Keywords you should be tracking on Reddit
Social Listening is the act of tracking keywords online related to your business. It's a popular tactic not just for market research, but also for customer acquisition.
Reddit is the internet's largest online community platform and social listening to conversations on Reddit can be an incredibly effective, low-cost, and time-efficient marketing tactic...
... if you track the right keywords.
Below are the types of keywords that you should be tracking on Reddit to maximize your exposure to conversations that could lead to business opportunities.
Track product category keywords
This is the basic category that you should absolutely be tracking for your product. If you are working in a market that has several players, there are likely common terms for your product category and features that your users expect your product to have.
These conversations are often people asking for product recommendations, so being first to respond with your product can pay off big time. If you are plugging your product on one of these conversations, make sure to include some of your top differentiators compared to your competitors.
Examples:
"SEO tool"
"SEO audit"
"On-page SEO"
"keyword tracker"
"keyword planner"
Track customer objectives
People in online communities don't always know the proper product category names to use in their submissions, but they almost always know their general goals. These are fantastic keywords to track that can lead to sales opportunities.
These conversations provide opportunities to not just sell to your audience, but educate them and build up trust. If you have content written up on these objectives, this is a great time to promote it.
Unlike product category keywords, where someone is asking for recommendations within a category, people that mention customer objective keywords might not be assessing multiple solutions. Therefore, being the first to provide your helpful answer can be all that they need to become a user.
Examples:
"improve SEO"
"get backlinks"
"keyword ideas"
"first page of results"
Track customer pain points
People talk about their problems on Reddit quite frequently, and these conversations are opportunities for you to use your expert knowledge to help them out. The more painful the problem, the more appreciation you will get for a thoughtful response to their issue.
These conversations will sometimes lead to opportunities to plug your product if your product directly helps with these pain points. Sometimes, it'll lead to more opportunities to promote your educational content.
"low domain rank"
"no impressions"
"second page"
"slow results"
Track your brand name
This is what a lot of folks think of when you say the term "social listening". But really, it's "brand monitoring", and used mostly by bigger brands who want to make sure that if someone is saying something negative about them online, they can quickly come in and defuse the situation. Likewise, if there is a positive mention of a brand, encouraging the user can lead to them becoming a superfan.
If your startup is in its infancy, you likely won't be getting much action in this category. However, it doesn't hurt to track this keyword because even if it pops up infrequently, it'll likely be a conversation you'll want to have visibility into.
Track competitor mentions
Tracking your competitors is a really smart move from several perspectives. Firstly, you'll get a lot of insight into what they are doing right with their product and might be expected from customers in the market, and also what their gaps are. Staying on top of these conversations can give you an incredible edge in the market.
Additionally, you'll find that people can complain about your competitors, and you have a chance of winning them over as a customer. They already have the need for a solution, and have a budget for it as well. You just need to make sure you can satisfy the gap that your competitor has, and make sure it's easy for this user to transfer over to using your product. Offering a time-based free trial is a clever move here.
Examples:
"ahrefs"
"moz"
"semrush"
Track blog post topics
If you have a content strategy, you should be using social listening to promote those pages in addition to your general product offering.
This is great because:
it greatly expands the number of conversations on Reddit that are now relevant to you
it's easy to self-promote content because there's no cost to consuming it
good content builds up trust with your visitors and helps convert them to customers
your content will get ranked by search engines faster if it's discussed in online communities
Pick the topics that you cover in blog posts most relevant to your audience, determine the keywords that they are about (or use Google Search Console to see existing ranked keywords for each of those pages), and start tracking those as well.
Examples:
"keyword difficulty"
"site speed"
"backlink strategy"