Reddit masterclass
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The ascension of Reddit to one of the largest sites on the web over the last 15 months is quite controversial and unique. Never in the history of SEO has a site grown that fast to such a level.
In a recent interview on the Motley Fool Money podcast, CEO Steve Huffman paints a picture of how large sites can succeed on Google you shouldn’t miss.1
I extracted the key quotes and added my own takes below. Every quote is verbatim, but I removed filler words. The takeaway questions at the end of each section hopefully inspire you to find new growth opportunities.
I optionally uploaded this Memo to NotebookLM’s new podcast feature, so you can listen to it if you like.
I’d love to hear your opinion in the comments about whether you prefer reading or listening to Memos!
On: growth
We made sign up much, much easier. We made both the website and the app much faster. We redesigned it in a lot of little ways so it's easier on the eyes. There are fewer bugs. And our home feed has gotten much better at making recommendations of communities that you might like. [We’re] getting people into their home on Reddit and then finding all their interests much more effectively.
We used to be more aggressive about ‘hey, login, download the app’. That worked in the short term, but long term, it was just kind of annoying because in that moment, that person probably has a question and Reddit likely has the Answer, but they're not looking to be on Reddit in that moment. They're trying to do something. I'm trying to buy this thing or I'm trying to get an answer to this question.
Our attitude now is give the person what they want. Give them the answer, let them see all the content, let them go about their day and trust that we'll see them again on the front page or opening the app when they're more primed to have the community experience. Every time they come to Reddit and get the Answer, they're learning ‘Reddit has the Answer to my questions’. That alone is really valuable.
As we’ve learned from the recent Google ranking factor leak and Google lawsuits, user engagement can trump any other ranking factor. Logically, the more friction you remove for users, the easier they can solve their problems and the better the signals you send Google. The key point here is that these changes are related to the product, not just the website. The product experience influences SEO.
The effect of positive user signals is often masked by time, as Google takes months to collect user behavior for queries and might only slowly reward sites. The slow pace starkly contrasts the fact that companies are often incentivized to harvest short-term gains, usually by adding friction to the experience rather than removing it. While there is a balance to be had, the result is usually worse user engagement signals.
Brand recognition in the search results plays into the same challenge: when visitors have a good experience with a site or product, they’re more likely to click on it again when they see it in the search results. If they encounter too much friction signing up or a poor product experience, though, that opportunity goes out the window.
Takeaway questions:
How can you improve your product and onboarding experience?
Do you have too much friction in the sign-up process to allow users a good experience?
Where can you take friction away, and where do you need to find a compromise?
How do you measure user experience on the site vs. in the product?
Either you haven't heard of Reddit or it didn't work for you. Those are the number two we're really focused on. There's a third one, which is you don't speak English. That's the next frontier of Reddit.
We can actually translate the existing Reddit corpus into other languages at human quality. Now, not all the content is relevant, but a lot of it is. We have been testing this in France, in French in the first half this year, and it's gone very, very well.
After winning in the US, international markets are a huge growth lever for Reddit, and machine translation has become good enough for most cases. The Hidden Gems update initiated Reddit’s rise in the SERPs - not just in the US - and Reddit needs to capture the momentum.
As a marketplace, it faces the classic chicken-egg problem: you need content to attract users, but users need to create the content. In the US, Reddit has famously solved the problem with fake users.2
In INTL markets, Reddit can use the content it already has to stimulate new content creation and “make the site feel alive”. The key is to get the translation good enough, and that’s where Reddit uses machine learning.
Takeaway questions:
What assets do you have in your core market that you could leverage to enter new markets?
Can you use machine translation to get to “good enough” quickly?
Do you have momentum in INTL markets that you should capitalize on?
On: SEO
We made our website substantially faster - two to five times faster. We launched this in May of 2023. GoogleBot likes speed, and faster pages rank higher and get indexed faster.
When our website got a lot faster, we started ranking higher. Users are having a better experience on Reddit. It creates this Flywheel that we're really benefiting from as we see a lot of new and core users coming from search.
A lot of SEOs miss this: Google crawls and indexes faster sites more. As a direct ranking factor, speed and Core Web Vitals optimization have the biggest impact on e-commerce. I don’t recommend prioritizing it for other types of sites - unless you see a high amount of discovered, not indexed or crawled, not indexed pages in your GSC pages report in combination with low CWV scores. As a result, crawl and indexing rates are relevant metrics for site speed as well.
Takeaway questions:
Could (server) speed be the reason you’re seeing a high amount of discovered, not indexed or crawled, not indexed pages in GSC?
Could you slim down the amount of stuff Google has to download to render the page without a massive resource investment?
We have no idea how search works. Nobody does. Right? Right. Nobody does.
Google algorithm and product changes sometimes help, sometimes hurt, but we don't live or die by them by any means.
The art of SEO is leaning into it really hard and then diversifying. It’s like investing: double down on something and diversify once you have wealth.
A common approach to getting wealthy is to double down on one investment and diversify once you’ve reached a certain return to hedge your bets. SEO for marketplaces should be no different. The question here is how dependent Reddit is on Google for growth.
My take is that Reddit depends on Google for its Top of the Funnel (TOFU) but provides a good enough experience that users would come to Reddit even if a Search algo update brought it back to its 2022 baseline. Over 50% of Reddit’s traffic comes from SEO and 42% direct, according to Similarweb. But Search is not Search. There is branded and non-branded SEO traffic. A significant mass of searchers append “reddit” to their queries, which is an incredibly strong ranking signal to Google and shows that users want Reddit results specifically. Reddit also saw strong user growth due to its exploding presence in Search. So, both are true: Reddit needs Search to grow but wouldn’t die without its front-row seat.
