not ignore Reddit as a potential keywords source?

Before we dive in, let’s look at some of the statistics about Reddit.

According to latest rankings from Alexa, Reddit ranked 24th globally and 7th in US.

So it is a very popular site with real people participating in commenting and posting on virtually everything on Earth!

So if you are a blogger or entrepreneur (whether online or offline), this is one place where you could mine very valuable keywords (or blog post ideas/topics) for your next content marketing.

And the beauty is these keywords would not show up in the usual way when you search using Google Keyword Planner.

Due to its limitations of Google Keyword Planner, some keywords are hidden from normal search UNLESS you type in the keywords exactly.

Rationale of using Reddit as an unusual method for keyword research

The logic of using Reddit for seo keyword research is rather simple:

So are you ready to go deep to dig into how to uncover untapped keywords using some very simple step-by-step strategies?

Step #1 Zero In A Broad Niche

If you haven’t got any clue of what to write or you just want to explore in Reddit, use this tool (MetaReddit) to find out what kind of communities are inside Reddit.

This is really a mini search engine for the purpose of searching subreddits in Reddit. You could search what subreddits are inside Reddit using normal search.

Also there is a “tags” search function where you could search subreddits that share a common topic. The "stalk" function let you see which Reddit subscriber (called redditor) is active and his recent activity.

Alternatively you could go to redditlist.com to find some popular subreddits.

Over there you could see how different subreddits are ranking in terms of recent activity, number of subscribers and growth (past 24 hrs).​

Before you proceed, I assume you have already registered as a subscriber in Reddit.

If you haven't, just go over to Reddit and register.

Step #2 Identify Suitable Subreddit

​After you have explored what kinds of subreddit are available in Step #1, it is time to head over to Reddit's built-in subreddit search function.

This to identify a suitable subreddit for further research.

Remember subreddit is a community for a specific topic. So our job is to find a suitable subreddit to target:

Below are the criteria to bear in mind while doing this:

For our example below, I have typed in “entrepreneurship” in top search box.

Next you should type in a suggested subreddit name into the second search box to find out what subreddits are available.

In our case, we type in the subreddit name “entrepreneur” and that brings out all subreddits with “entrepreneur” in their names.

Here is what we get.

Note that the first subreddit (/r/Entrepreneur) has more than 224,000 subscribers. And should be a good place to find some good topics.

Of course some subreddits will have much less number of subscribers and usually there will be less discussion threads.

Step #3 Research Content Ideas From Discussion Threads

As a start we can sort the posts in the subreddit by using the buttons at the top: “hot”, “new”, “top” or “gilded”.

My favorite is to use “top” to sort and filter it through time period “past year” because normally there will be large number of posts in “top” posts and we do not want posts that are too old that are over 12 months..

Of course you could use different time period other than “past year” like “all time”, “past hour”, “past month”, “past week” or even “past 24 hours”. There is no right or wrong in this aspect.

Examples of interesting content ideas that I extracted from the subreddit /r/Entrepreneur is shown below.

The next step is click and expand the post to see all the comments and details in order to search some very good topics for your niche.

For example we have used “how to” to refine the search in the subreddit /r/photography.

Immediately there are a few “how to” content ideas/blog topics that we could use. Two are listed below.

How to make amazing portraits with minimal affordable gear

How to increase the performance of your Canon Kit lens.

Step #4 Finding Keyword Opportunities

The next step is to extract some potential keywords from the discussion threads in the subreddit you have identified.

There are two ways of extracting the keywords from the discussion threads.

4.1 Manual browsing

This method takes longer time but it is very insightful.

You will need to go through the discussion threads to read the comments, questions and answers to hunt for those keywords.

This process is slow but you would be able to identify some golden keywords to analyze.

The objective here is go to the right subreddit, identify discussion threads with lots of back and forth commenting, scan them with eyeballing for terms or keyphrases you have not seen in your previous research.

This is hunting for keywords that you know you don’t know about.

4.2 Using Keyworddit.com

This method is making use of a free keyword tool called Keyworddit.com and is a time saver

This online tool is rather useful in extracting some keywords (why only some keywords? I would explain later) from the subreddit you have identified.

Let’s see what happened when we put the most popular weight loss subreddit (/r/loseit) into the search box.

The tool returned 362 keywords in total ranging from 0 to 4,400 monthly searches (US).

Part of the screenshot is shown below for keywords with more than 2,400 searches a month.

Just follow the 5 steps as shown above to extract the keywords.

Points to note

The gold mine step (Step E) is where you analyze the content where people are talking about the keyword.

You would uncover ideas and context where this keyword "homemade chicken salad" is being discussed in the posts such as below.

Though there are some limitations when using this tool, Keyworddit is really a time saver. Just imagine how much time we could have saved in the above example if we were to manually scan the posts in the subreddit.

In this example, we get 362 keywords with a few clicks in under 5 minutes using this marvelous keyword tool.

Step #5 Validate Your Keywords

In this important step you should further analyze the keywords you get from Step 4.2

There are 2 options you could use, depending on your choice and budget.

The first option is the free method where you plug those keywords in Google Keyword Planner and start analyzing.

The other option is use a paid tool such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz or any other tools of your choice.

When validating the keywords, we should make sure the following are analyzed;

For the subreddit /r/loseit above, we have performed a keyword difficulty analysis on one of keywords using Moz parameters.

The top 10 analysis for "coconut flour bread" is as follows.

From the above table, we notice that PA (Page Authority) of most of the top 10 sites are below 30 and their DA (Domain Authority) are NOT that high too (many are below 50).

The number of backlinks (authority links & total links) to the sites are low.

As regards to whether the keyword is trending downwards over time, look at below screen-shot from Google Trends.

The search interest over time (past 90 days) is more or less the same month over month.

Therefore, it is safe to say that this keyword “coconut flour bread” should be a FAIRLY EASY keyword to rank and is not a keyword with declining search interest.

Step #6 Finding New Websites

This step of using Reddit for SEO keyword research is actually trying to find new websites that are already there but they just NEVER appear or come to your mind during your initial research.

There is always some niche sites in every field which are frequently used by real people (like redditors) but Google does not display when you do a normal search.

They might just appeal to certain audience indirectly.

Reddit could do a better job by indexing these relevant sites for your research.

Let me show you some examples.

I started by going over to https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/ and then typed in topic of interest “SEO”.

Reddit returned some related subreddits as shown below.

Then I clicked the subreddit /r/SEO to explore.

This brought me to this page https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/

From this subreddit page, I clicked the “wiki” tab at the top.

This brought me to the wiki index page https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/wiki/index where there are links to various sites for different guides on seo.

At the right hand side of this page, there are more related subreddits:

Then I decided to explore /r/webmarketing

After that I clicked the wiki tab at the top and this opened to this page, see below.

Voila! You could see that there is a gold mine of information on the topic of web marketing:

So you could see that by applying the above method, we are able to find new websites (thus new keywords as well) related to our topic of interest.