Google Trends is appropriate in so many scenarios, but I definitely suggest it for content ideas and inspiration. Many people utilize it after already writing their content to add in popular phrases or words, but that is not enough. The platform should be used prior and during the content creation process so that you can use the data to see what your audience/customers are interested in at the moment and create the content based on their interests. It can help, but I find it much less appropriate to use it after your article, eBook, etc. is already written. Maximize on this useful tool by ensuring the topic you're writing about is relevant in the first place before simply adding in popular keywords. An article that's written based on what's trending will be far more successful than an article that solely has popular phrases added to it.
SEOGadget is ideal when using vendors like Moz and Majestic for analysis of your backlinks. It is not the tool to use if you need to gain more backlinks or want to increase your backlink. It can help you edit your backlink profile and understand where the links come from. It is probably ideal for in-house teams studying larger sites with lots of links and trying to understand their link partners, or an agency/freelancer that needs to import data from multiple sources to help clients with link profiles. It is not the tool to target new link opportunities, but with some ingenuity you could probably use it for this if you an access your competitor data. It's also good for anchor analysis which is something few teams really look into.
Allows you to search keywords and phrases in certain locations to see search volumes, this is huge and helps us be successful with our Google Ad campaigns.
Shows us insights into trending topics which allows us to stay in the know and apply any relevant trends to current clients.
Year in Search and Trending Topics provides us great inspiration for our ads
Being able to search in certain locations gives us a ton of help when setting up campaigns and doing our keyword research for clients.
Being able to compare multiple keywords or search terms side by side is extremely helpful.
Google Trends is very easy to use. you just search for a certain keyword or phrase, and it tells you how often that keyword or phrase is searched, where in the world it is searched, and over the last decade, how often it is per year.
I haven't needed to use any support for Google Trends. However, I've used Google's support in general and it's a hit or miss. Usually, there's a long wait or they don't understand my problem. They are the only ones that can help, so sometimes I feel stuck. They prioritize paying customers for sure.
I've used SEMRush, while more of a SEO Manager than keyword trend analyzer, it does have that option as it does relate to SEO management, but between the two, its nice to have the option in SEMRush, but Google Trends is better at doing the trend analyzing than SEMRush is.
This includes more data and makes backlink analysis easier because you don't have to build sheets and tables from scratch. While it doesn't directly compare (it uses some of these services) it is better suited for the custom analysis of data and that is a big help when you do a lot of data manipulation. It's easier and more streamlined than Knime, and Knime does not allow you to import directly from Moz or Majestic so a step is saved here. It can't do as much as Knime but most of the things you want to do it can do, and you can do them faster.
I can't really give a measurement of how Google Trends has directly contributed.
Since Google Trends is free I would have to say that it is all positive ROI.
I can say that Google Trends definitely makes it easier to accomplish my business objectives of delivering the most relevant and insightful advice to my clients regarding their SEO, Social Media Publishing, and Online Advertising.
It is hard to quantify this realistically but it does save time and that is big
Importing data is a time suck, so the only real advantage here is the ability to do two or three imports instantly without downloading and visiting three sites, this could be expanded for even more ROI
We haven't had any negative impacts as this is mainly a time saver