How Exploding Topics Can Help You Identify Future Search Movement and Viral Topics

We get it. It’s more complicated than ever to make your content stand out online and get it in front of new users simply because of the amount of content online. If you’re looking for fresh ways to stand out in the SERP and bring in new users, finding keyword trends and topics that have viral potential but haven’t quite taken off yet might be the strategy pivot you’ve been looking for.

Exploding topics is a little like investing. You have to consider the landscape as a whole, but ultimately you want to get in on it before everyone else does. To have the upper hand, we can ask what people are searching for. What topics are up and coming? How competitive is the topic? What do people care about right now and how might that evolve in the next few months?

This article will cover everything you need to know about how to find exploding topics and content creation that has a viral ability to take your blog or your content marketing services to the next level. You will learn how to know what an exploding topic is, how to identify them, how this viral content can help your business, and how to make the most of that topic with a cross-channel strategy.

What is an Exploding Topic?

Let’s first dive into what an exploding topic encompasses. To start, they consist of any new topics that are currently trending but have yet to gain immense popularity or virality. 

Exploding topics are diverse and can vary based on industry, category, or consumer interest. Key factors that help calculate an exploding topic include conversations, social media shares, mentions, and searches of related topics across the web. To determine the right kind of exploding topic depends on utilizing the right tools and resources, as well as your best judgment. 

How to Identify Future High Demand Blog Topics

When it comes to identifying exploding topics before your competitors have, you might wonder how you can determine the viral potential for a topic that hasn’t quite gone viral yet. To get ahead of the game, you can look to rising trends. Tools like Exploding Topics and Google Trends lend a hand in finding a trending topic or one that is beginning to see rapid growth. By leveraging these tools, you can put out timely content that has the potential to bring thousands of new visitors to your brand’s website. So, how do you use these tools to your advantage?

How to Use The Exploding Topics Tool

Exploding Topics isn’t like the standard keyword research tools we all know and love. With Exploding Topics, you can search by category and time frame to identify new topics that are about to take off. If you are a skincare brand, you can filter through the database for trending topics in the beauty category over the past 1 month, 3 months, or longer. Some skincare brands were able to identify “maskne” (aka acne caused by your face mask) as a rising search trend during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. With tools like Exploding Topics, this was made possible before their competitors even knew what this new term even meant.

How to Use Google Trends

What is Google Trends? Well, similar to Exploding Topics, Google Trends data allows you to identify the latest trending topics related to your product or service or overall industry. You can filter by time frame, category, and geographical region to identify trends based on the core term search term you enter. This allows you to find related queries that are trending. For example, if you are a jewelry brand that sells engagement rings, you can enter “engagement rings” as your core search term and identify several trending topics that relate to engagement rings. You might find that unique engagement rings is seeing significant growth in search interest, which may lead you to craft a blog post around the Top 10 Unique Engagement Ring Styles.

The best part about both of these tools is that they’re free and easy to incorporate in your evergreen content planning. With different search functionalities, you are sure to find relevant topics with viral potential and the ability to positively impact our brand.

How These Tools Can Help Your Business 

While more time is certainly needed to measure the real impacts of these tools on content marketing programs, exploding topic applications are generating early, positive results. 

Curious how to make blog content more engaging? Here’s a look at three of the top areas that these tools are currently benefiting:

#1 Efficiency

Coming up with new topic ideas for blog articles on a consistent basis can be challenging — not to mention time consuming. And when you’re developing a piece that’s intended to be “trending,” it’s critical that your entire content strategy be on-point — from topic selection and keyword research to writing, editing, optimizing and promoting. 

Exploding topic applications can help cut your ideation and research time in half. Not only that, they can offer peace of mind that the topic you’ve chosen will drive traffic to your site, be engaged with by readers and be shared among their networks.

#2 SEO

From an SEO strategy perspective, proper execution of blog ideas around an exploding topic can really fan the flames of your content marketing initiatives. Take Possible Finance, for example.

This company opted to create multiple blogs around the exploding topic of “COVID financial support” in March of 2020. As you can imagine, their decision to create this content during a time of financial uncertainty for many Americans — and in anticipation of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act — helped their blogs to garner thousands of new keyword rankings in a matter of days. Not only that, these rankings for nice keywords with high search volume helped to drive tens of thousands of new users to Possible’s website in just a few weeks. 

#3 Thought leadership

Of course, organic traffic is only the beginning of the buyer’s journey for many businesses. Staying ahead of the competition and being forward thinking is critical to moving prospective customers down through your funnel.

Companies that can produce authoritative content around an exploding topic before it goes mainstream will do wonders for their thought leadership and, ultimately, their business. Companies that take a more consistent approach to creating this type of content — noted it’s high-quality and relevant — will eventually find both potential and existing customers looking to them as a leader and authoritative voice in that newly created space. And the more consumers are engaged with your brand; the more likely they are to purchase your product or service.

How to Promote Your Exploding Topics Cross-Channel 

One of the most important parts of a successful content strategy is planning for promotion within the marketing funnel once your post is live. By leveraging other channels, you’re able to squeeze more juice out of your content efforts while also supplementing the results for other channels. Here are a few promotion tactics we’d recommend: 

• Email – Our email marketing approach is to “make more deposits than withdrawals.” This means it’s crucial to provide value to your audience and link to assets that will further educate them within your flows (prior to asking for the sale.) 
• Organic Social – With organic social, it’s important to differentiate your content frameworks and have a healthy balance of educational, promotion-focused, and engagement-based content within your monthly content calendar. Sharing a blog article is a great way to hit on the educational content (while also pushing traffic to your site.) 
• Paid Social – Exploding topics are great to leverage on paid social as “clickbait” to prospecting audiences. It provides a great first touch in the buyer’s journey and typically has a higher click through rate (CTR). 

One of the best parts of producing content from exploding topics is it has evergreen SEO value. One of the benefits of evergreen content is the opportunity to have more virality as the topic continues to surge in popularity.

Staying Ahead of Your Competition  

After you’ve put in the work of identifying new content ideas and publishing a viral or exploding topic, it’s up to you to maintain and sustain its growth. In the weeks and months to come, visit your analytics frequently to identify downward trends in traffic — knowing this will give you insight into additional actions you may need to take. If traffic is dipping, there may be fresh, competitive blog content circulating the web that is leading to a loss in rankings, or perhaps interest in the topic itself is running out of steam. Do a quick Google Search to evaluate the competitive landscape around the topic; in doing so, pay attention to subtopics competitors include in their post that you don’t mention. Is there a fresh spin you can look to include that “out-values” competitors? Perhaps new information has since surfaced on this trend, which can help you determine if an updated perspective should be considered and included.

Ultimately, an “exploding topic” content marketing strategy is a highly effective way to stimulate immediate traffic and business results online. The more you can keep it updated, relevant, and valuable to your target audience, the longer your success will reign. 

If you want to learn more about the benefits of blogging for your business, contact us today!