How to Identify and Leverage Trending Topics for SEO

Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's edition, we are going to talk about how we can leverage trending searches in our content strategy. What are the best ways to identify those topics that nobody is targeting? New topics, new search behavior. We know that our users are searching for new things all the time, right? And to help me tackle this particular topic, I have invited a couple of people who have tons of experience doing SEO for content and identifying opportunities as soon as they arise. On one hand, I have Abby Gleason, who's the SEO product manager at Skript. Hello, Abby. How are you?

Hi, Aleyda. And thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Very excited to have you too. And on the other hand, I have Crystal Carter, desert princess, better than Morty SEO in Wix, our head of SEO communications at Wix too. Hello, Crystal. How are you?

Hello.

Hello. Thank you so much for having me along.

I'm very, very excited for our today's edition indeed. Before starting with our conversation, I want to thank our today's sponsor, which is ContentKing. ContentKing is that real-time SEO alerting tool that will allow you to tell you whenever something goes to hell with your website before it actually damages your organic search traffic and conversions. So it's a very valuable tool. If you don't know ContentKing, go and give it a go. You have a link below here in our description. We're ready now to start. I believe that A lot of people still think that keyword research is that activity that you will tend to do at the beginning of the SEO process and never revisit it back, thinking that the search behavior of the user won't change or will change and you will revisit it like once per year or something like that. But realistically, there's always something new happening. So I would like to ask you to start, what are the main errors to avoid that you see people doing when searching for or identifying trending topics, even if I don't do necessarily a lot of SEO for publications, but I am much more targeted to e-commerce websites or SaaS websites. I have always found being alerted of new mentions, new topics that are connected with the context of the clients, with the industry, super useful because like that we have been able to even leverage or piggyback for campaigns. So effort minimum, potential impact very high.

I think one of the things that I, that I noticed is people sometimes ignore some of their like owned data, some of the data that they have within their own site. So, you know, thinking about site search or thinking about literally the, the questions that people are asking at your actual physical location, maybe necessarily if people are constantly coming in and they're saying, hey, have you got like Coachella outfits or something and you don't have a section for festival wear or Coachella outfits or something on your website or in your space, then maybe you should.

If people are asking regularly for like soy milk or coconut milk or something like that in your cafe, then maybe you should have some soy milk and coconut milk in your cafe.

And I think that this is a data source that is free and these are also warm leads. So if people are on your website and they're already customers of yours and they're looking for something that you don't currently have listed or don't currently have, or you haven't currently curated. So for instance, in the case of like Coachella outfits, which is a really easy category if you were an e-commerce store and you would be able to sort of just pull together some like fun things, put them in a category, write a little bit of blurb, stick it on the top. And then when that comes up, you're ready there for those searches. And I think also, you know, when things go viral, sometimes when people are figuring out like, should we engage with this influencer or should we engage with this brand or something like this? one of the litmus tests I always do is like, how, when, if you look at their account, how many people do you know that are following them? And if you see that a lot of the people that you follow are following them, then that's a good sign that there's, that there's some overlap. There's some audience overlap that they're following the same kind, or, you know, that they're, that your audience is engaged with their audience. And if those people that you follow, for instance, are talking all about the Corn Kid, then maybe that's something that your brand can engage with somehow, either on social, or maybe you could do a little blog, or maybe, maybe it's Halloween and it's like, oh, you dress up like the corn kid or something like whatever it may be. So yeah, be aware of the things that are within your ecosystem and the data that you already have access to when you're thinking about finding new topics and trends.

