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How to Find Trending Keywords

, Senior SEO Specialist at Similarweb
10Min.September 20, 2023

Trending keywords are (quite literally) all the rage. They inspire content your audience will be dying to read while also breathing new life into your evergreen content.

The thing with keyword trends is that to capitalize on them, you have to catch them early. By the time they reach their peak, everybody is fighting to win a higher share of organic traffic. So, being the first to notice – and take action on – a trend is a huge advantage.

For example, with the rise of artificial intelligence, forward-thinking brands like Canva have quickly jumped on skyrocketing keyword trends like ‘ai image generator’ which is now one of their top 10 traffic driving keywords.

They acted quickly and developed a free AI image generator tool, and are now the traffic winner for these and other related trending keywords – positioning themselves as a leader in the AI image generation space. A pretty powerful place to be when AI is only just beginning to shape the world around us.

How to find trending SEO keywords

The best place to start finding trending keywords is to use a keyword tool. It will help you understand how your target audience searches and what’s causing buzz in your industry right now.

Similarweb, with its extensive, rich keyword database – which has billions of keywords, and counting – is one of the best platforms out there for discovering the hottest keywords. Here’s how to find trending keywords using Similarweb:

Keyword Generator

Begin by inputting a seed keyword or a list of potential keywords into the keyword generator. With access to 6 billion relevant keywords, you’ll instantly get a comprehensive list of relevant, fresh, and targeted keywords around this topic.

Next, pay attention to the “Trending Keywords” section. See which related keywords have seen a significant uplift in traffic in the last 28 days to capture growing interest before your competitors do.

In this example from Similarweb’s platform, we see that timeless Mary Jane shoes are back in style this season, but there’s an even bigger, unexpected rise in searches for ‘tabi shoes’ – a specific Japanese style shoe. Also, looking at the Yearly Trend shows which months the keyword is trending the most so you publish/update content at the right time. 

Keywords by Industry

Another great way to discover trending keywords, particularly in a niche, is to search for keywords by industry – another feature within our Keyword Research tool.

Select a relevant industry and narrow down by country to see a list of keywords for your audience based in different regions.

You can then filter by ‘trending terms’ and ‘newly discovered keywords’ to get an extensive list of new and upcoming keywords that are super relevant within that specific industry.

Why fresher is better

Similarweb’s Keyword Generator is a great example of how fresh data can make all the difference. It’s the only keyword tool out there that gives you search volume data from the last 28 days. 

Here you can see that Similarweb has picked up on several early emerging keyword trends in September – from Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s shock split to the arrest of YouTuber Mom, Ruby Franke.

Having the freshest keyword data at your fingertips enables you to be the first to detect new trending keywords in your industry or your geographical region. If your keyword research tool isn’t able to provide timely, precise data, you’ll find keywords that are no longer relevant.

So, the number one thing to remember when learning how to find current trending keywords is that the value of a tool’s output depends on the data quality. Make sure you use tools, like Similarweb’s Keyword Generator, that provide up-to-date insights and fresh, precise data.

Let’s take a step back before we move on. Ask yourself: why do you even need data? Isn’t it enough to know there’s a buzz about a keyword?

Here are three great reasons:

  • Not everything that everybody talks about will also drive traffic
  • If it’s a passing trend, it may be gone by the time you’ve created content, and you’ll never be the first to pick up on a trend
  • Even when there are no apparent fads, you still need to identify what’s trending

So, after you identify topic trends, feed the related keywords into a keyword tool to conduct in-depth keyword research.

Competitor’s trending keywords

The next step is to plug any gaps. For this, you might use a keyword gap tool (we’ve got one of those, too, luckily) to find what keywords competitors are targeting and leverage their potential. You can also check a competitor’s traffic share to see very quickly which key terms and topics you are missing on your website.

For those who want to be the first to catch on to trends, gaps that existed three months ago or only may exist now are irrelevant. Trends and fads are only relevant if you catch them on the rise and as early as possible. Similarweb keyword gap delivers data from the last seven days and guarantees the highest data freshness.

