When building e-commerce or niche sites, conventional wisdom dictates that you go with topics with lots of easy-to-rank-for keywords, cheap products that you can private-label, and others.
However, almost everyone will be doing the same.
So if you’re looking to be different, why not travel the road less traveled?
I’m talking about using emerging trends as the topic of your niche site or online store with the help of Google Trends.
In this post, we’ll be looking at the advantages of targeting trending topics for your website and how to find them on Google Trends.
Why Use Trending Topics Instead of Evergreen Ones?
Looking for emerging trends instead of proven niches may appear to be a gamble. It’s highly possible that the topic is trending now but will soon fade away with a whimper as if it never existed.
Also, you don’t have historical data to support your decision on using a trending topic for your niche site or e-commerce business.
To be honest, these are risks you’ll have to take with trending topics. It’s just a matter of gut feel or feeling out if the topic is something you can build upon over time, even if the luster wears off.
For example, here’s the trending graph for “gdpr:”
After its peak in May of 2018, the topic never reached its point of popularity again and remained out from everyone’s consciousness since then.
Now, let’s talk about the benefits of pursuing trending topics.
In fact, there’s only one advantage that matters:
They provide you with a greater opportunity to become an authority in these topics.
The fact that trending keywords are hot off the presses, i.e., brand-new topics that are enjoying a surge in traffic from search engines and interest, means few to no competitors for these topics.
Therefore, the faster you decide on making sites from these topics, the faster you’ll become an authority for said topic.
So if you built a site about “contactless payment” in April of 2020, you should be reaping the towards of being one of the best resources online about this topic.
By leveraging a trending topic with the potential for becoming an evergreen topic, you could generate exponential traffic, sales, and revenue!
This makes Google Trends a unique keyword tool that you should have at your disposal to broaden your niche and product research.
Using Google Trends for Market Research
Let’s head on straight to using Google Trends to identify topics that are trending and which among those topics you should target on your site.
Explore Topics or Industries
Go to Google Trends and enter a topic on the search bar.
If you don’t have a topic in mind to research yet, you can explore the site to find ideas for different categories that pique your interest.
Click on the hamburger icon on the top-left of the screen and select Explorer. Then scroll down the page to ideas.
It’s best that you locate topics according to categories or web search. This way, you can narrow down the selection to industries that have at least a passing interest.
You can break down the category into subcategories by clicking on the arrow.
Keep clicking on the arrows until they no longer appear. That means you’ve exhausted the topic to its very core.
For this example, we’ve chosen Gaming > Board Games > Chess & Abstract Strategy Games. Here’s what you should see on your screen:
You can break down the results page into three parts:
- Interest over time – Shows users’ interest level about the topic from 1-100 (100 being the highest). This shows how many people are looking for the topic on Google at any given time.
- Search topics – Terms people also searched for in relation to the topic. You can organize the results according to Top (currently most searched topics) or Rising (topics that are generating more searches and interest over time).
- Search queries – Keywords people typed in that are related to the topic.
In search topics, you will see the entity of each term.
This helps provide you with more context about the term to aid you in your niche research.
Regarding search topics and queries, expect to see how many people are searching for them at the moment compared to the previous time.
You should either see the increased percentage of searches for the term or just see “Breakout.” This means that the topic or query has “exploded” in search over a short period.
Ideally, you want to target “breakout” terms and keywords to lead off your niche or e-commerce website. The fact that these topics came out of nowhere to appear on Google Trends makes them potential niches for or products to sell on your site.
Related:
How to Stay Up-to-Date on SERP Trends
Leverage on Trending Searches
If the above method didn’t work for you, the Trending Searches feature ought to do the trick.
You can see this option if you click on the hamburger icon.
Once you’re on the topic, you can show results from daily search trends or real-time search trends. There’s also an option to show the trending topics from a particular country.
In here, you’ll see the trending search terms complete with their respective search volumes and an accompanying Google news article that made them trend at a given time.
If you click on any one of these topics, you will see related queries to the trending search term and additional articles about them.
Click on any of the queries to show you Google Trends data on each.
For real-time search trends, you will also see a line graph that shows interest over time for the search term and the article published related to it.
Using this method, you can piggyback on keyword searches and find new angles to approach them using their related queries to build a profitable site.
Compare Topics
Let’s say you found topics that you want to target for your site. However, you’re still unsure which among them to pursue.
To help you make a decision, you can compare the topics from Google Trends to view their interest over time.
To do this, click on the three-button icon to show a drop-down menu and select Add to comparison.
Next, choose the next topic you want to add to comparison from the search topics or queries. You can also type in the term if it doesn’t appear on either.
Once you are comparing two or more terms using Google Trends, you can see how they measure up on the tool’s different metrics.
Arguably the best thing about this feature is how you can break down the terms according to the regions in which each of them is popular.
This is vital to help you determine if the topic you want to create a site for meets the sub-regions or countries where you want to profit your site from.
So if you’re in Europe and the region where the topic is popular is in Asia, you may want to think twice about whether the topic is the right one for you.
Validating Your Google Trends Topic Further
Now that you know how to use Google Trends to find a niche, you also need to know how profitable the topic is and could be.
We mentioned that, since emerging trends are literally brand-new topics in the market, you won’t have websites about it to research and compare.
At the same time, the topics won’t lend themselves well to traditional keyword research due to the lack of search data from most of these tools, such as search volume.
Therefore, as a trailblazer, you’re left with few options to determine its potential traffic and revenue.
For starters, you can search for affiliate promotions adjacent to the niche markets that you can join. In particular, you’d need to find a relevant product or two that you can promote and make money from your site.
Also, check if there are online communities on social media sites like Reddit and forum boards about these topics or products. If they are vibrant and active, there’s a good chance you can generate interest from these markets.
From these groups, you’ll be able to gauge the interest in the topic over time. If the buzz surrounding it is slowly but surely fading, so is its search popularity.
Therefore, you’d want to keep your ears close to the ground about the topic to hear incoming rumblings about the topic.
Ultimately, profiting from trends using Google Trends and hoping they continue to sustain their popularity is the real challenge here.
But at the very least, this method gives you a unique spin towards niche research and provides you with new insights as to which topics to find.
