Do you feel like you're always chasing trends in your market?
When it comes to SEO, anticipation is key. What could be better than the start of the year to set up your editorial planning, search for topics to cover and above all detect new requests that will allow you to increase your traffic and your conversions?
Here we provide you with an ultra-effective approach to detecting trends before your competitors.
How? Using weak signals. These questions of tomorrow offer you new SEO opportunities and allow you to position yourself before everyone else. Here are 3 tips to follow, as well as the tools at your disposal to detect new trends in your market.
3 reasons why you absolutely must detect market trends in SEO
To save time
We don't teach you: producing content takes time. According to a 2021 study by Orbit Media , it would take an average of 3 hours and 57 minutes to complete a blog post, compared to 2 hours and 24 minutes in 2014.
And what frustration to see that your competitor has beaten you by a few days, by also publishing optimized content on the subject that has occupied you for several days!
It is therefore essential to save time on content production.
To do this, you can, of course, make sure you write faster. But above all, you must try to position yourself on trending keywords, that is to say, those which are not yet competitive but which can generate many visits within a few months.
To obtain prior art on Google
Priority is a beneficial factor in SEO. Indeed, being one of the first pages to offer content on a little-known topic allows your URLs to accumulate power sooner than those of your competitors.
For what? Firstly, because your content will attract the first visitors who will search for information on this query. Second, because people who want to share a link to content on the topic will likely link to yours.
To love the blue ocean
We speak of a blue ocean for sectors where competition is not yet present or very little. Conversely, in sectors where competition is extremely strong, we rather speak of a red ocean.
These relatively uncompetitive sectors therefore offer the possibility of positioning yourself on a market before anyone else. Furthermore, you save time and energy since it is your competitors who will have to make efforts to surpass you. For your part, all you have to do is monitor and keep your content up to date!
Bonus: you will need a few backlinks to position yourself and be visible given the low competition.
What are weak signals and why use them?
What is a weak signal?
This is a notion theorized in the 1970s by Igor Ansoff. The weak signal is defined as “early warning information, of low intensity, which may be a precursor of an important trend or event”.
In the context of marketing, weak signals allow us to understand our environment and its changes, sometimes subtle, in order to anticipate market trends.
In SEO, weak signals are keywords that:
- Do not yet generate high search volumes,
- Have not yet been detected or exploited by SEO tools,
- Offer strong traffic opportunities in the coming months.
Why use weak signals?
- Create and optimize your editorial line,
- Identify new SEO queries,
- Offer content that will meet the needs of its audience,
- Promote commitment,
- Get ahead of the competition,
- Develop acquisition,
- Associate your brand image with novelty or even innovation.
Identify trends in your market in three steps
Analyze social networks… but not only
To find the latest trends, you may be tempted to explore social networks. They can, in fact, be an excellent source of information. But it is not the only one.
In order to explore your subjects in depth, do not hesitate to dig around in the discussion and publication areas: user reviews, comments, information sites, forums, etc.
It is essential to explore your subjects in depth and get to the bottom of the themes. In doing so, you will be able to get to the bottom of the themes and will have the possibility of finding new angles of attack: a new law about coming into force, a recently published study, a media affair, etc.
Use the right tools for your monitoring and trend analysis
In order to save time and carry out your monitoring more easily, you can use several tools. Here we present the main ones, most of which are free.
We advise you, if possible, to carry out your research on data from the last 24 months.
Google Trends: the tool does not indicate search volumes but an index out of 100 which corresponds to the number of requests (100 is equal to the maximum traffic peak). It interesting is because it allows you to carry out a trend analysis over the period of your choice and according to various categories.
For detecting truly emerging trends, we recommend switching the tool to English and running an analysis on the US market.
Pinterest Trends : Launched in 2019, Pinterest's trends tool is only available in English. This can be given the fact that certain American and Anglo-Saxon trends emerge a few interesting months before arriving on French territory.
Exploding topics : this tool curates trends on around thirty themes. Focused on investors, it is also very interesting for Content Marketers because it allows them to carry out trend research within many industries (beauty, luxury, health, finance, technology, etc.) and sectors such as marketing, media, justice, education, etc.
Tips for e-retailers:
One of the best practices for researching e-commerce trends is to look at the best sales among your competitors. For this, you have several tools.
Shopify : You can view the best sales of your competitors present on Shopify by adding to their url: /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling to view their best sales.
But be careful, this doesn't work every time. It is, in fact, possible for an e-retailer to block this visualization.
Amazon and Alibaba : The two e-commerce giants also offer pages of the best-selling products by category: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/bestsellers and https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/top- selling-products-in-alibaba.html
Consider ghost keywords
Ghost keywords are trending keywords that have not yet been detected or referenced by SEO tools. Their search volumes are often shown as less than 10 per month when in reality the actual traffic, as it appears in Search Console, can be much higher.
This is explained by the fact that SEO tools such as Ahref or Semrush draw their data from Google Ads and have a latency of several months in detecting new keywords and their search volumes. When these tools show search volumes of 0 or 10, it may simply mean that the data is not yet up to date.