Here, using CNN as an example, you’ll see that when compared with other competing news outlets, Similarweb’s last 7-day view has highlighted gaps with keywords as fresh as ‘hurricane lee’ and ‘danny masterson’. Both keywords refer to breaking news in the first week of September.

Next up, we’ll look at some other tools that will help you discover the latest SEO trends.

How to find trending keywords on Google

The quickest way to find keyword trends on Google is to use its autocomplete function.

Type in a seed word and let Google display some trending searches related to that keyword.

Take it a step further and dive into Google Trends. The free tool is easy to use and shows you the related keywords with the highest search volume. You can filter according to geographical region and category to find even more targeted keywords.

Bear in mind that you’ll still need to carry out keyword research to identify search intent and ensure the keywords are appropriate for your target audience and industry.

How to find ecommerce trending keywords

Ecommerce is highly competitive arena, and you need a first-rate keyword research tool to stay in the game. Let’s look at some great ways to conduct ecommerce keyword research to get you the best results. The first step is to investigate shopping and product trends.

The following tools will help you pick up on emerging ecommerce trends:

Trendhunter is a large-scale platform that shows current trends for just about everything. You choose the category, i.e. fashion or lifestyle, and can start browsing the latest trending products, concepts, or ideas.

Trendly is a popular app for fashion trends. Discover new looks and see which styles are currently popular. You’ll learn what people call these new trends and find keyword inspiration.

Treendly – although similar in name to the last, this tool is highly keyword-focused. It actually measures search volume for trending terms per category. Select ‘ecommerce’ to find the top trending keywords.

Boost Your Keyword Research with Similarweb

Start using our keyword research tools to find the most trending keywords that could help expand your market share

How to find trending keywords for your blog

A well-managed blog is an absolute organic traffic magnet.

This is because blogs can touch on almost any trending subject remotely related to what your site offers. The trick is to identify the ones with the highest relevance that will bring the right target audience to your blog.

So, how do you find out what’s trending online? Start by paying attention to what the media reports. Then, spy on other blogs – particularly competitors’ blogs’ – to see what they’re writing about.

Here are some tools to help you discover content trends and identify possible keywords to target:

Feedly is an app that organizes all daily news into categories and shows you what’s relevant. Let’s say you want to follow digital advertising trends. You select the category and the magazines, such as Adweek, that you want to track. You’ll get a daily feed with what they publish and see what’s trending.

Medium is a publishing platform anyone can sign up to and post articles. Influencers and bloggers use it because the pieces with the highest engagement get featured. See which topics get the most attention and try to identify patterns in the keyword trends.

Reddit is another great platform for staying on top of trending topics. People share content and discuss topics of interest. You can select the categories or areas you want to read about.

Quora is popular with bloggers wanting to get some exposure. They write quick answers to the questions visitors post on the platform. With its question-based format, it’s a super effective way to understand the issues people struggle with. Check queries related to your area of expertise and use the most asked questions as keywords for your blog.

Pro-Tip: Use Similarweb’s Popular Pages feature to discover which of your competitors’ pages are getting new clicks each month. This will keep you on the pulse of their trending content so you can create or adjust your own content to meet the emerging demands of your target audience.

How to find current trending keywords for social media

For social media, there are some great ways to identify trends. The best-known tactic is following #hashtags. Find hashtags that people frequently post on social media in your industry and use them in your posts.

Monitoring what people say about a certain topic, brand, or product – also called social listening – has become a must for social media marketers.

There are many tools to help you with this:

Keyhole and Social Mention will do this for you across social media platforms. You’ll stay on the pulse of trending hashtags and be notified of any changes.

Buzzsumo is one of the best-known tools and is easy to use, helping you to identify viral content quickly. It’s also really helpful for video and other web content.

SproutSocial and Hootsuite are social media management platforms where you can track social activity and conversations to get insights for your keyword strategy.

How to find keyword trends for video

YouTube gives you trending videos on a silver platter. You can see the hottest videos simply by clicking on ‘Explore’ on the home screen. You may not find many keyword ideas here, but it’s great for understanding what topics people are searching for.

