Trending topics represent popular or emerging topics of online discussion. In SEO, trends are an opportunity to connect with a wide audience when interest is highest.
A trend-driven SEO approach will increase brand awareness and advocacy, and differentiate your content from your competitors’ often homogenous strategies.
Trends offer a unique advantage, allowing brands to deliver content that stands out and is timely. Here are five ways you can leverage trends in your SEO content strategy to stand out.
1. Create timely, trending content and distribute it when interest is at its peak
Keywords and their “monthly search volume” are useful, but they are highly competitive.
In contrast, trends offer a less crowded environment. They require more work and disrupt the typical workflows that agencies and brands are accustomed to leveraging. Most brands probably don’t even know a term is trending.
Create high-quality content that immediately grabs your audience's attention, which will lead to more traffic because there's less competition. Social search supports this because it shows up instantly on social media and algorithms reward quick responses.
In a world where Google SERPs have been democratized with Reddit content, TikTok results, YouTube videos, and more, creating content on social search platforms increases the chances that your content will appear in the traditional SERPs alongside your website content.
How to do it
Identify and monitor emerging or relevant trends that are showing growth. I prefer to use Glimpse in conjunction with Google Trends, but you can also utilize Exploding Topics.
Once a trend has reached a strong spot and you decide it’s worth investing time in creating content for it (this will vary depending on your brand), take note of where the trend is exploding.
The Channel Breakdown will let you see where trends are happening so you can create content there first and then support it with content from your preferred channels if there's interest there too.
Consider video content, blog content, images/infographics. Create a method of execution that will best help your target audience. Create this first and recycle/reuse this as needed.
Once you discover a trend, try to have a content solution in place within a few hours, especially if you leverage a social search platform. If resources are an issue, swap out the content you had planned for that day and create the trending content first..
example
Look at the health and wellbeing industry, where products and trends are constantly emerging.
According to Glimpse, intermittent fasting has become a trend after a celebrity used it to get in shape for a Marvel movie. Brands can create a video series on the trend using the actor as a case study, covering how to get started, the benefits, pros and cons, etc.
2. Re-optimize your existing content for emerging and trending keywords
As you become more familiar with trending tools, you will find that most of them track keywords and show you related trends. See what new trends are relevant to your existing content and update it accordingly.
If your page is already ranking highly, these updates will rapidly improve its performance, giving you the dual benefit of maintaining and improving your rankings.
How to do it
Keyword research is still important in the strategy phase for determining what content to create, but it can be augmented by mapping trends to keywords.
This allows you to optimize your content according to current trends – you can update your H1, optimize your H2 sections, etc. depending on the situation.
example
Our agency partner created a dashboard to monitor the top 100 queries we ranked for and noticed some trending terms that were similar to existing keywords but slightly different.
You decide to optimize your content to include new terms to take advantage of this trend, but you need to ensure that the potential reach of the trending terms is greater than the monthly search volume (MSV) of your current keywords; otherwise, the change will not be beneficial.
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3. Identify recurring trends and plan your content
The previous two points require a significant reactive element of “proactive response.”
However, when it comes to trends, you can also leverage a different approach: identifying trends that reoccur at certain times of the year – being proactive.
Here, you can leverage historical data to discover patterns in trend trajectories, predict when trends will re-emerge, and plan your content strategy accordingly.
Leveraging keyword seasonality is familiar to content strategists, but predicting when a trend will re-emerge is more complicated and requires a deep understanding of the topic and an effective forecasting model like Exploding Topics.
How to do it
There's nothing fancy here: you need to go into the data and look for signals or indications it shows you, which could be reviewing past traffic on a topic or looking at past spikes in engagement.
Alternatively, you can use the Trends tool to see which peaks occur repeatedly throughout the year and when they occur.
The tool allows you to set alerts based on growth, i.e. you can set a parameter of x% growth year over year and get notified when this happens. If you set this at a moderate level, you can get ahead of the expected peak and create your content accordingly.
example
This one is easy to think of: imagine you're a retailer, and around Christmas time (seasonality) you often see a spike in searches for gift ideas.
