Reddit outranks you now
Google started paying Reddit around $60 million a year for its content in early 2024. Since then the threads have climbed. Pull up a comparison search for almost any product or service I work on and there's a Reddit thread, six comments deep, sitting above the company's own page.
Nobody's ad budget put it there. No ad budget gets it out.
A reputation channel you never signed up for
That turns Reddit into a reputation channel for every business, including the ones that have never opened the app. The thread about your category exists whether you show up in it or not, and Google treats it as the most trustworthy thing on the page because a person wrote it.
The play is a person
Find the threads that rank for your category, answer the question in them the way you'd answer a customer on the phone, and put your name on it. A mod will delete a sales pitch inside an hour, and they should. A real answer with a number in it stays up for years and keeps ranking.
Two searches to run this week
If I owned a service business, I'd run these before anything else. Whatever comes up is what your next customer already read.
- Your category plus your city.
- Your brand name plus "reddit".