Almost all businesses tend to post articles on trending topics. But think about it for a moment: when a large number of articles, all-encompassing one trending topic, are being published online, doesn’t it become highly difficult to rank for the keywords relevant to that topic? The answer is “Yes.”
Now imagine, if you could write on a topic that’s yet to become trending, won’t it be much easier to rank for relevant keywords while making the piece stand out? Of course, it’ll. Now you might be wondering, how can it be possible to identify topics that are up-and-coming?
Enter exploding topics
Exploding topics is something that every digital marketer and business owner should utilize as part of their digital marketing strategy to outshine their competitors.
You can always implement some SEO strategies to improve the performance of your blog content. But remember that SEO strategies only work when you pick appropriate keywords and topics. And with exploding topics, you get the keywords and topics relevant to an upcoming viral trend before anyone else does.
In this article, we’re going to discuss all the essential things you need to know about finding exploding topics that’ll help you stay much ahead of your competitors in terms of viral content creation.
Understanding Exploding Topics
Simply put, exploding topics refer to the topics that are trending right now but yet to get massive popularity. So, these are the topics and keyword trends that people haven’t yet started searching heavily for, but soon they’ll. These topics involve a large amount of variety and can change depending on consumer interest, category, or industry.
When it comes to calculating an exploding topic, major factors that come into play include online searches of associated topics, social media shares, conversations, and mentions. You need to use appropriate tools and resources in conjunction with your best judgment to identify the right types of exploding topics.
One notable benefit of using exploding topics is that they help you become the first person to write about a trending topic and have other content creators follow suit. You could be a great writer with a well-defined research strategy, but when you use exploding topics and create stellar content around them, you become the pioneer of those topics.
The tools for identifying exploding topics, which we’ll be discussing next, offer several filters. This helps you see the trend of a search term during a specific period of time and in your industry. You’ll get a clearer idea of whether or not the search term is going to see an upward trend. So, you can only pick the ones that are expecting to see upward trends while discarding the others.
Tools to Find Exploding Topics and How to Use them
To identify a topic’s viral potential, you can use two tools: Google Trends and Exploding Topics. Based on the results generated by these tools, you can create authoritative, timely content to attract a massive amount of organic traffic to your website.
Let’s see how each of these tools can help you determine exploding topics.
Google Trends
Google Trends demonstrates how frequently a specific search term people have entered into Google in relation to the search engine’s total search volume over a specific period of time. So, using Google Trends data, you can pinpoint the trending topics related to your industry, product, or service during your specified period of time.
For example, if your business deals in mobile commerce, you can enter “mobile commerce” as your main search term, and Google Trends will show something like this:
As you can see, when entering your core search term, you can select the region, duration for which you want to see the search term’s trend, and its category. We’ve selected the United States as region, past 12 months as duration, and all categories.
Now, if you move down the page, you’ll see a list of trending topics related to “mobile commerce.”
As the topic “mobile banking” is experiencing massive growth in search interest, you can create a blog post around it.
Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics lets you search by time frame and category to find out fresh topics that are about to see massive popularity. For instance, if you’re an e-commerce business, you can choose your category as “e-commerce” and search the tool’s database for trending topics while selecting the duration from past 1month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or longer.
By selecting “e-commerce” as the category and “1 year” as the duration, you’ll see something like this:
If you click on “athletic greens” and scroll down the pop-up page, you’ll see some related topics with their search trends.
As the topic “alo yoga” is showing a rising trend, you may want to write a post related to it.
As you can see, both tools can help you identify rising trends for the search term you enter. Google Trends is free, and Exploding Topics also has a free version that we’ve used for the above examples. The free versions of both tools are good enough for most businesses. However, Exploding Topics also offers a paid version that’ll help you identify exploding topics at least six months before they gain momentum.
Three Key Advantages of Using Tools to Find Exploding Topics
Now that you know how to use tools to identify exploding topics, you may think something like, “why should I invest time and effort on these tools when I can think of upcoming, trending topics?” Continue reading the below pointers, and you’ll get the answer yourself.
Improved Process Efficiency
It has already become harder than ever to make your content stand out. Even if you create absolutely mind-blowing content on one of the currently trending topics, chances are pretty high that it won’t get as much attention as it should. But producing fresh topic ideas regularly isn’t only a difficult task but super time-consuming as well.
