Check out these 15 tools for finding trending topics in your industry to inform your SEO and content marketing campaigns.

One of the most effective ways to connect with your audience is to incorporate trending topics into your editorial and social media calendar.

Not everything you publish has to be related to a current event, but using trending topics strategically will allow you to ride waves of demand in both search and social platforms.

Here are 15 of the best resources for finding out what’s trending.

1. Google Trends

The gold standard for identifying trending search topics in your industry is Google Trends.

It tracks global search trends and offers a wealth of data broken down by date range, geo-location, category, search type (for example, web search vs. YouTube), and other factors.

One of Google Trends’ more recent advancements in recent years has been its incorporation into Google Search. Google has evolved into a destination not only for searching but also for reading the most recent trending stories based on your preferences.

2. Exploding Topics

This tool is useful for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone looking for trending business ideas, categories, or companies.

Because Exploding Topics does not provide as much context as other trending topic tools, you will need to subscribe to their newsletter or use this tool in conjunction with other tools to fully comprehend the trend.

3. SparkToro Trending

Sparktoro stepped in to fill a critical void left by the demise of Inbound.org.

Sparktoro Trending displays the most popular marketing, SEO, and technology articles.

Sparktoro identifies these trends based on the number of social shares from tool users (along with other means).

4. FrontPageMetrics

Almost every topic has its own Reddit thread. Frontpagemetrics.com is useful for determining which subreddits are experiencing the most daily, weekly, and monthly growth.

With over 3 million tracked subreddits, there are plenty of rabbit holes to help inspire your content roadmap.

5. Feedly

Once you’ve identified the most important publications or news sources for your target audience, this tool is one of the best for aggregating the most recent stories in one place.

Feedly is a powerful tool for identifying trending topics and staying current in your industry by displaying the most recent stories published from your curated list.

6. Podcast Notes

Podcasts are an unsung hero when it comes to identifying hot topics. Podcasting is a $1 billion industry that is expected to grow by 10% each year. This is a fantastic opportunity to identify trending topics for your clients or organisation.

Unfortunately, podcasts require a lot of time and focus to digest the content and aren’t suitable for everyone.

Podcast Notes solves the problem of identifying the key takeaways from individual podcasts in a concise newsletter format.

If you don’t have time to listen to 10+ podcasts per week, Podcast News does the heavy lifting for you across fitness, nutrition, startups, technology, finance, crypto, and lifestyle topics.

7. Buzzsumo

The best community managers have well-oiled systems for monitoring trending social media topics in their industry.

Buzzsumo has long been one of the best-in-class tools for identifying viral content across social channels, and it has expanded into other areas of content discovery, including video and Q&A websites.

Buzzsumo can show you what video content is getting the most traction on YouTube if you’re looking for the top trending video content in your vertical.

8. Trends.co

Trends.co provides a thorough but easy-to-digest format for understanding new topics across industries. The Trends newsletter deconstructs a topic by covering:

• Why does it matter?
• What is the problem that has caused the trend?
• The solution.
• The main players in the market.
• Predictions.
• Opportunities.
• Important takeaways
• Haters (or opposing viewpoints of the trend) (or opposing viewpoints of the trend).
• More resources to delve deeper into the subject.

9. Treendly

This tool refers to itself as Google Alerts for Google Trends. One of the difficulties with Google Trends is that there hasn’t always been an easy way to subscribe to a specific topic.

Google Trends now provides this functionality, but there are third-party solutions, such as Treendly, that aim to provide a better user experience and source from a wider range of sources than Google Trends.

10. Product Hunt Topics

Product Hunt showcases the most recent new (mostly digital) products across industries, and anyone can submit their own.

11. Trendwatchers

Trendwatchers, like some of the previous trending topic tools, allows you to track trends based on a category or keyword.

Trendwatchers distinguishes itself by combining trend data with ‘blog topic generator’ functionality.

This enables a user to identify what topics are trending and then apply that trend to a well-wordsmithed (aka clickbait-y) style template.

12. Conference Agendas

One of the best places to find trending topics in your industry is to attend conference keynote and breakout sessions.

13. Publications’ Editorial Calendars

Like conference agendas, editorial calendars for publications are frequently designed based on seasonal search trends that will resonate with their target audience.

Use publication editorial calendars to inspire or find trends that you know will peak during seasonal or cultural moments as you create your content calendar for next year.

14. Trendhunter

Finally, Trendhunter is a major source of trend data.

Trendhunter is a media company that provides free trend data (in the form of articles) as well as custom research, books, public speaking services, events, and more.

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