How to Use Reddit to Discover Content Ideas That Drive Organic Traffic

It’s easy to feel like everything’s been said already. Especially now when the internet’s overflowing with content on every possible topic.

But honestly, it doesn’t matter if others have already said it. New people face the same problems every day, and they might need a different angle or a fresh perspective on a widely known problem. So here’s a mindset shift to try:

As long as there are humans, content will be created.

And that’s exactly what I’m exploring today: how to use that mindset + Reddit to create awesome content that connects with your audience and drives organic traffic.

“But Wait…What Kind of Content are You Talking About?”

When I say content that drives organic traffic, I’m not talking about ads. I’m also not talking about a viral tweet, a LinkedIn carousel, or an email campaign. Those have their place, but they don’t necessarily bring new people to your site from search or discovery.

I’m talking about content that gets picked up by Google. That lives on your site. The kind of content that builds compound traffic over time.

That could be…

• Blog posts: Educational, opinionated, or helpful articles that match what people are already searching for
• SEO landing pages: Pages designed to rank for specific search terms
• Help center or FAQ content: Answers to specific, often long-tail questions that your audience is asking
• Guides or resource hubs: Evergreen content built to teach, compare, or curate
• YouTube videos with links back to your site: If they show up in Google or get shared in niche communities
• Case studies and customer stories: Especially when they’re keyword-rich and address common problems

What makes this kind of content work is that it’s…

• Searchable: Google can crawl it, index it, and surface it for the right queries.
• Linkable: People can share it in forums, Slack channels, Reddit threads, or newsletters.
• Evergreen (ideally): Meaning it has a longer shelf life than your average social post.

It brings people to your turf, where you can convert, educate, or build trust.

How Smart Creators Find Traffic-Worthy Content Ideas 

Reddit keeps surfacing in conversations with founders, marketers, and content folks for a reason. The communities and posts might not look like traditional research, but when you’re paying attention to the right communities, you’re getting a constant stream of ideas rooted in your audience’s perspective.

Here are a few ways creators use Reddit to find content angles that are grounded in what the right people care about.

They Use Pain Points as Raw Material

The one good thing about pain is: it’s a step closer to a solution. On Reddit, you’ll typically find more pains than solutions. For content creators, that’s one hell of an opportunity.

But that doesn’t mean chasing every single complaint and jotting them down as content ideas. These complaints become useful when they show up again and again. That means you’ll be solving a problem for several people at once, and there are multiple ways to go about it:

You can write a guide breaking the pain points down and offering solutions (directly on Reddit or on your website), pull quotes directly from communities (with proper credit), and add your solution. Or use it to shape the next blog post or FAQ.

As Yuvraj Pratap, Founder of Supplement Launchpad, puts it:

“I look for recurring topics and concerns within relevant subreddits to understand what problems people face. Once I pinpoint these pain points, I craft content that addresses these specific issues, offering clear, practical solutions.”

They Transform Reddit’s Language Into a Blueprint

Some people treat Reddit like a giant billboard and immediately get swatted down by the community. Tim Hanson, CMO at Penfriend, takes the opposite approach – and it works.

Instead of dropping links and praying for traffic, he spent six months just being helpful. Answering questions. Talking to people. Listening. That’s how he built trust and figured out how people actually talk about their problems.

That last bit is tremendous. Tim builds entire blog posts around real questions users are asking. And when it’s time to write, he doesn’t sanitize the language for SEO. He suggests people do the opposite:

“Use the Reddit language as your H2s and H3s, then build your keyword research around that.”

So, how’s that working out for Tim? In his own words:

“We currently rank above some huge websites for some massive terms because our content perfectly matches how real people actually talk about their problems.”

They Use Reddit Content to Strengthen SEO 

What a lot of people miss is that Reddit isn’t just useful as part of research. It can also show up in the content. You’re not limited to using it as a background resource – you can treat Reddit posts like living documentation of your audience’s opinions.

Plus, adding in actual conversations and perspectives shows you’ve done the work, keeping your content nuanced and human.

Brendan Aw, a longtime founder and editor-in-chief featured in places like Entrepreneur and Hackernoon, puts it this way:

“To align Reddit-sourced content with SEO best practices, I recommend embedding trending Reddit discussions directly into blog content with proper attribution. This creates natural keyword opportunities while maintaining authenticity. Not only that, it balances out any biases the article might have.”

He’s even seen positive results:

“On my website, I’ve noticed a slight recovery of some blog posts that got hit by the helpful content update last year by incorporating Reddit user perspectives.”

If you’re already doing research, you might as well show your work!

Another Point in Common Between Those Thought Leaders: GummySearch

All of these thought leaders are clearly onto something. A lot of them use GummySearch too, which isn’t a coincidence.

Personally, I love raw Reddit research, but know it can take you for a ride sometimes. It’s easy to fall into side quests that seem promising, only to realize later that if you had just seen a different post first, everything would’ve “clicked” sooner.

That’s why I built GummySearch: to help you get to the cream of the crop much faster. With the right searches, it surfaces posts that reflect your audience’s best conversations, organized in a way that helps you spot patterns, pull quotes, and turn what people are saying into awesome content.

As always, I like to show GummySearch in action. So, let’s walk through a practical example.

What Type of Content Would Drive Organic Traffic in the Photography Niche?

Alright, for this example, I’m taking on the persona of someone who runs an online store that sells cameras and photography gear – everything from camera bodies and lenses to SD cards, lights, straps, bags…you name it.

Lately, my blog content hasn’t been performing well. Rankings have dipped, traffic’s slowing down, and I know some of these posts just aren’t it anymore. I’m not here to copy competitors. I want fresh content ideas that are rooted in what photographers are debating right now. Plus, I want to be able to plug my products naturally into those blog posts.

