Trending topics represent popular or emerging points of discussion online. In SEO, trends are opportunities to connect with a wider audience when they are most engaged.
A trend-led SEO approach can increase brand awareness and advocacy, setting your content apart from competitors’ often homogeneous strategies.
Trends offer a unique edge, allowing brands to deliver distinctive and timely content. Here are five ways to leverage trends within your SEO content strategy to stand out.
1. Create timely, trend-relevant content and deliver during interest peak
Keywords and their “monthly search volumes” are useful but highly competitive.
In contrast, trends offer a less crowded landscape. It requires more work and disrupts the typical workflow agencies and brands have become accustomed to leveraging. Most brands probably won’t even know a term is trending.
Create top-quality content that captures immediate audience interest, leading to increased traffic due to lower competition. Social search supports this, as you can appear on social media instantly, with algorithms rewarding quick responses.
In a world where a Google SERP is being democratized with Reddit content, TikTok results, YouTube videos and more, if you create content on social search platforms, it’s likely that this content could feature on a traditional SERP alongside any website content.
How to do it
Identify and monitor emerging trends and relevant trends that are showing growth. I like to use Glimpse alongside Google Trends, but you could also turn to Exploding Topics.
When a trend reaches a favorable position and you believe the opportunity is worth time investment in creating content (this will vary from brand to brand), look at where the trend is exploding.
“Channel breakdown” will show where the trend is emerging. Create content there first and support it with content on preferred channels if there is interest there, too.
Explore video content, blog content and imagery/infographics. Create whichever execution will assist the target audience most effectively, create this first and recycle/repurpose this as appropriate.
When you have discovered a trend, attempt to deliver a content solution within a couple of hours, especially when leveraging social search platforms. If resource is an issue, swap out the content you had planned for that day and create the trend piece first.
Example
Let’s turn attention to the health and wellbeing industry, a space where products and trends emerge constantly.
Glimpse shows that “intermittent fasting” is trending after a celebrity used it to get in shape for a Marvel film. A brand can create a video series on this trend, covering how to start, benefits and pros and cons, using the actor as a case study.
2. Re-optimize existing content for emerging and trending keywords
As you get familiar with trend tools, you’ll see that most track keywords and show related trends. Check for emerging trends related to your existing content and update it accordingly.
If a page is already ranking well, these updates can quickly boost its performance, offering a dual benefit of maintaining and improving rankings.
How to do it
Keyword research remains essential in the strategy phase to determine what content to create. However, you can enhance it by mapping trends to your keywords.
This helps optimize content to align with current trends. You might update an H1 or optimize a section in an H2, depending on the situation.
Example
An agency partner created a dashboard to monitor the top 100 queries where we rank. We noticed a trending term similar to an existing keyword but slightly different.
To capitalize on the trend, we decided to optimize our content to include the new term. However, we must ensure that the potential reach of the trending term is greater than the current keyword’s monthly search volume (MSV); otherwise, the change won’t be beneficial.
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3. Identify and plan content for recurring trends
The two previous points require much of the reactive element of “proactive reactivity.”
However, another approach can be leveraged when it comes to trends: identifying trends that reoccur at specific times of the year – a.k.a. proactivity.
Here, we can utilize historical data to discover patterns in the trajectory of a trend, predicting when trends will resurface and planning content strategy accordingly.
Leveraging keyword seasonality is familiar to content strategists. However, predicting when trends will resurface is more complex and requires a deep understanding of the topic or an effective forecasting model like Exploding Topics.
How to do it
There is nothing fancy here. We must head to the data and look for the signals and signs it shows us. This could be a review of historic traffic around a topic and/or a look at historical engagement spikes.
Or, we can leverage trends tools to look for those recurring peaks and when they occur throughout the year.
Tools will allow you to set alerts based on growth, meaning you could set a parameter of x% growth year over year and be notified when this occurs. If you set this at a moderate level, you would then be ahead of the expected peak and can create content accordingly.