A more keyword-oriented method is to use a tag explorer. YouTube videos are tagged with keywords, so there are several social listening tools, such as TubeBuddy and VidIQ, that analyze YouTube keyword tags and how often they are used and how.

Pro-Tip: Similarweb has a YouTube Keyword Generator. You can enter any key term and discover a host of rich YouTube search volume trends. You can focus your keyword research on the search engine you optimize for.

How to get trending keywords for Amazon

Amazon is a whole world in itself. It’s important to know that SEO for Amazon varies from Google and YouTube SEO. Keywords on Amazon are a lot more product-focused, and searchers have a high intent to buy. This eliminates a large variety of keywords.

But keywords are keywords, and you need to know how to find what’s currently trending on there. How? Yep, you’ve guessed it, we’ve got an Amazon keyword generator, too.

But keywords are keywords, and you need to know how to find current trending keywords.

How to find trending keywords for your industry

Most keyword research tools don’t let you to hone in on your specific industry, making it difficult to analyze industry-specific keyword trends you detected using one of the above tools.

Most tools show data from all sectors, and if a trend isn’t impacting all industries, you may be missing out. With Similarweb, you can select the time frame to view and get data from the specific week, month, or period you choose.

How to find recurring keyword trends with keyword seasonality

Data granularity is critical when dealing with trends. Trends are everywhere all the time, so finding trending keywords can’t just be limited to fads and passing fashions.

You must identify the trending keywords that are evergreen, but currently on the rise. The idea is to discover keywords with long-term, high potential to boost your ranking and grow traffic.

Some keywords have seasonalities and are more popular during specific periods, like keywords related to sporting events. With Similarweb’s keyword seasonality tool, you can quickly identify when search volume is high.

Where does data come from?

Google is for data what Walmart is for groceries. You can find a little bit of everything there, and it’s accessible to anyone. But when you need something a bit more specific, or if you are looking for top quality, well, there are better places to look.

It’s the same with data. Google isn’t a sufficient data supplier. That’s why you need additional data analytics or keyword research tools. The downside is that most of them rely on Google for data, which means, in terms of accuracy and freshness, you’re back at square one.

That’s not the case with Similarweb’s data, which uses a unique mix of data signals from various sources to provide fresher, higher-quality data. This includes growing contributory networks building on verified keywords people use, direct measurements, verified public data, and partnerships.

Therefore, Similarweb’s Keyword Generator tool can provide timely and comprehensive data that’s not available anywhere else. Similarweb will show trends earlier and more accurately than other tools.

How to stay on trend with Similarweb

We’ve discussed how, in today’s fast-paced SEO world, staying ahead of trending keywords is crucial for driving organic traffic. Similarweb offers marketers an arsenal of tools to achieve just that, namely our Keyword Generator, that use real-time data as recent as the last 28 days, offer gap analysis for competitor keyword strategies, and provide valuable industry-specific insights.

With data granularity that adapts to weekly or even daily shifts, Similarweb highlights seasonal trends, helping all marketers to make data-driven decisions across multiple platforms—from Google and social media to YouTube and Amazon.

Boost Your Keyword Research with Similarweb

Start using our keyword research tools to find the most trending keywords that could help expand your market share

FAQs

What are trending keywords?

Trending keywords are the terms and queries that people increasingly use in search engines. In other words, those that are currently gaining popularity.

Why is it important to find trending keywords?

Trending keywords are essential for staying ahead in the SEO game. Catching a keyword trend early allows you to develop content that attracts a significant share of organic traffic before it reaches peak popularity.

How can I identify trending keywords in my industry?

You can find trending keywords by using a keyword research tool, like Similarweb’s Keyword Generator. Start with seed keywords related to your industry, and the tool will generate a full list of relevant keywords.

How fresh is Similarweb’s keyword data?

Similarweb offers the freshest keyword data on the market, providing search volume data from the last 28 days. Accessing timely and precise data enables you to be the first to detect new trending keywords in your industry or geographical region.

by Maayan Zohar Basteker

Senior SEO Specialist at Similarweb

Maayan, with 5+ years in SEO, specializes in complex research, strategy, and technical audits. She previously worked at a top digital marketing agency in Israel.

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