Reddit Marketing | James Dooley Interviews Dawood Khan from CrowdReply.io on Reddit SEO in 2026

James Dooley: Reddit marketing. So many people in the SEO community are talking about different strategies using Reddit as part of their SEO. Today I’m joined with Daward Khan, who is the founder of crowdreply.io and also the founder of crowdscale.ai. So Daward, pleasure to meet you. Daward Khan: Nice to meet you, James. Nice to meet you. James Dooley: Good stuff. So obviously we’ve followed each other’s work for a while. So many people in the SEO community, especially it seems after they got hit with a helpful content update, seem to move to using Reddit marketing and using your tool at crowdreply.io. For anyone who’s watching this, can you explain why Reddit marketing is important in today’s search engines? Daward Khan: Absolutely. Just to give a quick background, I own several other SaaS businesses and our main acquisition channel was content marketing. It was doing SEO. Three years ago we saw a shift. We saw our traffic decreasing by about forty percent after core updates. We also saw the shift where Reddit threads and forums started to rank for the core keywords we were going after. That’s where we had the idea that instead of only doing SEO, we should also focus on this channel because we believed that is where it was going to go from there. There was a shift in consumer search. Previously people were used to reading a five thousand word article. Right now it is more like, I just want my information, so they just go to Reddit. If someone wants to buy running shoes, they go on Reddit, see what the top comment is, and get their answer. They do not want to go to a four thousand word article filled with affiliate links. That is where we started working on Reddit. We kept using it for our projects and tools. Everything we learned, we realised it solves a real problem. Many people do not know how to do marketing on Reddit. It is different to other platforms. That is why we created crowdreply to solve that problem. James Dooley: For myself, I’ve seen so many keywords start having appended at the end where real users were searching for running shoes Reddit, and they wanted to go through to Reddit. I think a lot of users became frustrated with affiliate sites where one person did a top 10 list of running shoes, probably never even wore any of those shoes, and just put the ones that pay the most commission at the top. Users started to get wind of what was going on, so they preferred forums where people can go back and forth, comment, disagree, and upvote. That was then, I’m presuming, the start of why you created crowdreply.io. When was that created, and can you explain to people what crowdreply.io is? Daward Khan: We started almost 11 months ago with crowdreply. Crowdreply is a Reddit marketing platform. The biggest hurdle we saw with brands that wanted to engage on Reddit is you cannot scale on Reddit with just one or two personal accounts. You need a good quality of accounts to scale. That is where we come in. You can use our network of accounts that are high quality, active, old accounts. We handle the fulfilment for you. In your case you write the content and we publish that for you. That is what we provide. We have our own platform where you can track everything. We have reporting on what is working and what is not working. We have guides, tutorials, videos, just to set you up for success on Reddit. James Dooley: Anyone who’s looking to do Reddit SEO, for me, I think it’s a no-brainer. People doing search engine optimisation should be on the channel. They should be present across multiple social media accounts. What it sounds like, it is almost like you have a set of accounts that have got karma that can post, and then able to then get the upvotes. For anyone that doesn’t know much about Reddit marketing or Reddit SEO, can you explain what karma means with regards to Reddit profiles? Daward Khan: Karma is basically points. The more karma these accounts have, the better and more established your account is. With karma, there is another thing we focus on a lot. It is the age of that account. That is also super important. You can have a new account that has ten thousand or one hundred thousand karma, but the quality is still not great because the account age is relatively new. Karma is how many points you have accrued over time. It is generated by posting helpful comments on Reddit threads, putting out helpful content for people to go through. James Dooley: So for anyone in the SEO industry, it is almost like the DR of a website. It is like the rating of a profile. How important is it, let’s say I find a thread that is heavily related to local SEO. I’m a roofer in Manchester and someone says they are looking for the best roofing repair company in Manchester. How important is the karma of the profile that leaves the comment versus how many upvotes you get? Which is more important for how high the comment is seen? Daward Khan: That is a great question. It is both. The account karma and age is required for the content to stick. If you have a strong account, it is easy to comment. The second part is the upvotes. You post a new comment and it will sit lower. People landing on the thread from Google will read the top comments. They have the highest visibility. That is why upvotes are super important. Karma helps the comment stick. Upvotes push you up the rankings within the comments. James Dooley: So with that roofer example, if I wanted to post and say a company is the best, come and get in touch today, and then link to my website, can I place a link in that comment or will it get removed if I’ve got low karma? And if I was to use crowdreply.io, would that stick if I’ve got high karma? Daward Khan: There are a lot of things that go into this. The most important thing is if you are too promotional, people will call you out. It needs to add value, add information, then mention your brand in a subtle way. If it is too strong and you are hammering your brand name, it does not work. A better approach is a normal comment, sharing experience, so it does not sound like you are shilling. There are two approaches. Adding links, or just doing a brand mention. We recommend brand mentions because social platforms are not built to divert external traffic. Links also look more promotional. Adding links is super hard on Reddit generally. Brand mentions without links work better. James Dooley: Would you incentivise people in the comment to search for the brand name, without linking, or put a phone number in? Or stay away from anything promotional? Daward Khan: That is a good suggestion. For local businesses, you can add your brand name and you can add your phone number. For people