Yes. And I just, Krystal, Aleyda, you've both given such classic examples of how culture drives search demand. That's what that is. And so Aleyda, you were saying this is not just for publications and I like, that's one error that I think has to be stated is like This is not just for publications. This is for e-commerce. This is for SaaS. Anything that is happening in the world is relevant if it, you know, within your industry. So that is one thing I would definitely call out. And yeah, there's a million examples. I think you'll see this Halloween, people looking for Succession Halloween costumes. When The Queen's Gambit came out, chess sets skyrocketed. So things that might seem unrelated even to your industry, like that's kind of where I think an error is assuming that just because something is trending and you are an industry that maybe doesn't change often, that it doesn't apply to you. And kind of the other going along with that, I think that's why we have to kind of not necessarily just change the keyword research process, but add kind of some new elements. I think right now, and I've been definitely, I've used this process before of going into a traditional tool, popping in a couple topics and then getting that list of seed keywords and going from that. While traditional tools do a really good job, I think, of showing a lot of evergreen topics with a lot of historical data, that's not all there is. And if you rely only on that process or think you can even like automate keyword research, I would say, I would agree you're missing out on some really major opportunities that might be a lot like lower competition.

Yeah, much, much lower. And you're, you're able to get in there first. You'll be able to get those searches and you'll be able to rank for longer. than, than other people who are, who are coming up behind you. So yeah, absolutely.

It's great that you mentioned this because indeed, whenever you think about keyword research for SEO, it's like, yeah, the searches that happen in Google and that's it. But there are other platforms where people are actually very active and even more active searching for certain types of things like social media platforms like YouTube or Instagram or TikTok that we can leverage within our process. What would you say? That are the steps, the core steps that you will tend to use now and when in the SEO process?

One thing I would start off with is before even like launching into specific tools is really making sure you're aligned with your audience. So beginning with audience research, I think is the very first step you should be taking. And this can look like a few different ways. I mean, I would always recommend if you can get in front of your customers or at least like customer support teams, the people who are talking to your audience. Frequently to understand what are their pain points, where are they on social media, what are they paying attention to. I just think doing that exercise for me at least like once or twice a year is really, really helpful and there are also some tools. I think of SparkToro as that can be helpful to see, you know, if your audience is interested in X topic that you write about or a product that you sell, where else are they online, what influencers do they follow, what topics do they care about, what hashtags are they using. all of this information, putting this in a document, getting a really strong sense of where you should be paying attention to, and then moving on to actual keyword research and tools.

I absolutely agree that a qualitative approach is really, really useful in the, in the sort of first instance, if you're trying to get some of those, some of those high value, but maybe not on the radar of a keyword research tool. And they might not be on the radar of a keyword research tool because maybe you have a new product. And so there's not going to be any search volume for your new brand new product, or maybe it's on there because, because it's a really niche branded term, but that doesn't mean that your customers aren't searching for your branded term.

So one of my favorite qualitative tools, which I think is highly underrated, is Slack.

If you work in a team, I happen to work in a very large team, and if you work in a team, and even when I was working in a smaller team, people will, if you have Slack Pro, you'll have historic searches or records of all of the conversations that have been had. And so you can search for a particular product or something like, let's say you're selling trampolines or something, so you can search up like trampoline question and in Slack and you can see every time somebody was like, hey, does anybody know about this? The trampoline? How does the trampoline work? Or does anyone know about this? Or I had a customer ask me that when I was working in my previous team, people would say, oh, if we, have we got any case studies on this, this, this, or this? Is there, do we have a case study on that, that, that, or that? And you have a record of those going back years sometimes, depending on how long your team has used Slack. So those can be really, really useful, but the qualitative research is really useful. And again, speaking to people, so speaking to sales teams. Sales teams will tell you everything.

They have a lot to say, especially if you're making content.

They're like, we need this.

I need a document that says that. I need a this that says this.

I need a one-pager for that.

I need some pictures of this. They will, they will put you to work if you're willing to do the work.

And they are looking for solutions to help them close the deal and to help them move people along the funnel. And they will know where those funnel gaps are because they'll be talking to somebody and they're nearly there with the deal and somebody says, oh yeah, but do you have an example of this? And they'll go, I don't. And so that's when they come to you. And if you're able to engage with those sales teams, it's really valuable to you, to the sales team, to the business.

