Google trends is excellent for spotting rising keywords (and using that to help clients with their next campaign – thus positioning you as a good researcher AND someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to business growth).
One of the places I subscribe to is a site called Muck Rack. Sounds utterly spammy (and yes, like most people I judge every book by its cover – but then go and take a proper look), but is actually a rare and excellent news site for journalists.
Every story they cover is in-depth. Meaning they actually do the work journalists used to do years ago before the world discovered click-bait and propaganda machines.
And now they’ve got a new tool for tracking trends (and no, even though today is 1st April, this is real). If you want to see what a viral word looks like, enter ‘coronavirus’.
You can also compare words, so try ‘covid’ and you’ll see why using the term coronavirus attracts more attention.
Where Google Trends gives you a ‘popularity figure’ for how well something is trending, the Muck Rack version gives you actual article numbers (don’t bother trying to use coronavirus to go viral – the competition is, erm, global – sad though that is).
It also tells you who are the top trending journalists and outlets. This is useful if you’re researching a topic.Here’s the link: https://muckrack.com/trends/