Top Trending Keywords on Google in April 2024

You might know we’ve got the data about the most searched terms and most asked questions on Google. But trending keywords per month? That’s a whole other ballgame. Here’s where the underdog – or even the unknown – keywords can come out on top.

By looking at the percentage increase in search volume from one month to another, we can see the impact of seasonal trends, social media trends, and timely news on searches all over the world. With Similarweb data from our super powerful Keyword Research tool, we teach you how you, as a business, can make the most of these trends in your content and traffic acquisition, helping you to:

• Gain visibility with ultra-relevant content
• Resonate more with your target audience
• Optimize and prioritize your strategy (and budget)
• Get ahead of your competitors
• Reach new heights with your web traffic numbers

Plus, we’re all nosey little things, us human beings, so let’s have a sneak peek at the numbers and see what searches were getting the most hits recently – worldwide, in the US, and in the UK.

Top trending keywords on Google in the world

What we can learn from the top global keyword trends

1) The internet loves Dhruv Rathee

29-year-old YouTuber Dhruv Rathee is all the rave right now and the undisputed king of the trending keywords, gaining by 11295% since last month. What can we attribute to his success? One thing is clear, Dhruv’s controversial take on politics is drawing a lot of attention.

Dhruv started his YouTube career as a travel vlogger but later turned to politics, becoming a harsh critic of Modi, the Indian prime minister. Looking at his YouTube channel, the more controversial his videos are, the more views they seem to have.

From an SEO perspective, Dhruv has an impressive brand SERP that’s complete with a Knowledge Panel, Twitter boxes, video boxes, and more. It shows you how powerful an effect a strong social media presence can have on Google SERPs.

Looking at click data, we see that almost all the clicks for the keyword go to either his social media accounts, YouTube account, or his own site.

2) The NFL draft is raising eyeballs

Nothing drives traffic more than seasonal sports events, and the NFL draft is no exception. We witnessed the 2024 NFL Draft, the 89th annual meeting of the National Football League for player selection, from April 25-27. This highly anticipated event caused a surge in Google searches for the keyword ‘NFL draft’, resulting in a staggering 4337% increase since the previous month, securing the #3 spot on the list of the biggest trending keywords.

Looking at the Keyword Seasonality report, keywords relating to the draft saw a strong increase in traffic in April with ‘NFL draft’ taking 58.62% traffic share.

As excitement around the keyword increases, Google adds more and more features to the SERP, giving marketers more potential real estate to occupy, including Things to Know, Top Stories, Perspectives, and Video boxes.

3) Controversy in the K-pop world

NewJeans, the K-pop girl band that holds the Guinness World Record for fastest K-pop act to hit 1 billion Spotify streams, is in the middle of a controversy which resulted in some nasty allegations and an emotional press conference. And since controversy is the oxygen of publicity, the keyword ‘newjeans’ saw a 3925.76% traffic increase this past month.

The marketing strategy takeaway here is that controversy is an easy way to win attention. But attention is nothing on its own and what really counts is what you do with that attention.

In case you were wondering where all those clicks went, let’s take a quick peek at the Similarweb Keyword Analysis tool:

• Wikipedia got the biggest traffic share of 21.4% of all clicks, acquiring 111.6K clicks in only one month. This most likely consists of people who are discovering the band for the first time
• The group’s YouTube channel saw a 59% increase in search traffic
• Their Spotify page saw an insane 310.5% traffic increase

Top trending keywords on Google in the US:

What we can learn from the top US keyword trends

1) Columbia University stealing the show

After nearly two weeks of protests, Columbia University searches have seen a massive spike in traffic between March and April, gaining by an insane 11912.02%. Our Keyword Generator shows a large volume of protest-related searches were trending in April.

The keyword ‘columbia university’ seems to serve more than one user intent. Above the fold, users might be Googling the keyword to find out about the university, with Columbia University’s website, a Knowledge Panel, Things to Know feature, and more. But if you scroll down a little, a different picture unfolds.

Never letting a good controversy go to waste, the top news sites own a significant percentage of the traffic share. Columbia.edu only has a 4.75% traffic share on desktop, while cnn.com boasts 25.5%.

2) The rise of the Tortured Poets Department

Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album The Tortured Poets Department was released on April 19th, and fans can’t get enough of it. The keyword ‘tortured poets department’ has increased by 10557.14% in just one month, securing the #2 spot for the biggest trending keywords in the US.

What’s more, it’s secured its place as an entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph with its own brand SERP, complete with Knowledge Panel, songs, video box, reviews, and more. The takeaway here is that having a strong presence on platforms that you have some control over, like social media, should be part of your entity SEO strategy.

Our Phrase Match report shows a whopping 2054 keyword variations resulting in a collective 1.67M clicks in a single month. Users are searching for the album title and adding keyword modifiers like:

• Lyrics
• Anthology
• Vinyl
• Tracklist
• Review
• Fan art

These keywords have varying keyword difficulty levels. The key takeaway here is: if your site doesn’t have the authority to rank for some of the big keywords in a topic, you can always build your search market share up one keyword at a time.

3) Intuit turns income tax into an income source

As tax season has come and gone, tax-related keywords are still trending. It seems that not everyone has their tax returns ready. We see that the keyword ‘file tax extension’ increased by 3176.1%, followed by ‘irs extension’ which grew by 3124.1%.

Notably, Turbotax, the software designed to help Americans file their taxes, topped both keywords. The branded keyword ‘turbotax file extension’ grew by 3251.6%.

Looking at the Keyword Seasonality report, we see that not only are tax extension keywords seasonal, but Turbotax-related keywords are also seasonal.

The company that owns the Turbotax software, Intuit, gets clicks from generic tax extension queries. Intuit owns 3.88% of the organic traffic share and 44.97% of the paid traffic share. The takeaway here is that having a strong online brand could help you find some commercially minded traffic even from informational terms.

