How to Use Trending Topics to Your Advantage
The goal of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing is to give the people what they want. The big daddy Google is so successful because it puts its users first:
“Google ranking systems are designed to … sort through hundreds of billions of web pages … to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for.”
To make your blog and website relevant and useful to searchers, you must answer their questions. One of the most effective means is to tap into trending topics. Then you’ll know what questions to answer.
Follow the News
Water cooler fodder are those trending topics that people are talking about. For example, trending topics that most definitely are being searched today include:
- Breaking news like the 2020 stimulus package
- Ongoing events such as the coronavirus crisis
- Tips on how to stay sane during a quarantine
Put any one of those words or phrases in your headline and you’re sure to get clicks. Staying abreast of the changing attitudes and interests of your target market is one of the keys to effective search engine optimization (SEO). SEO helps consumers (i.e., your customers and potential customers) find you and your company online. SEO also helps you get picked for the first page of search engine results, which increases your visibility enormously.
Trending Topics and Your Content
It’s not enough, however, to put trending topics in your page or blog post titles. You must include appropriate and related content in the copy that follows. Search engine algorithms have been created to weed out potential cheaters long ago.
You can’t, for example, title your blog “Beat the Coronavirus” and follow it with an article about the value of bicycling. The search engines put a kibosh on the practice long ago. In fact, they now punish bloggers who even try to sneak in unrelated content into a blog post.
How to Find Trending Topics
Granted, not every day provides you with trending topics that everyone is following. Today, it’s easy: the entire world is talking about the pandemic, searching for news about that one subject. Normally, to get the most out of this tactic throughout the year, you have to know what interests your target audience.
If your market is retirees, sign up for AARP news alerts and follow senior news aggregates. If it’s new mothers you’re trying to reach, follow a similar tact and spend a little time each day on sites geared toward that market. It won’t take long to figure out what they’re most interested in on any given day in any given week.
Find the Key Words
Listen to your demographic. Then research the topics they’re interested in to see what pops up in the news, then use those few key words that they’re seeking throughout your writing. Of course, you can always use some complicated keyword trackers to see what’s trending, but there’s nothing better than going directly to the source.
Another alternative is to hire a public relations firm whose job it is to keep up with the news to find trending topics that impact your business. Content providers like Ray Access provide another good source for topic ideas that are sure to get you noticed. In fact, any time you contact the writers and editors of Ray Access, you’ll get an idea, which we’ll give to you free if you hire us to write the piece!
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business to succeed. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters, and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.