How I use Reddit to inform content strategy?

Reddit is pretty cool. I have been using Reddit for nearly a decade now, and it has helped me tremendously in both my personal and professional life.

No matter how niche and obscure your interest is, you can always find a community there, with people who share the same interests and are more than willing to answer your questions.

Many marketers (me included) have been trying to crack Reddit. But Reddit is notoriously difficult to advertise and promote. Most brands trying to self-promote there are more often than not met with backlash.

However, I think that Reddit is much better used for content researching. The insights you need to build your whole content strategy can actually be found there, in the middle of threads started at 8PM, answered by people from all around the world.

And I’m going to share how to do that in this article.

The rise of Reddit

Reddit calls itself “the heart of the Internet” (originally the vision of Reddit founders was to make it the “front page of the Internet).

And Reddit is indeed the heart of Internet. It has around 250 million organic visits every month (as of Oct 2025), compared to a meager 1 million in Oct 2023. That’s a 25,000% growth in 2 years!

Although Reddit shares recently plummeted, the appeal of Reddit is still undeniable, and it’s due to the way that Reddit is designed:

1. Reddit is very collective-driven. Users democratically determine what content they want to see based on the upvote-downvote system, and the anonymity of Reddit means lower social pressure and allows more vulnerability, which means people can ask and say things that they wouldn’t normally do on Facebook or LinkedIn. This authenticity is what gives Reddit its appeal.
2. Reddit gives you access to incredibly diverse perspective. You can speak with presidents (Obama once hosted an AMA on Reddit), astronauts, famous artists, everyday experts, business owners, and even the more invisible populations. Everyone can have a voice there.

For Marketers and especially SEO, Reddit is even more appealing, because it is where real search happens:

• Sometimes people are only using Google to get to Reddit. They’ll type whatever they want to search in the Google search bar, then append “Reddit” at the end so that all search results that get are from Reddit. Over time, this becomes a search behavior.

• Google’s algorithm favors content that reflects “real user experience” and Reddit definitely excels at this with their authentic discussions.
• Users have increasingly grown to distrust SEO-heavy content farms look for more raw and unfiltered search experiences, which Reddit provides.
• Google signed a content licensing deal worth $60M/year, giving it access to Reddit’s Data API. This means Reddit not only ranks well organically but it’s now also part of Google’s structured data ecosystem.

Why Reddit is great for content research?

Reddit is incredibly unfiltered. It skips over the polish on company pages and goes straight to what people actually think:

Users ask what they really think, in natural language, with no SEO polish. These queries are gold for understanding pain points and keyword phrasing.

Comment threads are also full of real experience and emotional nuance that you can find nowhere else.

Just browsing through several subreddits of your target audience and you can get a sense of how your audience talks, what tools they’re using, and what kind of language resonates with them.

How to use Reddit to inform your content strategy?

I’ll use owner.com as an example for this. It’s a SaaS that helps independent restaurants manage and own their digital presence and online ordering. The mission is to reduce reliance on high‑commission third‑party food delivery apps (Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc.), and help restaurants retain more margin and control.

Step 1. Develop your audience mapping

All content strategy should be buyer-centric, so I first develop a Content Mapping table that looks like this:

Their audience mapping may look like this:

Buyer Type	Role / Title	Key Pain Points	Our Solution / Value Proposition	Content Topics
Technical Buyer	Marketing Manager / Digital Specialist	Poor visibility into marketing performance Difficult to track customer retention Limited data from third-party delivery apps	Built-in marketing automation, analytics, and CRM Actionable reporting to track campaigns & retention Consolidated customer data for targeted promotions	How to use customer data to boost repeat orders Restaurant CRM strategies for 2025 Measuring ROI from local restaurant marketing
Decision Maker	Restaurant Owner	Losing profits to Uber Eats / DoorDash fees No control over customer relationships Low repeat business and weak direct channels	Own your digital presence, website, and ordering Keep more margin by reducing third-party reliance Build direct customer relationships and repeat business	How to take back control from third-party apps Why direct online ordering increases restaurant profits Practical steps to launch your own ordering channel

Step 2. Discover what your audience is talking about on Reddit

Now that you know who your audience is, go see what they’re actually saying in Reddit threads. Here’s my process:

1. Shortlist some of the main keywords for the topics you want to build content for
2. Shortlist subreddits to launch your research
3. Conduct site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [query] searches and browse through Reddit to find good topics
4. Cherry-pick the best topics to put into a spreadsheet
5. Rinse and repeat

You can use ChatGPT to assist you in identifying the relevant subreddits:

I’ll then use the site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [search query] formula to browse those subreddits.

Here is a list of search queries I am going to use:

Search Query	Intent
site:reddit.com UberEats cost is too high	Identify common complaints about high delivery app fees
site:reddit.com how to start a food shop	Understand beginner challenges for food entrepreneurs
site:reddit.com how to start a small restaurant	Explore startup pain points for small restaurant founders
site:reddit.com/r/restaurantowners how to	Find tactical, how-to questions from actual restaurant owners
site:reddit.com/r/restaurantowners why	Investigate reasoning or motivations behind restaurant-related decisions
site:reddit.com/r/restaurantowners what	Discover tool, strategy, or best-practice questions
site:reddit.com/r/restaurantowners should	Surface key decision-making moments where guidance is needed

(I don’t use the Reddit search feature though because I find it to be fairly ineffective compared to searching directly from Google.)

For example, let’s try to search for the biggest pain point that owner.com is trying to solve, which is UberEat’s cost being too high.

You’ll immediately see a lot of complaint posts with thousands of comments. This is a great opportunity for Owner.com to share about their product.

Rinse and repeat this process for any key topics you want to rank for. When you read through the posts, make sure to focus on:

• Common questions that get high engagement
• Pain points people mention frequently
• Tools or solutions that get recommended repeatedly
• Sentiment for any key topics

For example, let’s try searching the list of keywords we prepared above. Let’s try “site:reddit.com how to start a small food shop“. You should get several interesting posts to dive into:

The “Tips for launching a food business with limited funds” post is relevant to owner.com, so I’ll investigate further. Interestingly, the very first comment is from an entrepreneur who launched a startup to solve that exact problem:

That means there is actual supply and demand for that question. That’s what owner.com should be creating content for, and we can consider it in our content list.

One tactic I love to do is searching by the keyword “how to”, since it surfaces the problems that people need a tutorial for:

This approach works exceptionally well for virtually any niche, from the most daily life niche like food shops to the most technical niches like automation testing:

Why Reddit research instead of keyword research tools?

Ahrefs and SEMrush are two of the most popular keyword research tools. And yes, while they are pretty interesting, turns out they can’t show you what people really think about a topic.

I see there are two caveats with such keyword research tools:

1. Their metrics are merely estimates. Keyword difficult is just an internal metric that these tools calculate based on their own idea of how Google works. Sometimes a low-difficulty keyword is not that easy to rank for.
2. These tools don’t capture the entire search world. There are so many long-tail, conversational queries that these tools are missing, but they are certainly searched for on a daily basis.

That’s why you need to go one step further and do what I call “community research”, and Reddit is perfect for this type of research.

Conclusion

And yes, Reddit sometimes is actually my favorite keyword research tool. It surfaces so much more than keywords, but also the nuances that traditional keyword research tools never get to show you.

If you’re working in an content agency, or just trying to build a content strategy for your brand (and it happens to be in a not-too-common niche), Reddit can be your friend.

Overall, I hope you learned something, and if you need help with any of your SEO stuff, don’t hesitate to contact me. Perceptric is here to help.

Much love, peace out!