The ascension of Reddit to one of the largest sites on the web over the last 15 months is quite controversial and unique. Never in the history of SEO has a site grown that fast to such a level.

In a recent interview on the Motley Fool Money podcast, CEO Steve Huffman paints a picture of how large sites can succeed on Google you shouldn’t miss.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

I extracted the key quotes and added my own takes below. Every quote is verbatim, but I removed filler words.

The takeaway questions at the end of each section hopefully inspire you to find new growth opportunities.

I optionally uploaded this Memo to NotebookLM’s new podcast feature, so you can listen to it if you like.

As we’ve learned from the recent Google ranking factor leak and Google lawsuits, user engagement can trump any other ranking factor.

Logically, the more friction you remove for users, the easier it will be for them to solve their problems, and the better the signals you send to Google.

The key point here is that these changes are related to the product, not just the website. The product experience influences SEO.

The effect of positive user signals is often masked by time, as Google takes months to collect user behavior for queries and might only slowly reward sites.

The slow pace starkly contrasts the fact that companies are often incentivized to harvest short-term gains, usually by adding friction to the experience rather than removing it. While there is a balance to be had, the result is usually worse user engagement signals.

Brand recognition in the search results plays into the same challenge: When visitors have a good experience with a site or product, they’re more likely to click on it again when they see it in the search results.

If they encounter too much friction signing up or a poor product experience, though, that opportunity goes out the window.

Takeaway questions:

• How can you improve your product and onboarding experience?
• Do you have too much friction in the sign-up process to allow users a good experience?
• Where can you take friction away, and where do you need to find a compromise?
• How do you measure user experience on the site vs. in the product?

Either you haven’t heard of Reddit or it didn’t work for you. Those are the number two we’re really focused on. There’s a third one, which is you don’t speak English. That’s the next frontier of Reddit.

We can actually translate the existing Reddit corpus into other languages at human quality. Now, not all the content is relevant, but a lot of it is. We have been testing this in France, in French in the first half this year, and it’s gone very, very well.

After winning in the U.S., international markets are a huge growth lever for Reddit, and machine translation has become good enough for most cases. The Hidden Gems update initiated Reddit’s rise in the SERPs – not just in the U.S. – and Reddit needs to capture the momentum.

As a marketplace, it faces the classic chicken-egg problem: You need content to attract users, but users need to create the content.

In the U.S., Reddit has famously solved the problem with fake users.

My take is that, Reddit depends on Google for its top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) but provides a good enough experience that users would come to Reddit even if a Search algo update brought it back to its 2022 baseline.

Over 50% of Reddit’s traffic comes from SEO and 42% direct, according to Similarweb. But Search is not Search. There is branded and non-branded SEO traffic.

A significant number of searchers append “Reddit” to their queries, which is an incredibly strong ranking signal for Google and shows that users want Reddit results specifically.

Reddit also saw strong user growth due to its exploding presence in Search. So, both are true: Reddit needs Search to grow but wouldn’t die without its front-row seat.

Takeaway questions:

• Are you at the point at which you should diversify from SEO?
• How can you stimulate more brand searches?

On: Brand Search

If you go to Google Trends, you can see this: Reddit is the sixth most searched word on Google in 2024 in the U.S. last year. Number five is news, and maybe number eight is maps.

People are going to Google looking for Reddit. A lot of those users are already logged in. They’re actually core Reddit users. They’re using Google to navigate Reddit. If you’re just searching on the Internet, there’s a good chance you end up on Reddit.

This quote goes back to my previous point and addresses the common criticism that Reddit’s search is so bad that users need to use Google. But isn’t that in Reddit’s interest?

If Google is Reddit’s TOFU and searches that include “Reddit” are a strong signal, why would Reddit improve its onsite search and kill that behavior?

Reddit needs to thread the needle and make the experience good enough that users signal up once they find a Reddit result but not so bad that users can’t find anything on Reddit.

To be fair, the chance of coming across a Reddit result on the web sooner or later is incredibly high since the platform is huge. It also hosts many small but passionate sub-communities that form one large community.

Other than Reddits competitors, which are mostly small niche forums, its footprint on the web is large enough to allow poor site search. Not every business can get into such a position, but some can.

Takeaway questions:

• Do users love you so much that they would search your site on Google even if your onsite search were poor?
• Is your footprint large enough that users would come to you either way?

On: Monetization

Our ad server doesn’t care if you’re logged out or logged in. They both have a user id. The main difference between a logged in user and a logged out user is logged in users spend more time on Reddit. So, we’ll have a more fulsome view of what your interests are, because over time, people join more and more communities on Reddit.

You might have 100 subscriptions or more and a logged out user doesn’t have any. They may have just visited a few subreddits. The main difference in value to us between a logged in user and a logged out user is time spent of the logged in accounts, they just have more inventory. But we monetize logged out users as well.

There’s broadly two ways that we’ll target an ad. One is based on your explicitly expressed interest on Reddit. If you join the skiing subreddit, you’re likely to see outdoor ads. The other is the context of what you’re looking at.

If you’re on a comments page, we call them post detail pages, that page is likely mentioning a company or companies by name and often specific products. We can target an ad based on the context as well.

We think targeting based on your explicit interests or the context of what you’re looking at are healthy and explainable and not creepy ways of targeting ads. What we don’t do is we don’t target ads based on your personal information, your Internet browsing habits.

Reddit’s ad targeting system is very similar to Google’s. Instead of tracking user behavior and interests, Reddit and Google target them based on their search query or subreddits and posts.

The benefit is not just a lower “creep factor” but also less dependency on logged-in users.

As a matter of fact, about half of Reddit’s daily active users (DAU) are logged in and half logged out.