I love how you mentioned qualitative data because coincidentally, I remember when COVID happened and one of my clients at the time was in the travel industry and how we literally had zero source of data at that point about a pandemic and how people will react with it. So what content can be created or should be created at that point to address and connect with their need and also like attract that demand and be able to give a good customer support and good experience overall as a brand, right? And I remember going to the support team indeed, like what are the questions that they are asking you by the phone, via email, via the contact or the chat that they had. On the website in order to prioritize the FAQ that we were creating pretty much in real time at that point. Later on, yes, I configured an alert system. So whenever something in that industry plus COVID search with a minimum of shares over social, I will get alerted. It's not something that a lot of times also accessible by default to all of us, but it's just about asking, right? Yeah.

I think that that's where the win is though, because most people are too lazy to do it.

And also it's that there's some people who find it really nerve-wracking going to talk to random people about, about whatever questions it is they have.

I think in the age of like ChatGPT and things like that, you're much more likely to get like actual, like unique content and quotes and the kinds of stuff that helps you to differentiate your content in a space where there's a lot of content that's created quite easily.

Amazing. So from a workflow standpoint, you identify the topic, do you see that it has a minimum traction or It really touches something that is actually relevant for the brand or the product. And then you talk with the content team to see how it connects with the activities that are already in place, right? Because that I can definitely see how at some point that can be actually the tricky thing when you don't have already in place a workflow that is friendly to trending topics, right? When, whenever it's the first time that you come up with something with real potential and you from scratch say, hey, here's something else to write. Now, it's like, oh no, no, I have all resources already allocated. All of the people is already working on something. How do you address that? Do you always leave certain type of resources with complete flexibility to address something new, or that can be flexible enough to address something like that?

I would say that I approach that on a client-by-client basis.

I think for some, for what is considered trending in some spaces is not considered trending in other spaces. So like in fast fashion, for instance, you know, trending might be whatever happened on Love Island last night.

But in like a SaaS space, it might be a sort of the, over a few months, you start seeing people talk about generative AI or Web3 or whatever. And you, and you think, okay, we should plan this for the next month, or we should move this ahead in the schedule. There's certainly, I've certainly worked with clients where they, where things were changing very frequently. And the way that I managed that was, was I essentially had a list of things that we should get done.

And if there wasn't anything, like particularly during COVID when things were changing all the time and we're open, we're closed, we're open, we're closed. So all of that sort of stuff.

I sort of had a list of the things that I'd like to get done and, and then we'd have things that we'd have to do that like if, so if there was, if there was suddenly a thing that we needed to do, then we'd put down the thing that was less time sensitive and pick up the thing that was the new thing to do. And then as soon as that was done, we'd go back to our list and just work down a list rather than working to a sort of timescale sort of Gantt sort of model. That was, that, that worked particularly well for that client.

For me and my clients, what I've, what I've done and seen success with is a mix of both evergreen and trending topics. So yeah, definitely not just, it also depends on the industry, Crystal, as you said, like if you're a fast fashion site, trends are going to be so much more important, like the yes, what happened yesterday or this morning. But in general, having kind of that mix and something I've found, especially with some, some clients, some industries are really hyper-focused on that search volume. So if there's not really that indication, there can be that blocker. I have kind of found a way around this where under that keyword volume, I will put trending topic volume not accurate. And then if they want more info, I always give the example, at least recently, of ChatGPT where, I mean, millions and millions of visitors within the first few days and for months it was a zero volume keyword truly. So, I think if there's ever any question about, okay, well, you know, are we actually not going to drive any traffic? I think you can give that example. And as you do more and more, you know, trending topics and see success, you can actually start to use, I've used internal examples then later on where, hey, you know, this was actually a zero volume keyword. Look, it's driving, you know, thousands of visits each month. So just making sure you're arming yourself one with kind of basically a prepared answer for the people who, who will ask about this lack of volume and also mixing in evergreen topics too. I do think that a balance is best when it comes to your content strategy.

Which are your favorite tools? For example, there is this little extension that I love that is freemium also to use up to a certain number of searches per month that is called Glimpse. That overlays with Google Trends that you can also use to create your own alerting system. And it will let you know whenever something gets more than X or Y in searches. And also when you overlay it with Google Trends, it tells you the actual numbers behind the trends. Then of course I use BuzzSumo that I use also to integrate or aggregate whenever any content is getting Not only a lot of searches, but backlinks, shares over social that I think is also a very important input to take into account. Google Alerts and Exploding Topics that allows you to identify for any topics, any industry, exploding terms or topics of interest.