Takeaway questions:
Are you at the point at which you should diversify from SEO?
How can you stimulate more brand searches?
On: brand search
If you go to Google Trends, you can see this: Reddit is the 6th most searched word on Google in 2024 in the US last year. Number five is news, and maybe number eight is maps.
People are going to Google looking for Reddit. A lot of those users are already logged in. They're actually core Reddit users. They're using Google to navigate Reddit. If you're just searching on the Internet, there's a good chance you end up on Reddit.
This quote goes back to my previous point and addresses the common criticism that Reddit’s search is so bad that users need to use Google. But isn’t that in Reddit’s interest? If Google is Reddit’s TOFU and searches that include “Reddit” are a strong signal, why would Reddit improve its onsite search and kill that behavior? Reddit needs to thread the needle and make the experience good enough that users signal up once they find a Reddit result but not so bad that users can’t find anything on Reddit.
To be fair, the chance of coming across a Reddit result on the web sooner or later is incredibly high since the platform is huge. It also hosts many small but passionate sub-communities that form one large community. Other than Reddits competitors, which are mostly small niche forums, its footprint on the web is large enough to allow poor site search. Not every business can get into such a position, but some can.
Takeaway questions:
Do users love you so much that they would search your site on Google even if your onsite search was poor?
Is your footprint large enough that users would come to you either way?
On: Monetization
Our ad server doesn't care if you're logged out or logged in. They both have a user id. The main difference between a logged in user and a logged out user is logged in users spend more time on Reddit. So, we'll have a more fulsome view of what your interests are, because over time, people join more and more communities on Reddit.
You might have 100 subscriptions or more and a logged out user doesn't have any. They may have just visited a few subreddits. The main difference in value to us between a logged in user and a logged out user is time spent of the logged in accounts, they just have more inventory. But we monetize logged out users as well.
There's broadly two ways that we'll target an ad. One is based on your explicitly expressed interest on Reddit. If you join the skiing subreddit, you're likely to see outdoor ads. The other is the context of what you're looking at. If you're on a comments page, we call them post detail pages, that page is likely mentioning a company or companies by name and often specific products. We can target an ad based on the context as well. We think targeting based on your explicit interests or the context of what you're looking at are healthy and explainable and not creepy ways of targeting ads. What we don't do is we don't target ads based on your personal information, your Internet browsing habits
Reddit’s ad targeting system is very similar to Google’s. Instead of tracking user behavior and interests, Reddit and Google target them based on their search query or subreddits and posts. The benefit is not just a lower “creep factor” but also less dependency on logged-in users. As a matter of fact, about half of Reddit’s Daily Active Users (DAU) are logged in and half logged out.3 Meta, for example, couldn’t operate under these circumstances. They need more logged-in users for ad targeting.
Takeaway question:
What intent can you derive from pages users visited, e.g. with a customer journey intelligence platform or attribution model?
30% to 60% of our users are not on the other platforms.
40% of conversations on Reddit are about products or product recommendations.
First of all, these are stunning statistics. Reddit has a unique audience, which is rare as a social platform, but speaks about the passion and engagement of its many sub-communities.
Second, the fact that almost half of Reddit’s conversations are about products might explain why Google ranks Reddit so highly for so many product-related keywords. In my Deep Dive on the Digital Publishing Industry, I found that Reddit appears for at least 26% of affiliate keywords.
Reddit’s visibility in the space seems to be justified by its content and Google’s ambition to display better content for products. Cases like House Fresh, an affiliate site that got published badly by Google for unknown reasons, while big affiliate sites seem to be sloppy with their product reviews, highlight how hard it is to find good affiliate content. I also referenced a study from Germany that shows how easy it is to identify affiliate content based on borderline spammy optimization. Even though Reddit is by no means perfect and needs to find ways to combat spam, it’s still a place on the web where users can find unfiltered product reviews.
Takeaway questions:
How can you be present in Reddit’s product conversations in an open, transparent way?
Should you start a Subreddit or engage more passively?
What can you learn from product conversions about your space on Reddit?
On: moderation
Every content starts at zero points. Human beings have to vote on a piece of content up and not down to make it popular. Stuff that's out of alignment with the community or if you're being a jerk in the comments is likely to get voted down. In that sense, every user is a moderator on Reddit because every user can vote.
Then we have users called moderators. They're not employees. These are the users who create communities on Reddit. They write the rules that can be as strict as they want for their communities. They write that and enforce it for themselves.
Of course, we have our own safety team. Those are our employees. We enforce our policies at scale. We have all sorts of fancy tooling for doing so. By the way, we expose much of that tooling, all the AI stuff to the user, moderators as well. They have all sorts of filtering and this and that. By and large, Reddit is a really safe and welcoming place because it's organized by community.
Again, Google’s decision to raise Reddit’s search visibility is controversial, and Reddit is by no means clean of spam. And yet, Reddit’s multi-layered moderation of votes, Karma, moderators and safety teams make it a good experience for most users.
Takeaway question:
As a user platform, how can you leverage your user base for moderation, such as Twitter’s community notes?
I like the podcast version of Growth Memo. Please keep it up. Thank you. I also keep your newsletter so I can refer back to it if I need to.
I liked being able to listen to that clip in the context of the written content!