Here’s how I’d do it.

First Things First: Audience Setup.

I could’ve built an audience from scratch, picking subreddits manually based on where I thought photographers hang out. But lucky for me, GummySearch already has a curated audience for photographers. So I just picked that.

This audience includes 11 subreddits, with a solid range: r/photography, r/analog, r/AskPhotography, and a few others that focus on specific gear or techniques. It’s a nice mix of massive, high-traffic communities and smaller, more niche ones, which means I’ve got plenty of perspectives in my favor.

What Are Photographers Talking About Right Now?

Where to start? Depends on your goal.

I’ve seen one thing again and again: everyone uses GummySearch a little differently. That’s kind of the point. There are a bunch of workflows to go for, but they all have the same end goal: delightfully efficient research.

In this case, I’m trying to write content that does a few things at once. I already know what kind of posts have worked for me before (how-to guides for photographers trying to choose the right gear, avoid common pitfalls on shoots, or troubleshoot problems.) That kind of stuff tends to drive traffic and convert, since I can naturally link to products we sell.

So, how about I start with what’s popular right now?

I head to the Themes tab in my photographer audience. There are six tabs total in the audience view, but for this use case, Themes is the best choice. There are two sections here I could focus on:

• Hot Discussions
• Top Content

Hot Discussions shows what people are talking about this week across the photography subreddits. It’s a quick pulse check on what’s got people fired up. Meanwhile, Top Content surfaces posts that performed well (as in, upvoted, commented, shared) within the audience. 

Obviously, there are a lot of discussions happening this week. If I had an entire day to go through every post manually, maybe I could comb through them all. But that’s not happening since I’m busy juggling a product, customers, and content creation.

So here’s what I do instead.

At the top right of the Hot Discussions tab, I’ve got a few ways to sort through the conversations. I can sort posts by category,  by recency, or by upvotes. All are useful, but even after filtering, there’s still a ton to look through.

But that’s okay. Because just above the results, there’s the Patterns ✨  tab . I click that, and suddenly I have a clean, high-level summary of everything happening across 98 hot discussions.

Just by looking at the patterns, I’ve saved myself over 30 minutes of digging.

The results from Patterns ✨ tab are scored by frequency. So if I’m seeing “concerns about over-editing photos” as a top pattern, I laser-focus on that.

By the way, I’m not just seeing the topic labeled “over-editing.” I can expand that pattern and peek into the actual posts and phrases people are using. I’ll find stuff like someone saying:

“Is it editing I hate, or am I just terrible now? How do you get past it and have fun again?”

That’s someone losing their passion and trying to claw it back. I want to pay attention to this kind of visceral language.

Now GummySearch doesn’t just stop at the post. I’ll see the top comments too – the advice, the empathy, the debates. Those will help me shape real solutions around the problem, beyond identifying it.

So let’s say I’m building a blog post. I could start with something like:

“You’re Not Terrible at Editing, You’re Just Burned Out. Here’s How to Get Your Mojo Back.”

What Are Photographers Biggest Pains? What Are They Frustrated About?

Another way I like to dig into frustrations is by heading back to the Themes tab and focusing on the AI-based themes.

There are loads of themes here, all helpful depending on what I’m after. But for this research, I’m zooming in on one in particular: Pain and Anger. Yes, it’s as useful as it sounds.

GummySearch gives me a big-picture summary of what photographers in the audience are venting about. That’s already useful if I want to stay updated without reading too much. But if I want to go deeper, Pain and Anger (as well as any Theme inside the platform) also have their own Patterns ✨tab, as well as the Ask ✨ tab.

I noticed that wedding photography comes up a lot in the patterns, specifically from people feeling burned out by it.

Say I wanted to write something for wedding photographers, maybe a landing page for a course or a video script for Instagram Reels. The format doesn’t matter as much as the direction: I want to speak directly to those photographers.

But what’s the real source of their frustration?

It’s super simple. I go to Ask ✨, and type in:

“What are the biggest frustrations wedding photographers deal with?”

Boom. GummySearch gives me a scannable breakdown of the most common issues. It’s usually sorted into three main blocks (and I can dig deeper if I want).

Here’s what surfaced this time:

• Problems with camera equipment reliability
• Difficulty achieving the photo quality they want
• Stress from managing the pressure and expectations of big events

All super helpful, but now I want to hear it in their words and absorb their language. So I click through to the original post, and right there, someone says:

“I’ve had multiple cameras crap out on me, so I haven’t been able to jump back in as fully as I’d like.”

Then they continue:

“I know a lot of those cameras are old, and it’s just part of the game to a certain extent. But I’m really just looking for something reliable, serviceable, suitable for intermediate level photographers, and won’t break the bank.”

If I were creating content based on that post alone, I wouldn’t lead with a generic headline like “Best Budget Cameras for Weddings.” Instead, I might try:

“You Deserve a Camera That Works (Even If You’re Not a Pro Yet). Here’s What to Look For.”

This person told me what matters to them: something that works, something they can afford, and something that makes them feel like they’re not being punished for being mid-level.

This is what good and deep research looks like, and it’s sitting right there in your GummySearch dashboard.

Why Stick to the Same Tired Workflow?

Some of us are just as burnt out on content creation as photographers are on wedding gigs. It feels as though we’ve run out of traffic-generating ideas.

But when you feel that way, remember: these aren’t supposed to be our ideas, but our audience’s. Knowing this gives us the confidence to stop recycling the top five SERP results and start creating content with perspectives and passion.

If you’re tired of spinning the same wheels, GummySearch might just be the thing that gets you out of it. Try it out for yourself.