Keeping the content on your website fresh and new plays an important role in ranking on search engines. Blogs and social media activity are good ways to not only frequently add new content to your website, but also add relevant content about industry topics – also a boost to search rankings.

Thinking of topics to write about on a regular basis can be a challenge. A content plan can help keep you going when the obvious topics get thin. But a plan immediately becomes out of date so watching comments on popular industry blogs is a good way to see what’s hot. Another is to use tools that monitor social media and blogs to find out what is trending.

One such tool is the Bottlenose Sonar Solo product www.sonar.bottlenose.com. According to the website, it allows you to search any topic to find trends and influencers about any subject, in real time.  For example you could type in Colorado SEO and find out what is being talked about.

Here is what Sonar Solo says is trending for ‘search engine optimization’.

The way to read this chart is as follows. The font size denotes the volume of mentions. The color orange indicates acceleration in volume. And, the green and red dots equate to positive or negative sentiments respectively.

Tools like Sonar Solor can give you ideas of hot topics to write about. Tying into popular trends is a good way to create share-worthy content.