doing affiliate marketing or rank and rent, they can add numbers that forward to other numbers. That can work. You can add your name, you can add your number, you can add links, but links generally have a higher removal rate. James Dooley: So we used roofers in Manchester as the example. That’s local SEO, brand mentions, exposure, good for branding. What if I type in roofers in Liverpool and Reddit does not rank for that query in Google. Is there a way of using crowdreply.io to prompt a Reddit thread, ask who the best roofing company is, leave reviews, add upvotes, and then try to pull that thread into Google for that query? Or does that not work very well? Daward Khan: It definitely works. Even if there is no Reddit thread ranking for that specific keyword, it presents an opportunity. In most cases, you have a subreddit for that city. You can go in there, post a thread, and ask, can anyone recommend a good roofing company in Liverpool. Once that is posted, you can post a comment where you promote your brand, again in a helpful and subtle way. Inside our platform, you can find threads. You do not have to go through Google search because we have automated that. You pick your keyword, add it in, and we scrape Reddit threads ranking for that term. You can also see traffic metrics, so you know if it is valuable to engage or not. You click add comment, write the comment, then submit. We use our network of accounts. You do not have to connect personal accounts. We post the comment on the thread. Then we have the upvote feature. To get your comment into the top positions, we analyse the top comment and how many upvotes it has. We tell you how many you need to outrank it. We drip-feed upvotes, for example two per day. That reduces the risk of triggering Reddit filters, especially on older threads. You can also add replies and schedule them. You can add your main comment, then schedule a reply one day later. You set it up once and replicate it across many threads, cities, and keywords. James Dooley: So you have shown how easy it is to use crowdreply.io. But let’s say I do not have time. I do not want to log in. I do not want to publish comments, reply, find threads. You also have crowdscale.ai. Could I just say, I own a lead generation agency, go and find all lead generation threads and communities, and post who I am and what I do across them. Is that what crowdscale does, as opposed to crowdreply? Daward Khan: Absolutely. Crowdreply is the do-it-yourself platform. You have everything at your disposal. You write comments, you post them, you track everything. Crowdscale is for companies that do not have an in-house content writer or someone that understands Reddit. Even if they have a writer, Reddit writing is different. A lot of B2B and SaaS companies write in a professional tone that works in articles but does not work on Reddit. So for crowdscale, we help generate leads and traffic. We also handle brand reputation. If there is a negative thread about your brand ranking in search, like “is X legit” or “X reviews”, we work on reputation. We also help with increasing LLM visibility on platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, because Reddit is one of the top cited sources. If you want visibility in those systems, you need to be on Reddit. James Dooley: So you have crowdscale.ai and crowdreply.io. Both are for Reddit marketing and Reddit SEO. You mentioned brand reputation management, local SEO, local lead generation. What if someone is watching and they are a SaaS owner. Can Reddit help SaaS for branding and exposure? Daward Khan: Absolutely. We have done almost sixty thousand comments across all our clients. When you do that amount, you see patterns. SaaS businesses work super well on Reddit because there is not much competition. Local businesses also work well because there are threads getting traffic but nobody is engaging. They are older comments. That creates opportunity with low competition. For very competitive spaces, ranking on Google can cost thousands or millions. For a new SaaS product, it is hard to appear in those Google results quickly. But with Reddit, you can engage on threads that already get traffic and be there from day one. That is why Reddit is important for SaaS. James Dooley: You had notes that affiliate marketing is tough. Explain why you say affiliate marketing is tough for Reddit. Daward Khan: We still have users doing affiliate marketing using our platform and it works for them. We have people doing casino, crypto, and other niches. But it is getting harder. Reddit is putting more restrictions. If you add a link, there are workarounds and we have resources on how to do it, but it is harder. If you want to build a genuine business that works long term, that is the better approach. Affiliate marketing can make money, but it is not always long term. In general, it is tougher than building a real brand presence in niches where you can add value. James Dooley: Reddit has exploded in the last few years. People love discussions and forums to get information. I recommend Reddit marketing for anyone not doing it. Daward, you’re an innovator. You’re two steps ahead of the game. What do you think is important going into 2026? What should people be doubling down on? Daward Khan: The traditional way of doing SEO is changing. We still have Google and search platforms generating traffic, but there is a shift. People need to prepare for AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Companies come to us asking how to rank on ChatGPT. They do not understand how it works. They just want to be there. As SEOs, it is important to understand how it works. In the next five years, the ecosystem will look different to what we see now. For our own platform at Crowdreply, we are not only focusing on Reddit. We are working to cover other social platforms like Facebook, Quora, and others in future, so businesses can engage across multiple platforms and not rely on only one. James Dooley: To anyone who’s watching, I hope you liked the episode with Daward Khan, founder of crowdreply.io. Reddit marketing is a hugely important part of SEO, holistic marketing, being omnichannel and omnipresent. Make sure you check out the link in the description. There is a follow-on episode about AI search visibility where Daward is looking at multiple channels like Quora and Facebook, and other platforms to support LLM rankings. AI search visibility, whether you call it LLM optimisation, AI SEO, GEO, or anything else, Daward Khan is usually two steps ahead of the game. I hope you liked this episode about Reddit marketing and Reddit SEO. Daw, it’s been an absolute pleasure. See you again soon. Daward Khan: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.