Google rolled out an update for Android users in April 2016 for testing trending In Search Auto-Complete. When the user clicks on the search bar Google shows the most trending searches happening on the search engine at that time. This should not be confused with the autocomplete feature.

After few days of rolling out, this feature met with a lot of user complaints. A Google Support forum exploded with 500 posts from users who hated this new feature. Users were frustrated because it didn’t have any option to disable it that time. Later, in response to the complaints, Google rolled out an update with an option to disable this feature.

On the 1st of September 2017, Google rolled out the same update for their search app on iOS. This Google Search App added Trending Search feature in their latest update, same as twitter trending.
Amazingly it gives a direct answer to questions like “who is the president of iran” in the search bar itself.

How Google Displays Trending Searches?

According to Google’s Support forum, it fetches data from Google Trends. In your local area, it fetches the search terms which are trending (getting searched by the most user) and shows the data accordingly.

Google quotes that:
What other people are searching for, including Trending stories. Trending stories are popular topics in your area that change throughout the day. Trending stories aren’t related to your search history. To see Trending stories, go to Google Trends

You can turn off this setting by following these steps:

1. Open the Google app 
2. At the top left, tap Menu  Settings  Autocomplete.
3. Tap the switch to turn “Show trending stories” off or on.

How Can SEO’s benefit from the Trending Searches?

How Can SEO’s benefit from the Trending Searches?

There are numerous ways in which you can benefit from the Google Trends data.  

Whenever the there’s something trending on Twitter or Google Trends, the information is not fully available on the web.

The partial information which we see are news websites ranking on Top giving the information about the incident.

Let’s take an example

When I tried to do a search, you can see some topics are trending in the given image

If I’m a blogger and searching for some trending topic, I can take the 1st trending topic about UN Chief Kofi Annan.

And create a topic around him and write an article like “Top 5 Thing you should know about Kofi Annan, UN Chief”

The benefit is your blog will start ranking for that topic without doing much SEO, because no other website has written about it.

Here you are fulfilling the biggest ranking factor which is “user intent” and to fulfill this, Google has to show the best relevant result for that topic.

Now because of no/less articles around that it starts pushing results which are relevant ignoring other ranking factors. And the amount of traffic you will get for the time it will be trending is huge.

The data which you find in Google Trends is nowhere to be found, be it Keyword planner or any other tool. So it is very easy to find trending topics that happened a year ago and what was the keywords users were searching. For example, “Halloween” Topic trends every year during october so if you are planning to write a blog around it, Google Trends data would be really handy to know the search terms to actually use.

Things to keep in mind while using this approach:

• The trending topic which you are writing on should be closely related to your niche.
• Try and select trending topics from your local area.
• The article you are writing should have enough data to explain the user about the topic. Add images, videos and make it long enough to fulfill the user intent.
• You might get a lot of traffic but that will probably not last long, because once the trend is over the searches are going to drop.

Closing Thoughts

Using Trending data from Google Trends and Google App can actually give you the next blog idea. You just have to keep looking for the trending topic in your niche and publish the blog ASAP.

The other benefits on writing on trending topics is users will start to see  your website as an influencer in the niche. So when the next time anything will happen, users will directly search on your website.

Writing on Trending topics will build credibility and people might also start linking to your website.

Let us know in the comments section if you have any better idea on using the Google Trends Tool?