How I find trending Google keywords (before anyone else)
This is how I find what keywords people are searching for right now. I’ve broken my process down into 5 steps using just two tools.
Creating content around trending keywords is vital if you want to jump on trends before your competition.
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Use the following process to discover the next big thing that your audience wants to know about.
Step 1: Choose your topic or niche
There are a lot of keywords out there so lets start with focusing on your niche or industry.
In this example I am going to find trending keywords in a niche I know nothing about “hair care”.
The first step is to visit trends.google.com and choose the most relevant category to your niche. In this case there is a category called “hair care”. Perfect. Find a category that is most relevant to your niche.
Important: Don’t enter a keyword after selecting a category. Leave it blank.
I’ve selected “United States” as my country of choice and also have selected the period of the “Past 30 days”. Some categories may not have enough data from the past 30 days so you may have to choose 90 days or more.
Step 2: Select a top keyword
Choose one of the top search queries in the “hair care” category.
I’m going to choose “shampoo” by clicking it and once again I select the “hair care” category. This will give me a list of keywords related to the topic of “shampoo” in the hair care category.
Step 3: Pick a trending keyword
Tip: 💡 If you’re looking for trending keywords for YouTube then I recommend you select “YouTube” from the drop down as this will give you keywords trending on YouTube.
I’m going to stick with “Web Search” which means searches on Google.com.
On the second page of related queries “rice water shampoo” is a rising keyword in the last 30 days. This sounds interesting, let's select it.
Step 4: Double check the keyword is actually trending
It’s important to double check the data. In Google Trends I do this by entering my chosen keyword and then zooming out by changing the date period to 5 years. This is a valuable way of checking if a trend is currently trending.
Using this view I can see that there has been a recent spike in searches for “rice water shampoo”.
Most people stop here but we need to go a step further to find those really hot trending keywords.
Step 5: Find the related trending keywords
Now that I know “rice water shampoo” is trending I want to also see all the trending keywords related to it.
This is important as it makes creating content easier by giving me ideas of what I need to talk about.
Using Google auto suggest I can easily pick out the related keywords.
Google auto suggest is a great way to find trending keywords as Google is constantly updating the list of suggestions daily, weekly and even hourly in some cases.
I now have a list of trending keywords related to my trending topic.
I can quickly see that “hair growth” is mentioned twice. This is a perfect topic for a new piece of content, maybe a blog post on “How rice water shampoo can help with hair growth” or a video titled “I used rice water shampoo to help my hair grow”.
We can now create a new piece of content based on a current trend.
Advanced Tools
If you want to go even further down the trending keywords rabbit hole then here are 3 more tools which might help you.
Glimpse (Paid and free option)
Glimpse is a useful tool which helps you “supercharge” Google trends via a Google Chrome extension. The tool makes Google Trends even more useful by adding extra data such as search volume. It does a good job of showing you related trending keywords and even has the option to sign up for email alerts. Something google recently removed from Google trends.
I’ve written a full review of Glimpse if you want to learn my full thoughts about the tool.
Exploding Topics (Paid and free option)
Exploding Topics is really useful if you are looking for trending topics. While it doesn’t give you specific keywords it is a great starting point to see what broad topics, products or services are popular right now.
I’ve written a full review of exploding topics, if you’re looking for trending topics or products then I would definitely recommend signing up for the 7 day free trial.
Keywords Everywhere (Paid and free option)
Keywords Everywhere is another chrome extension. While it is a useful tool it isn’t necessarily the best for finding trending keywords. The data is likely to be less fresh than google trends and the auto suggest trick.
However, I still find it really useful to get search volume data for trending keywords. It also does a good job of showing related keywords.
Bonus tool: If you’re looking for weekly keywords then I highly recommend signing up for Google’s weekly newsletter. You will need a Google account and must sign up from the Emails from Google section in your account.
You can’t choose a specific industry or niche but it does a great job of telling you what’s popular every week in the USA.
If you want UK specific data there is also a UK newsletter here.
Getting your content seen these days is hard. With so much compeition for attention it's vital that you create content about what people are looking for now. Being the first to create content around a trend can give you the upper hand against your competition.
Your marketing friend,