Want to grow on YouTube?
Focus on “low-hanging fruit” topics with high demand and little competition.
I used this strategy to get nearly 1,000,000 views (and made over $50,000) in a year.
Let me show you how.
Disclaimer: This post has affiliate links at no cost to you. I only showcase products that I use and truly believe in.
1. Check YouTube Suggestions
Let’s start with the most obvious strategy, that is, YouTube search recommendations.
First, open YouTube Incognito mode.
Then, search for something and see what YouTube suggests.
This is YouTube’s AI suggesting topics that people are searching for.
In other words, these are good video topic ideas.
But the challenge is knowing how competitive they are.
For instance, “AI tools for students” is a good topic, but it’s already highly saturated.
There are millions of videos about it already.
But worry not, because there’s a fix to this!
2. Use Google Trends
A better way to find trendy video topics is by using Google Trends.
Google Trends
Explore the year through the lens of Google Trends data.trends.google.com
It’s a free tool that shows what people are searching for now.
Here’s how you can find trendy YouTube topics with it:
- Search for something.
- Set “Worldwide” audience.
- Set the “Past 90 days” timerange.
- Set “YouTube Search” as the channel.
- Scroll to see Related queries.
These are topics that popped up during the past 90 days.
Some of these are good video topic ideas because of low competition.
However, there’s still a big problem.
You can’t tell how competitive these topics are.
For example, the DeepSeek trend became saturated in 24 hours. The content creators were prepared for the new AI and capitalized on it quickly.
To avoid saturated topics, you still need a better way to find topics.
3. Semrush to Rescue
Semrush is a tool that shows trends and topics with actual numbers.
This is the best way to find trends and topics for YouTube.
If you’ve never used it before, I’ve arranged for you a free 14-day Pro trial that’s only accessible with this link.
To find trendy video topics, open up the “Keyword Overview” tool and type in something.
For example, let’s search for “AI tools.”
This opens up a report that looks like this:
I know that looks complicated.
However, there are only two things you need to pay attention to.
Firstly, there’s the keyword difficulty metric:
For “AI tools”, the score is 88%, which means “Very hard.”
In other words, this is a super competitive video topic idea and completely out of your reach.
But here’s the second part.
When you scroll below, you will find “Keyword ideas.”
You can translate this as “Video topic ideas.”
In our example, there are more than 22,000 video topic ideas related to AI tools.
This is your goldmine.
Let’s open up that report:
This shows you:
- Video topic ideas (Keyword column)
- Number of interested viewers (Volume column)
- Competitiveness (KD % column)
For example, “ai detection tool” is searched 14,800 times every month, and it has a competitiveness score of 91.
That being said, there’s still a problem.
The above ideas are too competitive based on the KD score.
That’s where you can use filters.
Let’s set a filter to only find video topic ideas with low competition (0–40% difficulty):
Now you’ll only see the low-competition topics you could get views with.
For example, the “best college ai tools” is a topic that 2,400 people search every month, yet the competitiveness is just 35%.
These are your video topic ideas.
These are topics with a lot of searches but not a lot of competition.