I also use Glimpse and it is like supercharges your Google Trends. So yeah, definitely love that tool. I have so many, but one that I want to call out is like using Google's own tools. The People Also Ask and also Google Autocomplete. That was actually like several years ago, my first kind of foray into trending keywords. COVID hit. I was working with a client in the healthcare space and there was not a lot of like, if you searched for COVID in a traditional tool, you didn't really get maybe all of the questions that people were asking. But we basically looked it up on Google autocomplete and tried a few different like patterns of the way people were asking questions and found a lot of different questions that people were asking that showed zero volume in traditional tools. And one of these topics that we targeted pretty early on in COVID ended up driving, gosh, tens of thousands of visits and became one of our top URLs on the blog. And so that was just one example of how autocomplete is trending. So another example is when Rihanna did the Super Bowl. If you looked up Rihanna maybe 3 days before the Super Bowl, you would've seen a completely different set of questions than what was happening right after. People all of a sudden were asking about her pregnancy, how many kids she has, did she get paid for the Super Bowl? And you can see those questions also reflected and people also ask where I believe Google is maybe even testing a trending tag.

Sure.

I've seen the little arrow.

I'm sure.

I'm really excited to see Google kind of leaning into that and giving people indication about what's trending. Those are a couple of tools that I start with.

Yeah, I very often use Twitter actually, because I'm pretty good at the Twitter search operators and they, they used to be very good at their trending terms.

It's a little bit changed recently, but what I'll tend to do is you can, you can look at certain terms and you can sort of sort by latest, or you can, you can sort it by filter it by date, or you can filter it by people that you know who are in a certain, certain space. So you can look up a particular topic and then you can look up from people you follow and you can see those. And then you can see a sort of, you can get a very quick litmus test of how many people in your circle, in your field are interested in that particular topic or talking about that particular topic, who from within your followership or who you're following is somebody who's, who talks about that a lot. For instance, we've mentioned ChatGPT a few times.

That's like, if you want to figure out like who actually knows what they're talking about in terms of ChatGPT, because lots of people have opinions.

So you could put, for instance, you could put in that as a term and then you can filter a bit by date and things like that. So I find that that's, that's really useful.

It's interesting because there's a lot of conversation about it and how more young people are using it as the new search engine, right? TikTok. Something that I have also found particularly useful is that they have this business-focused creative center, right? Free to use and access. You just need to log in and pretty much they will give you trendy hashtags and focus on specific countries too. You can use, even if you are not running any ads or anything like that, to identify what are the trending topics. So for example, not shockingly, I'm seeing it right now, like Met Gala, Met Gala 2023. So how you can leverage that? Especially when you are entering in a market, how it can give you ideas because you don't have such a big know-how from that particular industry.

I am so happy we're talking about TikTok. The business center, you can even filter it by industry too, to look at specifically what hashtags in each industry. And I mean, culture starts on TikTok. There are terms used there that you'll never find anywhere else because the words don't exist. Like, just, you'll see the craziest terms show up on TikTok, but then you'll see that there's 10 billion searches. Like, that's real numbers for a certain hashtag. One example that I found recently is like interior design word cluttercore is something, or hair theory in the fashion world, which is basically just another word for hairstyles, how hairstyles change how people perceive you. But this, these are all opportunities. Again, won't find them maybe in traditional terms. I wouldn't even know where to look, but then then on TikTok, all of a sudden, you're kind of seeing these new terms, and that just gives a lot of opportunity to, I think, even define these terms. People are looking up like, what is hair theory? Going beyond that and saying, how do you apply it? Different hairstyles you can use, and all of a sudden, you've got kind of like a mini hub just off of one topic that you found on TikTok. So, I think if you're, if you're not on TikTok, like, even if you're not a huge user personally, like, I'm not, like, I use it for keyword research all the time because there's just, that's where culture begins, as weird as some of the terms may seem. And it's, you're missing out if you're not seeing some of those, those kooky terms.

