**James Dooley:** Hi. So today I’m joined with Daward Khn who is the founder of crowdrely.io and also the founder of crowdscale.ai.

**James Dooley:** So Doward, pleasure to meet you.

**Dawood Khan:** Nice to meet you, James. Nice to meet you too.

**James Dooley:** Good stuff. So obviously we followed each other’s work for a while. So many people in the SEO community, especially it seems after they got hit with a helpful content update, seem to move to using Reddit marketing and using your tool at crowd reply.io.

**James Dooley:** For anyone who’s watching this, can you just explain a little bit of firstly, I’d say why Reddit marketing is important in today’s kind of search engines?

**Dawood Khan:** Absolutely. I mean so so so just to give a quick background we’ve been, I own other several SaaS businesses and our main acquisition channel was content marketing, it was doing SEO and 3 years ago we saw this shift where I’m sure we’ve heard of the core updates where we saw our traffic just decreasing by 40% and we saw the shift where Reddit threads, these forums were now started to rank for the core keywords that we were going after and that’s where we just had this idea instead of just doing SEO we should also focus on this channel because this is where we believed it was just going to go more from here.

**Dawood Khan:** There was a shift in consumer search where previously people were used to reading a 5,000 word article but right now it’s just, I just want my information. They just go to Reddit. Let’s say I want to buy running shoes. For that, I just go on Reddit, see what the top comment is, and just get my answer. Then maybe go to a Forbes 4,000 words article that’s filled with affiliate links and get my answer. So that’s where we just started working on Reddit.

**Dawood Khan:** Based on that, we kept using it for our projects and tools. Everything that we learned during that time, we basically thought this is a real problem where many people just don’t know how to do marketing on Reddit. It’s quite different to other platforms. So that’s why we created crowd reply to solve that problem.

**James Dooley:** Yeah, for sure. For myself, I’ve seen so many keywords start having appended at the end where real users were searching for, let’s say, running shoes, Reddit, and they wanted to go through to Reddit.

**James Dooley:** I think a lot of users became frustrated with affiliate sites where one person’s opinion just did a top 10 list of running shoes, probably never even wore any of those running shoes, and just put the ones that give them the most commission at the top and then the least commission at the bottom, and did a top 10 review. I think users started to get wind of what was going on and therefore were preferring a forum where people could go back and forth and comment and disagree with them. People can upvote going yes I agree with this and stuff like that. So that was then I’m presuming the start of why you created crowdrely.io.

**James Dooley:** When was that created and can you explain to a few people what even is crowdrely.io?

**Dawood Khan:** Yeah. So we started almost 11 months ago with the crowd reply. Crowd reply is a Reddit marketing platform where the biggest hurdle and problem that we saw with brands that wanted to engage on Reddit is you cannot scale on Reddit with just one or two personal accounts. You need to have a good quality of accounts to scale on Reddit. And that’s where we come in.

**Dawood Khan:** You can use our network of these accounts that are basically high quality active old accounts where we handle the fulfilment for you and in your case you just write the content and we publish that for you. So that’s basically what we provide. We have our own platform where you can track everything. We have reporting, what’s working, what’s not working. We have all these different guides, tutorials, videos just to set you up for success on Reddit.

**James Dooley:** Yeah. So anyone who’s looking to do Reddit SEO, for me, I think it’s a no-brainer. I think people who are looking to do any sort of search engine optimisation should be on the channel and on the present. They should be seen across multiple social media accounts.

**James Dooley:** What it sounds like is almost like you’ve got what used to be the old school black hat methodology of PBNs. You’ve got a set of accounts that have got karma that can post on these platforms and then are able to then get the upvotes.

**James Dooley:** For anyone that doesn’t know much about Reddit marketing or Reddit SEO, can you explain to people who are watching this what karma means with regards to Reddit profiles?

**Dawood Khan:** Karma is basically just points. The more karma you have, the more karma these accounts have, the better and established your account is. And with karma, there’s another thing which we focus on a lot. It’s the age of that account. That’s also super important.

**Dawood Khan:** You can have a super brand new account, but it has let’s say a karma of 10,000 or 100,000. But even in that case the quality of that account is not going to be much because the account age is relatively new.

