Finding new keywords using the ad spend method
Here’s how I’ve been using ad spend to reveal emerging keywords before search volume catches up.
Back in 2016, I still had Instagram, and brands were advertising on it. I spent a lot of time, like many others, scrolling and wondering…
If that weird matcha cream actually makes your skin look like that??
And if those clothes really are worth it or will I regret the purchase?
Is that new insurance brand legit? Cause its videos are cute and it seems cheap.
I recognized I fall into a mainstream shopping style of seeing something on social and searching about it later. Even if the ad was boring, if I saw it enough times, I’d be curious enough.
If I was doing it, plenty of other people are too.
Zero MSV words: Catching trends before they trend
Let's talk about zero MSV words. What happens when you try to find a term that people are talking about, but doesn't quite have volume yet? It’s hard to prioritize which ones are gonna gain traction and which ones are going to fizzle out.
The intention is to set yourself up for major growth trends. It’s not just about covering all the words, but investing in a few that show the most signs of promise or early wave signals.
You can prioritize them a few ways: size of a themed batch of 0 MSV words, forums, customers and UGC, social media trends, events, competitor research, and as I like to call it, the zeitgeist.
(There are plenty of guides out there on how to approach 0 MSV words well, so I won’t re-visit the common practices that are out there.) Welp that was wrong. I did some research and turns out all the top articles on this topic kinda suck.
How to find 0 MSV words with high likelihood for growth
In your normal keyword research, batch related 0 MSV words and see which ones have the most variations. I don’t think words end up in the keyword tools like Semrush if it’s truly 0. I think it’s more like, it can’t qualify for 0-10 but it’s not 0. Try one of those.
In your normal keyword research, keep an eye out for 0 MSV words that you’ve seen in other contexts in the wild – a social media video, for instance.
Customer concerns, complaints, questions, and survey results can show what people are thinking about before they’re searching about it.
Forums with many variations on the same question, and forum results high up in the SERPs, are a good place to try to write a comprehensive guide and reference some of those same forum comments to create a comprehensive guide from many themed comments.
Trends you can gather by analyzing your internal user data.
Keep your finger on the zeitgeist, as I like to call it. I don’t just mean what’s trending on social. I mean at the macro level, if you see a tide shifting because of macro-environmental, economic, political, or cultural influences, you will see a macro-level shift in human behavior, especially amongst demographics that have less flexibility: parents.
We saw this the most starkly during the pandemic, but even without a crisis or disaster, every quarter you should be able to sense what is coming next.
Third time’s a charm in conversation. What this means: Often, I don’t hear about anything online or offline, except I hear it in the office. If I hear something 3 times in a short period of time, I know it’s out there being talked about and likely being searched about.
Example: A client of mine was running a slaughterhouse and often, ranchers would come in and pick up their meat and be surprised by how little yield they got. To the butcher it’s normal to lose 50% of the carcass weight to packaged weight, but it was blowing customers’ minds – turns out, “yield” queries had little volume but “did the butcher steal my meat” had plenty.
So we wrote the guide on yields for every animal type and why and where the loss goes, backed by science and averages, so the farmer can tell when it looks legit and when something is off. The title tag wrote itself - Did the butcher steal my meat? The piece has 10 RLDs and at its highest, had 690 keywords.
As of January 2025, the “zeitgeist” is millions of government workers across the country looking for childcare and doing the math on taking the buyout. What happens after that? Who knows, but try to look ahead so you can be ahead of the trends instead of searching them after they are here.
How do you know which words are going to grow and which aren't? Here’s one foolproof way, because it involves a money-backed guarantee:
The Instagram method: Spotting VC-backed ad campaigns
One way I look for this is to see who's spending money. I used to call this the “Instagram method”.
I would scroll Instagram to find fairly new tech companies advertising new products. This would often be something like a challenger bank, like Chime or Revolut - I remember seeing a lot of ads for them.
Or, the great “boxed mattress has entered the chat” era of selling the same mattress-in-a-box under 10 different brand names.
👀 If I saw enough ads, I knew they had VC money to spend on brand awareness.
💸 If they have VC money for marketing and brand awareness, people will start searching their name at some point. If I'm seeing ads repeatedly or across all channels, I know they're spending significantly on figuring out who I am and how to reach people like me.
✍️If the brand was trying to create a new category, coin a new term, or launch a new type of product, you can also find non-branded core content to write that covers those topics.
▶️ Go live quickly with these new pages so you are “URL-early” and can capture some authority.
Review new brands before searches spike
It's only a matter of time before people start searching for reviews. So the first thing I would do is review Revolut or Chime early on to ensure I'm ready when people start searching their name.
Write about the new topics companies are pushing in their ads
Heatless hair curlers, mattresses in a box, covid + anything and everything. There are a ton of opportunities to be “URL first” and secure your authority in terms of earliest to speak expertly on it. In the case of Revolut and Chime, we built out a suite of challenger bank articles detailing how they work.
Another example is Buy Now, Pay Later. All the brands operate in similar but different ways, and detailing those differences really helped our customers decide how to pay.
Case study: Zillow's three-buyer home purchase ad
If you've seen this on streaming platforms, it's about three roommates who bought a house together – a three-buyer home purchase.
This is one of those keywords where you wonder what is the specific word for this type of purchase. Likely many people are typing in some variations. If we check SEMrush and do a couple of takes on the keyword, there's not much that hits the nail on the head.
But over the course of this ad running, if you go to Google Trends and input all of those word variations, you can see growth over all of them.
People like me, watching this commercial and wondering, "Can I do that with two friends?" will search to see what the monthly payment looks like.
This is a perfect opportunity to coin the term, set the URL, and build a calculator.
Opportunity: Build a complex calculator Google can't replicate
When you search these terms, what's on top? Affordability calculators, lots of sponsored content, and regular mortgage calculators. If you click on these, none offer options for 3 down payments or even 2.
This is a ripe opportunity to build a more complex calculator than what Google offers. We discussed this yesterday - writing things too complicated for Google or others to instantly replicate.
Create the guide on multi-buyer home purchases
There's an opportunity to write a comprehensive guide on three-way or two-way home purchases, explaining monthly payments and practicality. People will watch that commercial and think, "Wow, I could do that. Wait, can I?"
That's a hot tip on finding zero MSV or emerging keywords and securing the URL before anyone else by looking at ad spend.
