How to find popular keywords for SEO

One way is to identify and rank for popular keywords before these huge sites catch up and dominate the SERPs.

Here’s how you can discover popular keywords for your niche before your competitors:

Enter any topic Google Trends and you will see how it shapes up.

You can also adjust the time frame to identify emerging trends:

In my opinion, the best part of Google Trends is Related inquiries section at the bottom. Shows topics that are gaining increasing interest in the selected time period:

Look out for “breakthrough” terms, which means that the search volume for your search term has increased by over 5,000%.

A disappointing feature of Google Trends is that it doesn’t display many popular keywords.

So if you want to see a huge list of popular keywords, your best bet is to employ Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.

Enter any topic, go to Tailored conditions report, then click the button Growth column.

You’ll see >1.6 million keywords sorted by highest search volume growth over the last three months. You can also select a time slot by clicking the button Period drop-down menu.

The best thing about Keyword Explorer is that you can see all the crucial data about a keyword, such as its search volume (in a selected country or worldwide), keyword difficulty (or current ranking competitiveness), traffic potential (how much search traffic you could potentially get if you rank first), cost per click, and more.

You can even click the SERP drop-down menu to see which pages are currently ranking for a given keyword:

You can click Identify intentions to find out what users are looking for when they search for this keyword:

This will not only lend a hand you find popular keywords, but also give you all the information you need to lend a hand you rank high for that keyword.

Anything that gains popularity on the Internet will end up on the “front page of the Internet.” In brief, Reddit is the place to go to find popular keywords.

Start by entering the appropriate keyword in the search bar and search for relevant subreddits. For example, here are some subreddits related to “knives”:

Select the most relevant subreddit and then sort by top and preferred time period.

While browsing this subreddit, I found a discussion about “current customary knives”:

With 270 upvotes and 86 comments, this could be a potential topic to pursue if I were to sell knives online. However, I can check exactly if someone is searching for this keyword by typing it into the Keyword Explorer:

Low search volume (yet), but there are people looking for it!

Many trends start on social media, so needless to say, this is the place to go if you’re looking for trending keywords.

For Xyou can click Explore and the For You tab will appear. Shows trends on topics you are currently interested in.

As you can see, X knows that I am interested in technology and therefore shows me the latest news and trends in technology. However, this depends on your personal algorithm, so depending on how you employ X, it may or may not show the right trends.

Therefore, a better way is to search for your topic and see what the most popular tweets are.

Instagram is less intuitive and does not show trends. So you’ll have to get by by manipulating the algorithm to show what’s popular in your niche, or search and go to Tags:

Click on hashtags to see which posts or topics are trending.

For TikTokif you have a business account you will have access to their Original Hub where they will show you what is currently popular:

Similar to Reddit, once you’ve made a note of what’s popular in your niche, you can enter it into a keyword tool like Keyword Explorer to see if it’s getting high search volume.

Here is my code for discovering popular keywords: Manage your newsletter.

Whether it’s a personal project, an internal newsletter for your team, or one that’s sent to your clients, creating a newsletter will keep you up to date with all industry trends like no one else.

For example, I write Ahrefs’ Digest, our free weekly newsletter. Every week I have to scour social media, forums and other industry newsletters for the best published content.

This keeps me up to date with everything that’s going on in the industry – what just happened, what people are talking about and what people are posting.

For example, 200 issues later, I know that right now SEO and marketing people are interested in:

As you can see, we have already covered some of these topics and will cover more in the future.

Final thoughts

If you can’t beat them, stay ahead of them.

If you can follow trends before the huge brands step in, you have a better chance of ranking higher in search engines and accumulating the good stuff: more authority and more backlinks. This can lend a hand you in future searches to rank for more arduous and competitive keywords.

Have I missed any method for finding popular keywords? Let me know on LinkedIn.