Reddit’s growing presence in the SERP in its first year as a publicly traded company is hard to miss. In 2024, Reddit’s organic traffic surged by 208%, and the number of organic keyword rankings grew by 109%. In light of the decreasing organic traffic across the board, these are incredible numbers.

In this guide, we’ll talk about how to monitor social rankings in the SERP and how to mine social results to improve your SEO strategy.
Monitoring Social SERP Results
This section will focus on keeping track of your social presence in the SERP so you can increase your PR efforts and pivot your paid and SEO strategy if necessary.
Monitoring Social Presence in the SERP with Authority Labs
Obility uses Authority Labs to monitor the rankings of our clients’ target keywords. We usually track 100-150 keywords for the client’s website as well as their top 3-5 competitors.

From there we’re able to see which target keywords rank on page 1 and 2 for Reddit and examine what kind of results we’re getting: threads comparing two solutions? A user sharing their good or not so good experience? Someone asking for recommendations to solve a particular problem?
This is an opportunity for your PR team to provide valuable information to users. The goal is not to plug in your solution in every thread but to use your industry expertise to provide valuable information to users and, when appropriate, to recommend your solution. You can also create new threads to try to counter and take the place of existing Reddit threads.
Monitoring Discussions and Forums SERP Feature with SEMRush
According to a study from SEOClarity, the Discussions and Forums are showing up for around 30% of searches, which means that being featured in this snippet can be a huge advantage for you.
Here’s how to monitor your presence in Discussions and Forums:
- Go to Competitive Research > Domain Overview > SERP Features > Full Report
- In the SERP Features trend chart, uncheck everything that is not “Discussions and Forums”
- Scroll down to review which keywords and URLs are ranking in the featured snippet and when the last update happened

Manual Review of Social Presence in the SERP
Last step is to do a manual review. If your company has a dedicated subreddit, start there. Then, do a manual “site:reddit.com company name” to pull up results mentioning your company. You can repeat the same process for the name of your solutions and your target keywords. This will help you get a full understand of your brand’s visibility.
Mining Social Results and Using Insights to Further Your SEO Strategy
In this section, we’ll dig deeper into using social media to further our SEO strategy. The goals here are to:
- Identify new keyword targets, content topics, and audiences
- Market your solutions more accurately and precisely
- Understand competitors better
- Understand your audience better
Using Social Results to Gain Insights About Your Brand and Solution
Browsing social media for your products or target keywords can be really eye-opening. You may uncover ways people are using your products in ways you had never considered before, or flaws in your process that can be easily addressed.
You can also use social insights to:
- Find new target keywords to monitor and optimize for
- Support your strategy and sell it to the rest of your team
- Update your messaging to match the way users talk about your product more closely
- Identify product expansion opportunities
- Identify new audiences to market to
- Find out which pain points your audience is struggling with
- Add social media quotes in content to increase trust with your users and be more appealing to AI search engines

Assessing Your Competitors to Gain an Advantage
Similarly to what we’ve discussed about gaining insights on your own solution, you can use social results to gain insights about your competitors.
I recommended repeating the SEMRush and manual review process from earlier, but with your competitors brand names and the keywords they are prominently using on their homepage and product pages.
This will help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses so you can highlight your own strengths on your website. Here is an example of information I’ve found for doing a site: search for Salesforce:
If I were to create a Competititor vs Salesforce page I would make sure to highlight the competitor’s cost-effectiveness, user-friendliness, and low maintenance requirements.
Using Social Results to Fuel Content Creation
Finally, social media (and Reddit in particular) can be a gold mine for those looking to create new content on their website:
- Identify audiences most receptive to your solution and create audience-specific content collections (ex: “Why is X the best HRIS software for startups”)
- Identify industries with the most potential and create industry content collections (ex: “Comparing email marketing software for healthcare professionals”)
- Identify topics for thought leadership posting on LinkedIn and/or your education centers (ex: “Email marketing do’s and don’ts for B2B startups”)
Create new content as a response to social results. See the example highlighted in my Guide to SEO & Generative AI: Obility noticed a Reddit thread asking if a client’s solution was worth it. The responses were not all flattering so we decided to create a new FAQ page on the client’s website to answer that question directly and give users more information about the solution. Eventually, that FAQ page surpassed the Reddit result.
Social media platforms like Reddit are becoming pivotal players in changing the SERP and influencing buyer decisions. Actively monitoring your social presence in the SERP and integrating your findings into your SEO strategy will make your organic presence more relevant and better tailored to your audience’s needs.
Contact Obility today for a free SEO assessment, and let our SEO experts help you unlock new growth opportunities with a data-driven approach.