How to Track Trends (Guide for Inventory Managers & SEOs)

Trend Tracking is one of the most powerful features within Exploding Topics. It can transform your inventory management and supercharge your SEO marketing.

Finding trending topics is one thing (and Exploding Topics is great at it). But continuous monitoring of the trends most relevant to you and your customers will unlock whole new business workflows, from smarter stock planning to more proactive content creation.

I have been using Trend Tracking for years. I’m monitoring hundreds of trends across dozens of custom groups, designed and labeled to fit my needs.

In this guide, I’ll take you through some of the main ways that you can harness Trend Tracking to benefit your agency or retail business.

What is Trend Tracking on Exploding Topics?

Trend Tracking is a way of organizing and monitoring the topics most relevant to your business needs, so that you can easily recognize and respond to changes in consumer interest.

Our core database has 11 categories and 65 subcategories. But you’ll sometimes want to view and compare trends at an even more granular level, working from a custom-built list of the most pertinent topics.

With Trend Tracking, you can group any of the trends from our database into labeled projects. You can even pull in data from outside the main curated database, using our Trend Analysis feature.

For example, let’s say that you run a specialist gummies E-commerce store. The “vitamins & supplements” sub-category within our database would be a very useful starting point, but there’s still a lot of irrelevant noise. Trend tracking allows you to create a laser-focused list:

At a glance, you can immediately see that interest in keto gummies has peaked, but magnesium gummies are trending sharply upward. You can also see that ashwagandha gummies have the highest raw 1-month search volume.

And you can click into any of these trends to view the Exploding Topics 1-year forecast, based on analysis of millions of similar patterns. This will help you make far more informed decisions on the products to stock and the SEO-optimized content to publish in order to get an edge on competitors.

How do I track trends with Exploding Topics?

The process for tracking trends on Exploding Topics is extremely straightforward.

If you’re adding from within the main database, it’s a simple matter of selecting the “track topic” button at the top-right of your screen once you’ve clicked into a trend.

This will bring up a list of all of your Trend Tracking projects. You simply tick the box next to the project or projects to which you’d like to add the topic.

If you’re looking to track a term that isn’t currently in the main database (perhaps a highly specific or long-tail query), you’ll need to go through Trend Analysis.

Once you’ve selected Trend Analysis from the left-hand sidebar, you’ll be able to search for anything you like. As long as there’s enough data, Exploding Topics will generate the chart, and you’ll be able to track that too.

From this screen, the “track topic” button can be found at the bottom right of the chart.

You’ll also get a list of related search queries below the chart. If you like the look of any of them, you can track them directly from the list.

Once you’ve tracked your trends, you can see an overview of all the projects you’ve created from within the Trend Tracking tab.

You’ll get a summary view from the main screen. And clicking into the project reveals full details of the trends you’ve tracked.

In the screenshot below, you can see the gummies project we’ve been building here. (You’ll also notice an AI startups category: that’s a real project I’ve been using to help keep one of our pieces of content fresh.)

Trend Tracking for inventory management

Trend Tracking is an absolutely massive benefit if you’re using Exploding Topics for E-commerce. In a few clicks, you’ve effectively got a digital twin of your inventory, and a dashboard for monitoring possible future products before demand shows up in sales data.

Here are a few of the ways that E-commerce users are making the most of Trend Tracking:

Ongoing demand monitoring

The gummies example I’ve been using so far is a great illustration of how Trend Tracking can help E-commerce businesses within certain niches.

There’s steady supply for an overarching product type: in this case, gummies. But the “product of the moment” within that category is much more susceptible to fickle trends. And there is a huge business advantage to be gained by spotting those trends early.

If you’re a gummies seller, you might want to create a project that tracks a wide variety of “X gummies” and “gummies for Y” topics. That way, when one starts to take off, you can be among the first to stock and promote it.

