Keeping tabs on keyword trends enables you to identify and jump on SEO opportunities before your competitors.
For example, say you’re a tourism company, and the trends show that searches for “holiday in Jamaica” increased during the summer. With this information, you can create pillar content and topic clusters targeting the key phrase and related queries. Or you could refresh related content to boost your visibility in the SERPs.
Staying up-to-date on keyword trends can be tricky because the data changes constantly. To help you keep up, we’ve put together ten simple ways to spot topic trends early and within a reasonable budget too.
As the name implies, keyword tracking enables you to keep tabs on search queries and even discover new keyword suggestions that you can target for better search visibility and traffic.
You can set up keyword tracking with keyword.com in only a few steps:
Step 1: Log into your keyword.com dashboard. Enter your URL, then list the keywords you’ll like to track.
Step 2: Set the data parameters for granular keyword tracking. You can specify the location, device (whether mobile or desktop), and other information. Next, click “Add keywords.”
Step 3: Here, you will see your SERP performance for those keywords over time and uncover trends or patterns. Keyword.com also shows you its current SERP ranking, competition, and search volume for these queries.
Beyond SEO tools, here are two other ways to know the keywords your competitors are prioritizing:
Google Trends shows you a keyword’s search frequency over time in a particular location. You can narrow the data to sub-locations or even view the data for related queries.
Google Trends also shows you keywords that are gaining traction in the SERPs, making it a great resource for discovering new keyword opportunities. For example, we see here that traffic for the query “weight loss in Nigeria” is up by 500%.
Social media platforms are a great place to monitor keyword trends. You can use tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to track conversations and mentions of your brand or industry-related keywords. You can also follow influencers in your industry to see what they’re talking about.
Reading the top niche blogs is a great way to uncover the latest developments in your industry — and corresponding topics and keyword trends. Say top niche blogs start writing about a specific subject matter; that’s a sign that the topic is relevant and worth exploring.
You can also use tools like Feedly or Flipboard to aggregate content from multiple blogs in one place.
Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to monitor the web for mentions of your brand, products, or industry-related keywords. You can set up alerts for specific keywords and receive notifications whenever they’re mentioned on the web. This is a great way to stay up to date with the latest trends and news in your industry.
Use tools like Seobility and Ahrefs to analyze your competitors’ SEO performance and identify keywords they’re ranking for that you can potentially target.
You’ll also see which of their keywords are dropping or gaining rankings in the SERPs — which exposes topic trends you could take advantage of.
Sites like Reddit and Quora are excellent resources for finding out what people are talking about in your industry in real-time.
Say you’re an eCommerce store selling handmade bags; join subreddits for handmade fashion aficionados. Here, you’ll discover questions, comments, and ideas that could serve as untapped keyword opportunities for your business.
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can provide insights into how people are finding and using your website. You can use this data to identify which keywords are driving traffic to your site, which pages are most popular, and which keywords people are using to find your content.
Customer feedback is an untapped goldmine of keyword opportunities. Talk to your customers, read their reviews, and analyze their search behavior to get insights into the keywords they’re using to find your products or services.