Moreover, when it comes to creating a piece that you want to be viral down the road, your entire content strategy has to be absolutely perfect. Right from choosing the topic and discovering relevant keywords to writing, optimizing, and promoting the piece – a lot of things need to be taken care of.
Tools to identify exploding topics greatly reduce the overall time while making the process more efficient. And you can stay assured that your chosen topic will boost your site’s organic traffic, keep the readers engaged, and compel them to share the piece among their networks.
Better SEO Performance of Your Content
As mentioned earlier, SEO strategies only work at their best when used in conjunction with the right keywords. Applications to find exploding topics help you pinpoint the keywords and search terms that your target audience is going to use in the near future.
When you discover a topic that’s going to be viral, identify keywords relevant to it, and write a post about it, the piece automatically achieves top SERP rankings. As nobody has written a piece using the keywords, they’re less competitive, and that makes it much easier for them to rank higher.
And when your keywords perform very well in search engine results, it helps to drive lots of new visitors to your site.
Building Thought Leadership
Perhaps you already know that attracting lots of organic traffic to your site only opens a new world of opportunities. How your business can leverage that traffic depends on how it presents itself in front of visitors. By using tools to discover exploding topics, you get an incredible opportunity to make your business an authority in your niche or overall industry.
When you create high-value content on a topic that’s yet to be trending, it helps your business gain thought leadership in your industry. And if you can consistently produce this type of content, both your present and potential customers will start to see your business as an authoritative voice in the industry, which may give it a solid boost in its conversion rates.
Moreover, those, who’ll create content on the topic that you’ve discovered and first written a piece on, will most likely cite your content as the source. It’ll also greatly help you establish leadership while gaining organic traffic.
Top Three Channels to Promote Your Exploding Topics
Once you’ve created an authoritative piece on an exploding topic, it’s a must to promote it using different channels. Of course, you’ll most likely see a boost in organic traffic from search engines. But using other channels gives you a wonderful opportunity to make your piece reach a wider audience.
Here’re the top three channels that you may want to use to promote the pieces on exploding topics.
Organic Social Media
Organic social media lets you create a community, engage with your audience, and respond to the comments without paying anything. Because of their virality, pieces on exploding topics tend to reach much beyond your personal networks, creating brand awareness in markets unexplored earlier.
However, when using organic social media to promote your content, you need to maintain the right balance to keep your audience engaged. This means you should organize your monthly content calendar in such a way that your audience receives a good mix of educational, engagement-based, and promotion-focused content. For example, you can share a “how to” article to make your audience educated while driving traffic to your site.
Paid social media
Paid social media helps you connect with new audience members or customers. You can reach a bigger number of people, target the right audience more precisely, and achieve your goals faster.
After you’ve created a piece on an exploding topic, you can use paid social media to place it in front of new eyes. This is usually considered a low-risk tactic because you already have the content that’s yet to become viral. You just need to support it with spending.
You can always begin by allocating a small budget to one of the top posts. When it comes to evaluating the results of paid social media strategy, focus on profile views and conversions instead of only paying attention to likes.
Emails
The beauty of using emails to promote your exploding topics is that you already have a list of people who want to actively hear from your business, and you just need to send the links of the pieces to them. But one thing you need to keep in mind is that not all your subscribers will be interested in all your exploding topics.
Therefore, you should send the link of a piece only to the subscribers who’ll actually care about the content. It’s also important to use easily comprehensible language and an aesthetically pleasing design in the emails to direct the recipients to your content.
Also, be sure to include easily identifiable links in the emails and clearly mention what kind of content the recipients can expect to read.
Maintaining the Performance of Exploding Topics
After you’ve identified an exploding topic and written a post on it, your work doesn’t end there. You need to keep an eye on it to maintain its performance in the long run. Therefore, you need to review the analytics to spot any downward trend in the piece’s traffic.
If you identify downward traffic or a loss in rankings, fresh pieces of content on the same topic may have started getting published. The topic itself may also start to lose its popularity. A quick online search will help you get a clear picture of these situations.
If you find that your competitors are posting similar content, go through those pieces to see if they contain more detailed information or more subtopics that your piece doesn’t. If yes, you may need to tweak your content or give it a fresh perspective to help it regain its popularity.
To sum it up, the secret to content marketing success is in keeping your audience engaged and entertained. You need a strategy that will stimulate traffic, which you can do with an “exploding topic” approach!