Moral: Do not focus on the search volumes provided by SEO tools when you carry out a trend analysis.
How can you exploit the trends detected for the production of your content?
It's time to start producing your content!
Start searching for the right keywords
Do you want to build a set of relevant articles on an innovative theme? The recommended and most effective practice would then be to create a semantic cocoon. It is a set of pages linked together and treating a theme in depth.
This technique offers several advantages:
- Push pillar pages. Example: transactional content with the aim of increasing conversions.
- Strengthen the semantic authority of your site on the subject in order to be considered the most relevant site with Google and Internet users.
- Meet the Google Expertise (EAT) criterion.
- Example of a semantic cocoon on the theme “spirulina”: the cocoon could be composed of articles on the benefits, manufacturing, advice for use, nutritional recommendations, etc.
If it's a new trend, start by looking at what's happening on the subject or who your competitors are. You shouldn't find much content.
Then study the angles covered in the content you find.
Is it definitions, context, debates and sharing of opinions or even simply visuals?
This will allow you to see what the core user intent might be and how you can meet it while standing out from your competitors.
The GoNaddra Content Ideas module allows you, using a generic keyword, to detect content positioned first on a theme.
Example: You noticed in Google Trend that the term “Converted van” was regularly searched for. It is, in fact, a growing trend.
First, look at the query results page to see if there is a lot of content on the topic. Good news because if you don't find much or most of the results are in English (for terms that can be used in both languages), this could be an opportunity for a topic to develop.
Then consult the GoNaddra Content Ideas module to identify the competitors who position themselves first on this term or an associated term (from the long tail, synonyms or the lexical field).
Example: the terms associated with “Converted van” can be “volkswagen combi 2020” or even “camper van rental”.
If the module does not detect a lot of relevant content in French on the theme, the latter can constitute an opportunity to position yourself in front of your competitors, including the biggest ones. Otherwise, it is necessary to continue exploring.
The tool also tells you the search volume and difficulty level of the keyword. If these two criteria are high, there is a good chance that this is not a new trend.
Don't hesitate to analyze English questions on the US market. They are often several months ahead of the French market. To do this, use Google Trend, Pinterest Trends or Exploding topics in the US version.
Use chestnut trees and take inspiration from the previous year
To find trends, you can also play on seasonality and anticipate content production.
Example: Halloween 2022, league 1 resumption, Mother's Day 2023, etc. Also draw inspiration from what worked in previous years.
For example, for an e-shop specializing in decoration/lifestyle products, it will be interesting to position yourself on the query “Mother's Day 2022”. But be careful to publish them well in advance because this hot content becomes obsolete quickly.
GoNaddra's Content Ideas module provides you with content ideas by surfacing top content positioned on the targeted keyword and associated terms, including synonyms and frequently asked questions.
Here, we can see that the Content Ideas module highlights several content on the “Mother's Day” theme that could be interesting to integrate into your editorial planning. It also allows you to filter to only view transactional or editorial content.
You can already notice here that the queries “Mother's Day gift France”, “personalized Mother's Day gift” or even “Mother's Day box” do not present many difficulties. You will therefore have every interest in creating content on these keywords.
Analyze similar topics
A new product is coming out and you want to be the first to talk about it? To do this, you can take inspiration from equivalent products already released.
Example: you detect a search trend for the iPhone 13. Use content already produced on the iPhone 12 to study what is expected by your audience.
To fuel your search, look at the “Search intentions” offered by GoNaddra. There you will find ideas for topics and questions to cover.
Here, we notice that it could be interesting to write content around the price: on the difference between iPhone 12 and 13 for example.
The heatmap shows you the topics most covered by your competitors and their number of occurrences. Here again, we see that it is wise to approach the subject in relation to the different existing models: pro, pro max, mini, classic, etc.
Finally, there are simple frameworks to help you quickly create semantic cocoons around your trending queries. For a product or service, for example, you can use Coggle:
Maintain your edge over the competition
Congratulations, you have published your content! But it is not over, we must now perpetuate them. To avoid loss of traffic and downgrading of your content, it is imperative to update it regularly, as new competitors appear.
You can view whether updates are needed when:
- Your page traffic is dropping: GoNaddra includes a Report tab to monitor the performance of your content.
- You refresh the “Content Score”: this is a GoNaddra indicator of global SEO performance based on the detailed analysis of the TOPs contained in the query at that moment.
If the theme begins to be well developed by your competitors, you will also need to plan to add new content to the semantic cocoon to establish your authority on the theme.
The 7 takeaways about SEO trends and the use of weak signals
- Remember that content planning is the key to an effective SEO strategy.
- Learn to detect market trends in SEO, this will allow you to save time and position yourself quickly on strategic queries.
- Don't limit yourself to social networks to spot new trends.
- Aim wide and get out of your area.
- Use the right tools (Google Trends, Pinterest Trends, Exploding topics, etc.).
- Take inspiration from what has already worked for your competitors.
- Anticipate using international trends, particularly those in the US market.