Happy Friday!
Today, I’m following on from Monday's newsletter where I talked about the need to earn coverage in press roundups and reviews if you want LLMs to recommend your business. I'll be sharing why you need to figure out how to get your business talked about on Reddit (as well as Quora and YouTube), and sharing some ideas around this, if you want to be visible in LLMs.
You’ll learn:
- Why now is the time to figure out Reddit visibility for your business
- How you get talked about on Reddit
- Why digital PR teams could be best-placed to own this
Let’s get into it.
Don't sleep on getting visible on Reddit...
Let's go back to the example I shared on Monday - asking for recommendations for a pizza oven from ChatGPT.
Looking at citations, three of these come from Reddit:
(And one from YouTube)
Ask pretty much any product recommendation-based question and you'll see Reddit appearing in the citations. Usually more than once. YouTube's usually in there, too, and sometimes Quora.
Reddit especially is going to play a really important role in influencing visibility in this new era of search.
LLMs are pulling from where real people talk & share their recommendations
I've talked a lot recently about the need to build brand signals if you want to be recommended by LLMs.
If traditional SEO always relied pretty heavily on links, this new era of SEO is built on brand signals.
Yes, links are one brand signal. Mentions are another. So are reviews.... things that build trust and associate you with the right topics in the right context.
And from the perspective of a consumer who is looking for recommendations, UGC platforms are the perfect source to be thrown into the mix.
Why?
Like (most) reviews, they're usually unbiased. They're real recommendations made by real people sharing their experiences.
Think about it.
If a product is recommended as 'the best,' you'd expect it to be recommended in press roundups, have plenty of positive reviews and to be talked about and recommended on Reddit, Quora and within YouTube videos. Right?
As SEOs, we need to think beyond the ways we've traditionally influenced rankings. In this new era of search, we need to be marketers, not just search marketers.
That means building a buzz around our products; not just optimising them.
You know the 4 Ps of marketing?
- Product (what you sell)
- Price (how much you sell it for)
- Place (where you sell it)
- Promotion (how you market it)
Yep ... these all play a part in influencing visibility in the future of search.
So… how do you actually get talked about on Reddit etc?
The obvious one is to have a great product that's sold at the right price.
You can't polish a turd.
It's sometimes hard for marketers to accept when a product just isn't good enough; it's almost always out of their control. But this makes marketing, especially customer-led marketing, so much easier.
Anyway, that aside, there's lots you can do beyond this to get talked about on these platforms.
And I see a future where PRs are working with subject matter experts to help them build visibility on platforms like Reddit and Quora, and actively including outreach to influencers (especially YouTubers) as a standard part of their strategies.
That might mean encouraging the subject matter experts to contribute helpful advice to relevant threads and regularly engage within the right subreddits. Or doing it on their behalf, where it makes sense.
It's sort of personal branding meets brand marketing via your people and their insights.
But here's the key:
Don’t just drop links. Don’t sell.
Educate. Inform. Be genuinely helpful and actively engage.
Those top tips you pitched out to the press? That reactive comment you landed coverage for?
It's probably something that's relevant to what's being talked about on Reddit or Quora right now, and could add real value to the conversation.
Start today.
Building the profile of your people as experts shouldn't just happen in the press. There's a whole load of other platforms where these insights and opinions can add real value.
It's wrong to think about Reddit marketing as link drops. That's spamming.
Be genuine and actually engage, and it's about adding value.
This is where digital PR evolves.
It’s not just: Will a journalist cover this?
Now it’s also:
- Would someone link to this in a Reddit thread?
- Would this be useful in a Quora answer?
- Would a YouTuber include this in a roundup video?
The future of discoverability is about being part of the conversation, not just the coverage.
Don't forget, as well, that Instagram content is going to be accessible to search engines starting from 10th July 👀
It's going to be interesting to see how this gets surfaced across both traditional search and in AI-powered search over the coming months. Will we see Instagram start to be used for citations in ChatGPT? We'll soon find out...
Visibility in LLMs is increasingly about being referenced, recommended, and remembered by real people, in the places they naturally share their views.
If you’re not showing up there, your competitors will.
The takeaway…
If you want to be visible in the answers LLMs give, you need to be part of the conversation.
That means showing up where real people are talking: Reddit threads, Quora answers, YouTube videos.
Not with spam. But with helpful, relevant and trusted contributions.
Because the brands that earn genuine visibility here? They’ll be the ones who are recommended in the long-term.
The time to figure out how to get your brand, and its people, visible, talked about and engaged with on Reddit and other UGC platforms is now.
Already doing this? I'd love to hear what's been working for you ... drop me a line, let's chat!
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If you learned something from this issue or it’s made you think about SEO a little differently, please consider forwarding it to someone else on your team.
Appreciate you making it to the end; same time Monday?
- James Brockbank
P.S. If you ever need expert support with SEO or digital PR and want to drive results that actually matter, I’d love to chat. Let’s talk.
📌 This week’s bookmarks:
If I could only send three links to a fellow marketer this week, it’d be these…
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👋 Hi, I'm James...
Managing Director & Founder at Digitaloft.
I've spent the last 10 years building an agency that's perfectly positioned to help ambitious brands to drive real business growth from SEO and digital PR.
You might have seen me speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX and the International Search Summit.
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