Additionally, you can also identify and track the trends of specific products during this period (trends).
4. Trends in a wide range of activities, including digital PR and influencer marketing
Trending means that something is widely popular or consistently talked about online. This online buzz is valuable to publishers because trending terms garner high awareness and media attention.
A combination of trends, content and newsjacking allows your brand to gain attention and join the conversation.
Combining digital PR with emerging trends can help you gain links, build authority, and increase revenue through media attention.
Additionally, influencers can amplify your brand's message by discussing trending topics. If influencers and publishers share a similar audience, recommendations can combine the benefits of both approaches to further increase visibility.
How to do it
Use tools like Glimpse, Exploding Topics, and Google Trends to identify trends relevant to your industry. Make sure these trends align with your brand's messaging, community, and broader audience interests.
Create a press release that highlights your brand's engagement and expertise with your influencer partner on a trending topic. Use data, industry expert quotes, and case studies to make your presentation more compelling and increase your chances of being featured.
Monitor the news for breaking stories relevant to your industry and visit our trends tool to see if Insights findings can lead to immediate content or statements that tie into this story.
Use an influencer marketing platform to find influencers who are capturing audience interest on the trending topics you've identified. Look at their content, engagement rates, and audience demographics to ensure they're the right influencer.
Research trending hashtags and keywords to use in your posts and influencer collaborations to reach a wider audience.
5. Create a Drive Trend
Brands can leverage trend data at a category level to explore signals of what users are interested in and what is trending at a meta level before rolling out content around related products, which essentially creates brand-specific or synonymous trends.
This has been made popular by cosmetic and fashion brands, allowing them to create dupe trends or piggyback off existing trends with their own products.
Once a brand establishes a trend, it will be hard for competitors to jump on it without it becoming obvious that they have copied it. And trust us, users will notice and point it out.
If a community tends to be very loyal and vocal, it's possible to drive support and engagement and move the trend upwards.
Brands can use user-generated content (UGC) to give credibility and early traction to developing trends, both as the trend is established and as brands look to spread the trend organically.
Finally, if a brand is unable to develop its own trends, it may try to cultivate new trends on another platform.
If your brand sees that a trend hasn't yet exploded on TikTok, but is beginning to emerge on Instagram, there may be an opportunity to be an early initiator of that trend on TikTok and drive the trend there (with less competition).
How to do it
Find and join forums, social media groups, or online communities where people can discuss, share, and contribute to new trends and the trends you want to promote or create.
To keep the momentum going, please engage with this community regularly, including on your owned social media channels and in the comments section of this content.
Host webinars, live Q&A sessions (TikTok is perfect for this type of content), workshops or conferences focused on your content or what’s trending. Use these events to provide more information, answer questions, and build excitement and buzz.
Encouraging your audience to create and share content related to your brand and what it offers will also develop UGC on that topic, ultimately resulting in content that drives trends forward.
example
Clothing brands may notice an explosion of meta-level category trends as “90s retro fashion” and related terms start to emerge.
As a supplier of 1990s football kits, they are driving the ‘retro football shirt’ trend and in an age of rising nostalgia, may choose to recreate iconic products from the 90s for their community.
UGC creators have begun sharing their collections of retro football kits, showcasing their favourite designs and shirts, and discussing potential outfit combinations for incorporating retro kits into modern street fashion.
The trend has exploded, driving demand for the brand's new collection of retro football kits.
From reactive to proactive: Incorporating trends into your SEO content
By creating timely and trend-relevant content, re-optimizing existing content, mapping out recurring trends, leveraging trends into wider activity, and even driving trends, brands can stand out and engage with their audience in a meaningful way.
Why follow the crowd and create the same content strategy as your competitors (albeit with a different TOV) to lead your industry and truly connect with your community?
One way to achieve this is to actively incorporate trends into your SEO content strategy efforts.
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