Example
This one is a simple one to think about. Imagine a retailer, they will often see spikes in searches for gift ideas during the Christmas period (seasonality).
To take this further, they may see specific product trends during this period which can be tracked (trend).
4. Trends for wider activity, such as digital PR and influencer marketing
Trending means something is widely popular or a constant topic of online discussion. This online buzz is valuable for publishers, as trending terms attract high visibility and media attention.
By combining trends, content, and newsjacking, brands can gain attention and insert themselves into the conversation.
Connecting digital PR with emerging trends can help gain links, build authority, and increase revenue through media attention.
Additionally, influencers discussing trending topics can amplify a brand’s message. If influencers and publishers share similar audiences, endorsements can further boost visibility, combining the benefits of both approaches.
How to do it
Use tools like Glimpse, Exploding Topics and Google Trends to identify trends relevant to an industry. Ensure these trends align with the brand’s messaging, their community and wider audience interests.
Write press releases highlighting the brand’s involvement or expertise alongside any influencer partner in a trending topic. Use data, quotes from industry experts, and case studies to make the pitch more compelling and make it more likely to see pick-up.
Monitor the news for breaking stories related to an industry and head to a trends tool to see if the insight findings quickly create content or statements that tie into this narrative.
Use influencer marketing platforms to find influencers who have engaged audiences in the trending topics you’ve identified. Look at their content, engagement rates and audience demographics to ensure a good fit.
Research and use trending hashtags and keywords in posts and influencer collaborations to reach a broader audience.
5. Create drive trends
Brands can leverage trend data at a category level to explore signals of what users are interested in and what is trending at the meta level before driving content around a related product. This essentially creates a trend that would become exclusive or synonymous with a brand.
This has been made popular by cosmetic brands and fashion brands alike, who can create Dupe trends or piggyback their products upon existing trends.
Once a brand has established a trend, it’s hard for competitors to jump aboard without it being obvious they’ve copied and trust me, users will recognize and call this out.
Where communities tend to be very loyal and vocal, it’s possible to foster their advocacy and engagement and drive a trend upward.
A brand can use user-generated content (UGC) to give the developing trend credibility and early traction as the trend is established and the brand looks to spread the trend organically.
Finally, where brands cannot develop their own trend, they may look to grow an emerging trend on a different platform.
If a brand recognizes that a trend is yet to explode upon TikTok but is emerging on Instagram, there could be an opportunity to be an early creator of the trend on TikTok and drive the trend there (with less competition).
How to do it
Explore and participate in forums, social media groups or online communities where people can discuss, share and contribute to the emerging trends and the ones you want to drive or create.
Engage with this community regularly to keep the momentum going. This includes owned social media channels and the comments sections on this content.
Organize webinars, live Q&A sessions (TikTok excels for this type of content), workshops or conferences that focus on content and the trends you want to “get over.” Use these events to provide in-depth information, answer questions and build excitement and hype.
Encouraging an audience to create and share content related to a brand and its offering will result in content that eventually drives a trend forward, as UGC is developed on that topic, too.
Example
A clothing brand may recognize a meta-level category trend explosion around “Retro ’90s Fashion” and related terms as they start to emerge.
As a supplier of football kits during the 1990s, they may opt to drive the trend of “Retro Football Shirts” and recreate their iconic products from the ’90s for their community – at a time when nostalgia is also excelling.
UGC creators begin to share their collections of retro football kits, showing their favorite designs and shirts and discussing potential outfit combinations to incorporate retro kits into modern streetwear fashion.
The trend explodes, and demand for the brand’s new collection of retro reissue football kits is high.
From reactive to proactive: Incorporating trends in SEO content
By creating timely, trend-relevant content, re-optimizing existing content, planning for recurring trends, leveraging trends for wider activities and even driving trends, a brand can stand out and engage with audiences in meaningful ways.
Why follow the crowd in creating the same content strategy (albeit with a different TOV) as competitors, lead the industry and truly connect with a community?
Proactively integrating trends into SEO content strategy efforts is one way to achieve this.
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