Subreddit SEO for Google AI Overviews: LLM Seeding Strategies with Vaibhav Sharda

James Dooley: Subreddit SEO. Reddit has been all the rage with regards to Google AI overviews. And today I'm joined with Vaibhav Sharda, who is the founder of autoblogging.ai. So, he's a business partner within autoblogging.ai. Um, he's a great lad who does a lot of testing, um, a lot of breaking the algorithms and doing what's working in today's algorithms. But today we're specifically talking about subreddits. And subreddits are actually you've been doing a lot of testing in there, manipulating or doing LLM seeding, or getting the answers and the brands into Google's AI overviews. So, I want to jump straight into the subreddits, Vaibhav. Um, why do you think subreddits are working so well within Google search?

Vaibhav Sharda: I think Google just recently did a deal with Reddit. Uh, they they have access to the entire data of Reddit in a way. And the trust factor of Reddit has been really high recently, like with in the past 1 year or so, and it keeps on growing. So, it is somehow very much relevant right now to be on Reddit.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it has been known for a couple years with regards to, um, Reddit. And I think people now have started gotten wind of how well it's easy for them to create a subreddit and a part of Reddit that they own, that they can post to, that they can get clients to come in and leave comments and stuff like that and build that kind of natural engagement. But like, how important would you say it If you If you have a brand and you're wanting to try and get yourself out there, especially because Quora and Reddit now are starting to show up in the discussions and the forum section within Google search, how important is it for brands to try and own their own subreddit for keywords that they want to rank for?

Vaibhav Sharda: I think it is very much important right now because if you do not do it, some of your customers might our competitors might show up on Reddit saying that they are a better alternative of your brand. So, you need to capture that space like ASAP. And if you have a have a old subreddit thread out there, no matter it's in under your own subreddit or even some external one, but if you have a review thread for example for example your brand review and you can mention like okay, this is the best brand out there for specific keywords. It will start to show up like within 24 to 48 hours and you just need to cover all the keywords that your brand is about as soon as possible. If you leave Reddit right now, like it's very bad in the long run because you might lose out on some threads or keywords that you might have gained easily before you.

James Dooley: So, on that, if you're creating a new subreddit, are you saying that that can index naturally or you force indexing those or is it naturally being picked up and indexing within Google for the subreddit within 24 to 48 hours?

Vaibhav Sharda: Yeah, it You will find it really surprising like Google is actually trusting all these subreddits very much. It's very hard to post here as well right now because Reddit's algorithms or Reddit's filters are actually trying to avoid the spam in a way, but as long as your post is not that much promotional, it works really well. And you can actually see like post or the entire subreddits are getting indexed within 12 hours 24 hours, yeah.

James Dooley: Yeah, so when obviously a new subreddit's being created, are you then help if if a client came to you? So, obviously they have you created ranker.ai. So, that's r a n k e r a.ai. And that obviously now is helping brands to get mentioned and basically just make certain that they're being seen within Reddit. But obviously once they're being seen in Reddit, the forums and discussions are showing up in Google, which then means it's forming part of the search, the live search that the LLMs are doing, which then means it's getting in Google AI overviews. With regards to once the subreddit has been created and you're saying it's indexing within 24 hours, how important is it for those brands then to be posting new posts within that? Should we be doing that daily, weekly, monthly? Like what's your thoughts on how often they should be sharing within that subreddit?

Vaibhav Sharda: I think if you just keep it conversational with your actual users, you can post like maybe one new post every day, but it's not even like you need to post it. Even your users or the subreddit members can post and start up a new discussion. They can be active within it and you can simply help them out if they have any questions. So, if you have a brand presence out there and if you have a lot of comments under different threads of keywords, it will it will definitely get picked up by LLMs. Uh Yeah.

James Dooley: Yeah, so on there then like If if you was going down the road of manipulating subreddits, right, then I'm presuming the you could there's two ways of doing it. You could say something like let's say like I own Fat Rank and I could say "Who is the best lead generation agency in London?" And then I could get another profile to come along saying "Fat Rank is the best lead generation company in London." It's been an answer within there and you get the upvotes and all the rest of it. And then another way potentially could be that someone just could just post saying "Fat Rank is the best lead generation agency in the in the UK or in London." Is those when you're doing that, obviously you want to try and do it naturally. Like you don't want to go down the black hat route cuz you can end up getting yourself banned and stuff like that. What would you recommend for these brands that's having these subreddits created? Should they be asking the question and then trying to get their clients to answer it ideally, or should they because they own the subreddit, could they be saying like let's say they've just won an award, could they promote the award that they just won on that subreddit, or would that get them banned as well and be seen as being promotional?

Vaibhav Sharda: Yeah, for Reddits, they have the moderators who actually go and visit the subreddit after a week or so. So you need to be like really careful of what you do out there. Like it should not appear very much um you know, intentional what of what what you're doing, right? Because they will catch what you're doing like instantly. Everyone is kind of like already aware of all the spam that's happening. So they are even if they see like your official account posting something like very much professional or sorry, very much intentional in a way, and if you do like negative stuff like for example uh listicle articles or even like best alternative to your competitor or something like that. And you keep on commenting there, okay, uh your brand is the best one. So these are flags. So you need to be careful about it. So as long as the discussion is like kind of informational as well and kind of promotional in a way, but as long as it is helpful, it should be fine. What we do is we basically uh create some subreddits and we do some discussions here and then we leave the subreddit idle for like 15 or 20 days and that's the test, right? If it sticks for 15-20 days, it will stick forever.