**Dawood Khan:** Karma, in very basic terms, is how many points you have accrued over the period of time and that karma is generated by posting helpful comments on Reddit on different threads, putting out helpful content for people to go through.

**James Dooley:** So it sounds a little bit like Google saying you provide helpful content and then the links will naturally come and you’re building up karma. So it’s almost like for anyone who’s in the SEO industry it’s almost like the DR of a website. It’s the rating of a profile.

**James Dooley:** So how important, let’s say I was to find a thread and it was a question that was heavily related to, let’s say I’m a roofer and I’m based in Manchester, and someone was to turn around and say I’m looking for the best roofing repair company in Manchester.

**James Dooley:** How important is the karma of the profile that leaves the comment versus how many upvotes you get? Is it the karma that’s more important or the upvotes which is more important for how high your comment starts to be seen?

**Dawood Khan:** Yeah, it’s both. The account karma and age is required for the content to stick. If I can share my screen I can show you a live example. Let me share my screen.

**Dawood Khan:** Yeah. Can you see my screen?

**James Dooley:** Yeah, I can see your screen.

**Dawood Khan:** Yeah. So let’s say I search for best roofers and let’s do this. Let’s see what comes up.

**Dawood Khan:** Right here we see these Reddit threads ranking in the top spots. If I open this up, the thing is to stick your content on a Reddit thread, you need to have a good account. So let’s say with this account, if I open this up, you see it has 54,000 karma. It’s 11 years old. So if you have an account like this, it’s super easy to comment anything on Reddit. That’s the first part.

**Dawood Khan:** The second part is the upvotes. Let’s say we post a new comment on this thread, that is going to be down here. Just like Google search, when we search for something, we tend to go for the top three results. They have the highest CTR. That’s the exact same thing with Reddit comments.

**Dawood Khan:** Anyone landing on this Reddit thread from people that are searching for it on Google and then landing on this page, they’re going to go through the top three comments because they have the highest number of upvotes. Maybe they have replies too, it adds more validation psychologically, rather than going all the way down to find their answer. That’s why adding upvotes is super important to your comments.

**Dawood Khan:** So karma is needed to post your content. If it’s a super brand new account then posting a promotional comment would be relatively harder because Reddit filters will remove that comment. So the karma helps the comment to stick and then the upvotes is what pushes you up the rankings on the comments.

**James Dooley:** So with regards to that, let’s keep in line with the roofers in Manchester. Let’s say I was wanting to post on there to say I believe that Dooley’s Roofing is the best company. Come and get in touch today and then link through to my website.

**James Dooley:** Can I place a link in that comment or will that definitely get removed if I’ve got a low karma? And if I was to use something like crowdrely.io, would that stick if I’ve got a high karma?

**Dawood Khan:** There are a lot of things that go into this. The most we recommend is, the thing with Reddit is if you’re too promotional, then people will call you out and they can see you’re just promoting without adding value.

**Dawood Khan:** Any thread you engage on, at least add some value, add some information and then mention your brand in a subtle way. If it comes across too strong where you’re hammering your brand name, it doesn’t work that way. It needs to have a subtle promotion.

**Dawood Khan:** It could be like, “Hey, I’m using XYZ Roofers and they did a really good job, and here’s why.” A normal comment where it doesn’t sound like you’re shilling them, but you’re sharing your experience. That’s what we’ve seen work the best.

**Dawood Khan:** There are two things you can do. There is adding links in your comment and then there’s just doing a brand mention. What we recommend is just doing brand mentions because these social platforms aren’t built for diverting external traffic from their platforms. Adding links looks more promotional. Adding links is super hard on Reddit generally. So just do the brand mentions.

**James Dooley:** Would you try to incentivise people in the comment to say make certain to search for the brand name, but without it being a link? Would you literally say that or would you maybe even put a telephone number in or anything like that, or would you stay away from anything promotional like that?

**Dawood Khan:** For local businesses, what we recommend doing is you can add your brand name, you can add your phone number. For people doing affiliate marketing, for local businesses, they can add numbers that can then be forwarded to other numbers. That’s another way you can do this. If you want to do rank and rent, it’s a great method for forwarding these numbers. You can add your name, you can add your number, you can add links, but links generally have a higher removal rate.

**James Dooley:** Anyone who’s watching this, we gave the roofers in Manchester example for local SEO and using Reddit to try and increase branded mentions and get exposure. It’s good for branding.