It's one of those things where like, there are a lot of people who are in the TikTok space who are big into the TikTok space, but it's kind of its own ecosystem. So from a search point of view, so if you are, you as a brand have your foot in the water there, then you can, you can leverage that because again, it's like, it's going to be low competition from a web point of view. So there's probably not, not the same. volume of search for cluttercore on websites. But if you are on, on, if you do have that website, then you're going to get a lot more of that traffic than, than someone who doesn't. And also it shows, it shows people that you're relevant, that you're paying attention, that you're keeping up with what's going on, which is really, really important.

100%. To start wrapping up, what will you say are that particular area, that tip, that example, anything that you haven't mentioned yet? That you would like to share with the audience that you think that can be really useful for them to start leveraging trending topics for their own SEO process?

I would say, keep your eyes open and don't be afraid to lean into things that you're interested in. If you know that you and all of your friends are absolutely obsessed with a particular television show or particular activity or particular food, like you're just really into cronuts or whatever, which I'm dating myself, but like whatever, whatever it may be, you know, don't be afraid to lean into that.

I've personally done, done SEO content around Beyoncé, like, like throughout my career, for instance.

And I always find engagement from that content. It shows personality. It shows people that you are interested in the same things that they're interested. It also creates common languages for discussing more complex topics. Leaning into the things that you're interested in. Don't be afraid to talk about some of the things that you, that you personally find trending in, in the business space as well.

Completely agree, Crystal. I think your intuition is one of the best tools at your disposal, is just like keeping your eyes open and thinking about the things that you pay attention to naturally outside of work. I think it's wild how many ties you can create within your professional life as well. For me, my tip would just be in like an increasingly automated world, this is a process that I think we can just embrace the manual effort. Aleyda, you mentioned early on in the, in the call, like effort versus impact. I've personally found that, you know, a lot of these things that sounds like it's, you know, manual, can't be automated, embrace it. I think the effort of, you know, I would recommend doing this process maybe monthly depending on your, you know, space might be more or less frequently depending, but committing a few hours each month, I really don't think is a lot of effort for the frankly huge impact that I've seen it create. Because otherwise sometimes when you're going off that evergreen list that you created a year ago, you might be be kind of screaming into the void that's becoming increasingly competitive with all of the automated content that's gonna be coming out. And I think this is a case where you can really take that first mover advantage. And so I do, I find it worth the effort. And at the end of the day, you're on TikTok and you're getting paid to do it at work.

I believe that we have a wonderful data source also that you mentioned many times is already internally, right? We already have it. In our own Google Search Console.

Yeah.

Especially if you have established brand and there are a lot of branded searches, take a look at the questions along with the brand. A lot of, I have found that, oh, it's a branded search. It's a search that we already own anyway. Not necessarily. There are a lot of questions, a lot of queries that are being searched with a brand. Many of them referring to something new, something trendy that sometimes people are already questioning. It's like, oh, do they already offer this that I just saw on TV? It looks like it's something from them, even if it is not yet. Right? Or even if you could be able to offer it, but you don't have yet a proper guide or a proper category page that you could easily enable. So I will say that a best practice will be, as you mentioned, maybe like monthly to review a little bit, which are those new queries that are being searched along with your brand and Google Search Console is a free data source that we have already there. And of course we can use external keywords tool for this too, but yes, even if it has zero volume, if we see consistency. If we've seen some different permutations of the same topic, it might be very, very worthy to start targeting. So thank you. Thank you very much for your time. I love our today's session. It was so actionable. I believe that so many of you can start putting this into practice very easily too with the information that we already have and start leveraging and making the most out of new trending topics. High impact, low effort. What else do we want, right? So thank you very much, Abby and Crystal. And if you liked today's episode, remember to like, Like the video, subscribe to the channel to not miss anything out, and until the next edition, bye-bye!

Bye-bye!