A new day, a new trend. For businesses and content creators, it sure feels that way sometimes. If you’re not on top of trends, it might be difficult to engage your audience. So, what should you do? Is it still possible to create and maintain a holistic SEO strategy, while keeping your users entertained?
What is holistic SEO?
To keep it short: if you fulfill your users’ needs on every level, you’re practicing holistic SEO. This means your site is easy and safe to use, and provides the right information at the right time.
Holistic SEO is not just doing keyword research and writing content that people are looking for. It’s also user experience, technical SEO, and making sure your website is secure.
What is trending content?
When a topic or joke is trending, it has high visibility on social media platforms. This means people are talking and making content about this topic. And they’re also searching for it!
Depending on the topic that’s trending, people might search for more information on social media platforms or search engines. Sometimes even both! Which is why it can be useful for your business’s visibility to also create content about a trending topic.
Trending content might be necessary
How people search online is changing. In fact, many SEO experts predict that we’ll get less traffic from search engines. So, where will traffic come from? A large part will probably come from social media like TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Instagram – especially now that more people use them as search engines.
And how do you become more visible on social media? By posting trending content.
Trending or quality content?
As we just discussed, a large part of holistic SEO is writing quality content. But how can you create quality content when you only have a day or two before the world moves on to the next trend?
Take TikTok, for example. Generally, by the time you notice something is a trend, you’re already too late. The ship has sailed, and people are moving on to the next thing. With this in mind, it can feel like you have to choose between staying relevant or creating quality content.
What does your audience appreciate?
It’s good to know that the answer to how much trending content you should create also largely depends on your audience. If your audience consists of older people, then chances are you don’t need to follow social media trends as vigorously. On the contrary, you might even scare them away!
If your audience is younger, however, you might need to come up with a certified ‘trend strategy’. Because you can’t join them all. And if you try to stay relevant by jumping on every trend, you’ll look like you’re trying too hard. Plus, you’ll probably have to compromise on quality.
A trend strategy
As we said, you shouldn’t want to join in on every trend. So what should you do instead? We suggest you create your own ‘trend strategy’. Here’s a few things you should consider:
- Which trends are you going to engage with?
- Will you only engage with trends within your area of expertise, or will you branch out?
- Will you only join in on funny trends, or will you create content for more serious trends too?
- Will you only join trends that your audience is interested in? Or will you introduce your audience to new trends that could be interesting to them as well?
- Will you drop everything to create content related to a new trend?
- Does it need to be a blog post, or is a social media post better? Or both?
- How often will you post ‘trendy’ content? Keep in mind that if you join in often, your brand image will change. Your business will probably feel younger, which might alienate part of your audience.
You’re still working on your holistic SEO
With a trend strategy, you should be able to make better decisions about when to post trendy content. Which will hopefully help you to keep creating quality content – one of the pillars of holistic SEO.
What’s more, if you follow trends that your audience likes, you’ll be adhering to another holistic SEO pillar: creating content for your audience! After all, they’re the ones reading (and hopefully engaging with) your content.
Keep an eye on brand image
Just don’t forget that your brand image could change, depending on the type of trending content you post online. If you engage with and participate in a lot of meme-y content and trends (a meme can be a funny video, image, or piece of text that’s rapidly copied and spread online – usually, with slight variations), your brand might come across as more playful and less serious.
However, never posting meme-y content also sends a clear message. Your business will come across as serious, and perhaps a little impersonal. It’s fine if that’s what you’re going for, but it’s also good to keep in mind that authentic content (so more personal content) does really well online.
Conclusion
There’s no telling what the future will bring, but it’s clear that trends won’t go away. Plus, they’re constantly changing! That’s why it might be helpful to create a trend strategy, so you can provide your audience with content they’re currently interested in. Without having to skimp on quality and your holistic SEO strategy. Good luck!
Read more: Is conversational commerce really the future? »
Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.