**James Dooley:** But what happens if I was to type in roofers in Liverpool, and when I type in roofers in Liverpool in Google, Reddit doesn’t rank for roofers in Liverpool in Google SERPs. Is there a way of using something like crowd reply.io to ask the question like who have you found to be the best roofing company in Liverpool?

**James Dooley:** So it prompts and gets it and then you can leave one or two reviews and do one or two upvotes and then it might pull through that Reddit thread for that specific query. Or have you found that doesn’t work very well?

**Dawood Khan:** It definitely works. Just because there’s no Reddit thread on that specific SERP or keyword, I would say it presents an opportunity.

**Dawood Khan:** In 95%, I would even say 99% of cases you have a subreddit, especially in local business. Every city, every major city, or smaller cities, they have a subreddit these days.

**Dawood Khan:** In this example, if there aren’t any Reddit threads, you still have the Liverpool subreddit. You can go in there, post a thread using our platform and you can say, “Hey, can anyone recommend a good roofing company in Liverpool?” Once that’s posted, you can then post a comment where you’re promoting your brand.

**Dawood Khan:** The way it starts is you can find these threads. You don’t have to go through Google search. We have automated that inside our platform. You pick your keyword, add that in, and then we scrape all these Reddit threads that are ranking for this specific term.

**Dawood Khan:** In here you can see the traffic metrics. You can see if it’s valuable to engage on it or not. In this specific case we see this one, it has 188 visitors per month and it’s a great thread where a business operating in that area can go in and engage.

**Dawood Khan:** If any thread looks relevant and you want to engage on it, you click add comment. From here it’s adding your brand name in it. Like I said, helpful plus subtle brand promotion. Once that’s done, you click submit. We use our network of accounts. You don’t use your personal accounts. You don’t connect anything. We post this comment on the thread.

**Dawood Khan:** The other thing we have, and it’s super helpful, is we talked about adding upvotes. The comments at the top have the highest visibility. To get your comment in the top spots, we built this feature where you can rank these comments.

**Dawood Khan:** It analyses the top comment and how many upvotes it has. Then it tells you how many you need to outrank those comments. We drip feed upvotes per day. It doesn’t trigger Reddit’s filters. For older threads, if you post a comment and you send instant upvotes, Reddit can detect it and remove your comment. That’s why we do drip feed upvotes and it starts after 3 days.

**Dawood Khan:** You can also add replies. You can schedule it. You add your main comment and then add a reply after one day. It’s automated. You set it up once and replicate across multiple threads. You can cover more keywords or more cities. That’s a quick overview on how you use this inside the platform without having to search on Google.

**James Dooley:** Right. So now you’ve shown how easy it is to use crowd reply.io. But let’s say I say, Dawood, I haven’t got time. I don’t want to log in. I don’t want to go in and start publishing comments and replying to comments and sorting everything out, finding these threads.

**James Dooley:** You’ve also got crowdscale. Could I then just literally say, “Okay, I own a lead generation agency. Can you go and find all the lead generation threads and communities and what posts they are and go and submit who I am and what I do across all these?” Is that something that crowdscale can do as opposed to crowd reply?

**Dawood Khan:** Absolutely. We have crowd reply which is the do-it-yourself platform. You have everything at your disposal. You write the comments, you write the content, you post them, you track everything.

**Dawood Khan:** Then we have crowdscale. This is mainly for companies and businesses that do not have an in-house content writer or someone that understands Reddit and how to write for Reddit. Even if you have a content writer, the writing lingo on Reddit is a bit different.

**Dawood Khan:** Many B2B or SaaS companies use very professional language like we use in articles, which clearly doesn’t work on Reddit. So we have the agency side. We help you generate more leads and more traffic.

**Dawood Khan:** If there’s a negative thread about your brand, we do brand reputation. If it’s “XYZ reviews” or “Is XYZ legit”, and it’s ranking at the top, we do brand reputation.

**Dawood Khan:** The other thing we help with is increasing your LLM visibility on platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity because Reddit is one of the top cited sources. That’s why it’s super important. If you want to increase visibility on those platforms, you need to be on Reddit.