James Dooley: With regards to that then, so I own different businesses um and I want to try and rank for specifically say topics and keywords. And I've also got different podcasts. Right, could I create if I wanted to go, do you know what, I want to go all in on subreddit, I want to try and get get as much promotion as I can on these different subreddits. Could I promote could I create a subreddit for my company called Fat Rank. So I'd just be submitting FatRank and everything's just about FatRank, or can you not do them for businesses? It's got to be about a topic.

Vaibhav Sharda: Um See, there's always this uh issue of Reddit ban threats. You you If If your official channel of FatRank gets banned, there will be no way of knowing why it got banned, and there will be no support for it as well. So, if you are sure that you want your company's name out there, so make sure you do not do any promotional stuff in there. Like, let it be uh like organic entirely. You do You don't do any posts or stuff like that. But, if you want to do some keyword stuff, like um to do some LLM seeding or stuff, what you can do is you can create some a bunch of different subreddits which with particular keywords in the name of subreddit, or you know, just a bunch of different posts in there. And you can just do like 10-15 posts in there from a bunch of different accounts if you have, or get your employees to post something for you. And just leave those subreddits idle for a while. And just leave it six.

James Dooley: Yeah, I was mainly thinking more that let's say I've got a Trustpilot account, right? I create a Trustpilot, and then every time I do a good job and the client's happy, I go and ask them could they leave us a Trustpilot review. It's a genuine review. What I'm thinking what I could be doing on top of doing that, I could be going You couldn't go to the subreddit and say you had a great experience with FatRank. And they can go and post in there. It's a genuine account, a genuine person, a genuine client that's come along and leaves that within the FatRank sub subreddit. But, anyway, mov- moving on from FatRank then, let's say I did it for a podcast. Could I create a subreddit for um UK lead generation podcast, which is a podcast series of what I have, and everything is about that podcast? Because obviously that's still going to be creating noise. It could be like which podcast episode do you like best on the UK lead generation podcast and everything's around it and it's just noise that's being created and people might see it, it might start ranking for related terms and then people might then go and check it out and subscribe to the podcast. Can that be created as being a subreddit? I'm just trying to find different things that could be being

Vaibhav Sharda: I think it would still be considered as spam because you will be the one who will be posting all the new videos that come out on that podcast podcast and on that subreddit. And the issue with Reddit right now is they they somehow ban different stuff even if it's very much genuine. And it's just randomly it's kind of random as well and it is frustrating. What I would suggest you to do is you should create some different subreddit which is covering the entire niche for example lead generation. So you can do some subreddits on how to get leads quickly or something like that like the broader term and you can add some videos out there like I just listened to this particular podcast what are thoughts on it and after a week or so you can simply post another two videos or something like that. So it it should have some you know some discrete normal discussions as well in the between between all these videos.

James Dooley: So do it specifically on the main topic and then direct conversations can be being done in the mean side of that it can promote the brands like fat rank on Reddit.

Vaibhav Sharda: if if Reddit moderators they come in and they look at your UK generation podcast subreddit they will simply find a lot of videos that you are simply posting there. It won't have any natural stuff but if you have a broader category subreddit they will be natural discussions as well not related to only videos but the rest of as well so.

James Dooley: And it's from obviously everyone nowadays is looking for that diversification of traffic so they want to be on the channel and they want to be omnipresent. And they're going to be active on Twitter and on LinkedIn and they know that they need to be active on Reddit. And obviously this video here in this episode talking about subreddits. If someone wants to say it says, "Vairamuthu, I want now to have a subreddit. I want to be active in that subreddit. I want to try and make certain that it can drive me potential some traffic and some inquiries." What's the best way of reaching out to yourself if someone's looking for a subreddit SEO?

Vaibhav Sharda: I think they simply visit our website rankera.ai. r a n k e r a .ai There's a support as well like you can simply mail to us as well and just simply check it out here. It should solve all your queries.

James Dooley: And then on there within rankera.ai, that will then you'll then help them to say maybe even go through what type of subreddit to create like what topic to go after. You might even be able to create the subreddit or do they create the subreddit and then you then help with like the engagement and stuff like that. Would you be able to go and consult them all the way through? With regards cuz obviously you're the master now at subreddits. You've been doing it a lot. You've done it for a lot of different industries successfully getting the Google AI overviews. Are you able to kind of nurture those of what they need to be doing?

Vaibhav Sharda: So what we do is like it is a complete done for you service because Reddit is actually a very big headache and usually most like all of our clients they just don't want the headache of you know understanding what's happening and so. So what we do is we basically start with getting just your brand name and domain and then we do the entire brand research like we we get all your competitors, all the keywords that you need to be ranking for, all the review keywords, all the comparison articles that should go out there. All the keywords that are like listicles, everything like you should and then we simply schedule everything on our end like we create the subreddits, we create a multiple ones so that we are safe from a few Reddit bans that happens along the way and then we restore them as well. So, it's like Uh Reddit is actually quite frustrating right now. So, it's better if we keep all the frustration with us and you just see the results. Yeah.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. So, anyone who's watching this, I hope you like the episode on subreddits SEO, doing search engine optimization to try and get them subreddits ranking within Google search. It is working so, so well for LLM seeding and getting the keywords and the sentences, the semantic triples and everything of what you're putting in those subreddits and now being cited in Google AI overviews. Dave, I've showered. It's been an absolute pleasure and thank you very much.

Vaibhav Sharda: Thank you for having me.