And unlike some other trend trackers, Exploding Topics looks across multiple channels. So if the latest gummy is exploding on TikTok, we won’t miss it, and you’ll be able to see a breakdown of exactly where it’s worth promoting the product.

SKU/category lifecycle tracking

You can essentially use Exploding Topics Trend Tracking as a virtual stockroom. By making a project of all your inventory, you’re suddenly able to look at every product you sell and see whether it’s trending up or down, before sales lurch unexpectedly one way or the other.

You’ll likely want to split this up into numerous projects looking at clusters of closely-related SKU variants. For example, a supplements seller could group together all of their magnesium products:

Armed with easy-to-access data that aligns with your stock, you can make more informed decisions on de-risking your inventory. You may decide to reorder an upwardly mobile product like magnesium gummies in greater quantities, while running a promotion on an item where interest looks like it could be on the way down (e.g. magnesium glycinate supplements).

Product development and line extension scouting

Trend Tracking is your new R&D watchlist.

Maybe there’s a new product emerging within your niche that you just want to monitor for a while before committing. Perhaps a competitor has started stocking something you’re yet to be convinced about.

You can group all of these topics into one place, and observe in real time which trends appear to have staying power. That way, you’re only jumping on the right bandwagons.

You can use Trend Tracking as your one-stop shop. Or you can combine it with Semrush market analysis tools to get the clearest possible picture of what’s happening within your selling niche.

Trend Tracking for SEO marketing and content planning

The other major overarching use case for Trend Tracking is content planning. If you’re an agency or an internal SEO lead, it’s a surefire way to make sure you’re publishing the right things, in the right places, at the right times.

While the main Exploding Topics database is for distinct topics (like brands or products), you can combine Trend Analysis and Trend Tracking to monitor far more specific terms. Lots of users like to keep track of common search phrases such as “how to”, “what is”, and “review”: these map directly onto editorial calendars and page creation.

Unlike traditional keyword research tools, this lets you see which content ideas are gaining momentum, not just which ones already have volume.

In this case, “magnesium gummies benefits” is a clear standout for its sharp growth chart. That’s a ready-made, data-backed SEO content idea.

And just like in the E-commerce example, you can then make full use of channel breakdowns for each topic to establish what other kinds of marketing content it’s worth publishing. For instance, if you’re tapping into the interest surrounding “best gummies”, there is a lot of activity on TikTok.

In this particular example, that’s not necessarily surprising. But you may not previously have considered Reddit as a potentially lucrative marketing channel, or you might have been wasting creative efforts and/or ad budget on long X threads about the best gummies.

Trend Tracking puts all of this actionable data at your fingertips to level up your SEO marketing efforts.

Other uses for Trend Tracking

Inventory management and SEO content planning are where the Trend Tracking feature really shines. But we have also noticed users making their own projects for a couple of other reasons.

Brand and competitor awareness monitoring

It can be very useful to see how other brands are performing within your sector. Some of our users have set up projects to monitor changing brand search interest. Take this example from the beauty sector:

If you see your own brand losing interest and a rival taking off, you know that you need to take action. You can analyze what high-interest brands are doing well, and then use Semrush to help win their traffic.

Organizing trends by client/team

If you’re a multi-client agency or a large business with multiple teams, you don’t really want all of your trends data in one place. Trend tracking excels as an organizational tool.

You can split trends off into projects like “E-commerce” and “SEO”, for the use of different departments. Or you can maintain different projects for each of your clients, who may well be targeting entirely different niches.

Start tracking trends today

Whether you’re managing inventory, planning SEO campaigns, launching new products, or juggling multiple clients, Trend Tracking turns fast-moving consumer interest into something structured, actionable, and easy to monitor over time.

Instead of reacting late to demand shifts, you can spot them early, prioritize the right opportunities, and make confident decisions backed by real data.

If you’re already using Exploding Topics to find trends, Trend Tracking is how you turn those insights into a repeatable competitive advantage.

And if you’re not yet a customer, let this be your reason to come and join us. Sign up for a free trial today.