**James Dooley:** So you’ve mentioned crowdscale.ai and you’ve mentioned crowdrely.io. All related to Reddit marketing and Reddit SEO. We’ve mentioned it can be used for brand reputation management. We’ve mentioned it can be used for local SEO, local lead generation.

**James Dooley:** But what if someone’s watching this and they’re a SaaS owner? Can this be used also? Can Reddit in general help SaaS for branding, for exposure of what they do?

**Dawood Khan:** Absolutely. Based on what we’ve done, we’ve now done almost 60,000 comments across all our clients, which is a huge number. When you do this amount, you see patterns. You see what works. You see which industries work.

**Dawood Khan:** SaaS businesses work super well on Reddit because there’s not much competition. For local businesses, we’ve seen these threads getting traffic but there’s no one engaging. These are older comments. It presents a huge opportunity where there’s literally no competition.

**Dawood Khan:** For something super competitive, for a company to be on these SERPs they have to spend thousands of dollars, if not millions. It’s not easy for someone starting with their own project management software to be on those results.

**Dawood Khan:** What they can do is engage on Reddit threads that have lots of traffic and they can be on these threads from day one. They don’t have to be on Google. Obviously, Google is the longer play, but with Reddit they can be there from day one. That’s why it’s really important for SaaS companies to do Reddit.

**James Dooley:** What about your notes where it says affiliate marketing is tough. Explain why you say affiliate marketing is tough for Reddit.

**Dawood Khan:** We still have quite a lot of users that use our platform for affiliate marketing and it’s working for them. We have people doing casino, crypto, all sorts of niches. They do.

**Dawood Khan:** But it’s getting harder. Reddit is putting more restrictions. If you add a link, there are workarounds. We have resources on how you can circumvent that and do affiliate.

**Dawood Khan:** But if you want to build a good genuine business that works in the long run, I would recommend that. Affiliate marketing is short term. You’ll make money but it’s nothing long term. In general it’s harder than if you’re in other niches.

**James Dooley:** Yeah, for sure. Reddit has exploded in the last few years. People love going to socials and discussions and forums to get information. I definitely recommend Reddit marketing for anyone that’s not doing it at present.

**James Dooley:** But Dawood Khan, I’ve got a question for you. You’re an innovator. You’re always two steps ahead of the game. What do you think is important going into 2026? What are you working on? You’ve got plenty of SaaS products. What do you think is next for anyone who wants to be ahead of the curve, holistic marketing, omni channel, omnipresent, embracing Reddit, or they might not be doing everything. What would you say for anyone watching this in 2026 that they should be doubling down on if it’s working well?

**Dawood Khan:** I think the traditional way of doing SEO is changing. We still have Google and these search platforms. They’re still generating quite a lot of traffic, but there’s a shift.

**Dawood Khan:** People listening most of them have an SEO background and with that I would highly recommend preparing yourself up for AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity because now we have companies that come up to us and they’re like how do we rank on ChatGPT. They don’t know how it works. They don’t know what to do. They just want to be there.

**Dawood Khan:** As SEOs, it’s super important that we’re there on how it works. The traditional way of doing SEO is changing. I think in the next 5 years, the whole ecosystem would be completely different than what we see right now.

**Dawood Khan:** That’s what we’re doing for our own platform at Crowd Reply. We’re not just trying to focus on Reddit, but we’re trying to cover other social platforms like Facebook, Quora, and other ones in the future. So we help these businesses by engaging multi platform and not just rely on Reddit.

**James Dooley:** Yeah, for sure. To anyone who’s watching this, I hope you like the podcast episode I’ve done there with Daward Khn, who is the founder of crowd reply.io.

**James Dooley:** Reddit marketing is a hugely important part of SEO, holistic marketing, being omni channel and omnipresent. Make certain you check out the link in the description. There is a follow on episode about AI search visibility where he’s now going to be looking to get multiple channels like he’s mentioned, Quora, Facebook, and there could be other platforms that he can integrate into to get into those LLM rankings that could be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity.

**James Dooley:** AI search visibility, whether you want to call it LLM optimisation, AI SEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. Dawood Khan’s normally two steps ahead of the game.

**James Dooley:** I hope you like this episode about Reddit marketing and Reddit SEO. Daw, it’s been an absolute pleasure. See you again soon.

**Dawood Khan:** It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.