Top trending keywords on Google in the UK:

What we can learn from the top UK keyword trends

1) Solar eclipse

The number #1 trending keyword in the UK is ‘solar eclipse,’ gaining a massive 18810.92% increase in search volume since March. According to The Royal Astronomical Society, the last time the UK witnessed a total solar eclipse was in 1999, and the next opportunity to observe one won’t occur until 2090, making this event a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many.

The Similarweb Keyword Generator shows that over the last 28 days, solar eclipse keywords achieved 152,772 clicks in the UK alone.

While informative sites like Wikipedia.org and NASA.gov garnered the lion’s share of traffic, news outlets such as Sky News, BBC, and USA Today collectively captured a substantial 29% of the overall traffic share. The takeaway here is that there is profit to be made even on informational intent keywords by means of ad revenue. The only caveat is that news sites need keyword data that’s updated daily, and unless you want to work with APIs, your best bet is to use a keyword research tool like Similarweb, which updates daily.

2) Vampire Weekend releases their fifth studio album

The rock band from New York City, Vampire Weekend, released their fifth album Only God Was Above Us on April 5th. The album debuted at No. 27 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in late April, and the band appeared on SNL on April 11. The result was a search traffic jump of 11500.3% in the UK, making it into position #2 on the biggest trending keywords list.

Digging into click data, we see that the majority of the traffic went to the band’s website vampireweekend.com, resulting in 1.3K clicks in the month of April.

This could possibly be explained by the fact that the band’s website is prominent in the Knowledge Panel cards. And the key takeaway here is that you should optimize your content to appear in SERP features. The increased visibility is likely to result in higher CTRs.

3) The hardest geezer raises £944,000 ($1.17m) for charity

English ultra-endurance athlete Russ Cook, also known as the hardest geezer, is trending big time since he became the first person to ever run the full length of Africa this April. We see the keyword ‘hardest geezer’ gaining 2094.09%.

The drama of man against the odds has captured the world’s imagination, making him a PR magnet. The world followed his story on his YouTube channel, and his latest video got 1.5 million views.

In the UK alone, hardest geezer keywords earned 41,583 clicks in the last 28 days.

Shortly after his mammoth run, he took part in a 5km run around Clapham Common called Run and Raise to raise money for charity. The 27-year-old runner raised more than £944,000 ($1.17m). The marketing takeaway here is that people love to get behind a hero’s story of a man struggling against impossible odds and winning. If you can get your audience behind your story, you can use that attention to move mountains; in this case, that mountain was £944,000 ($1.17m) for charity.

What else do the top trending searches tell marketers?

Here are some other fun facts that our data tells us, along with some top tips into making these facts work for you:

• Most of the top trending searches have informational search intent, and the rest were of navigational or local intent. Understanding search intent not only feeds your knowledge about the type of content people are interested in, helping to inform your content strategy but also where users might be in the funnel.
• Taking a look at Keyword Difficulty, we can see that the majority of the top 100 trending searches have a moderate keyword difficulty. You need to find the balance between competitive keywords with high keyword difficulty and the less competitive with low keyword difficulty, giving yourself an opportunity to actually rank on them and gain traffic.
• YouTube shows itself as a traffic leader for a large amount of the top trending searches, showing the appeal of video content, why you should include it in your content strategy, and why you need to optimize it to show up in SERPs.
• Wikipedia, BBC and Reddit are the top traffic leaders with YouTube, showing users search for either unbiased information or varied, personal reviews, proving how important trust and authenticity is.
• The category with the most traffic share goes to… TV Movies and Streaming, however, the next big category is News and Media, showing just how important it is to keep up to date with trending keywords and apply them to your content strategy (while they’re still hot).
• Not in the News and Media category yourself? You can – and should – still target the trending keywords and create informative content around them if you’re in one of the smaller industries, but you’ve got to react fast and produce the content quickly, adding your own unique value to it to go head to head with publishers.

Methodology behind the top trending keywords on Google

We analyzed the monthly search volume trends within the Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence platform to determine the top trending searches on Google in the US, UK, and worldwide for April 2024.

• Date range: March 2024 vs. April 2024
• Calculation: To find trending data, we took the percentage increase in monthly search volume from March to April
• Data: Search data is from Similarweb’s Keywords by Industry feature (full how-to below)

Our data is the freshest and most accurate on the market because we use real-user data, which means you can pick up on trending keywords and their search volume as soon as they’re on the up (and not a month later…).

How to find trending searches

Anyway, enough of what’s trending on Google in February 2024. You’ll probably want to get stuck in yourself to find out more about your specific industry, look into what people are searching for in specific countries, or just dig into the newest TikTok trends.

Here’s how to find top trending keywords using our Digital Marketing Intelligence all-in-one platform:

1. Head to our Keywords by Industry feature – you can choose between a huge variety of industries, but in this case, we chose “All industries.”
2. Pick your date and region, then select Trending terms in the table filters.
3. Organize your data by Change to see searches that have gained the most search volume from the previous month (%).

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FAQs

What was the number one trending term in the world in April 2024?

The top trending term on Google worldwide for April 2024 was ‘dhruv rathee,’ which sent users through to his YouTube channel.

What was the number one trending term in the US in April 2024?

The top trending keyword in the US for April 2024 was ‘columbia university,’ which took users through to cnn.com.

What was the number one trending term in the UK in April 2024?

The top trending keyword in the UK for April 2024 was ‘solar eclipse’ – the traffic leader for this search term took users to bbc.com.

How do I find trending keywords?

It’s simple! Using our Similarweb platform, head to Keywords by Industry. Then, pick your date range, region, and select Trending terms in the table filters. Organize your data by Change to see searches gaining search volume.