I always make sure that we are actively using Bing and Google. There is a tradeoff in your time when you use more tools, but there's also benefit in multiple perspectives. And don't forget that Bing is a very viable search engine that receives 500 million search queries each month. You may find that your business benefits from a relatively small amount of attention paid to Bing because search ranking there is easier (not easy, easier).
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.
Google Trends shows me geographic locations where a particular topic may be useful for advertising.
Google Trends allows me to drill down into those locations to metro and city levels where I can focus on exactly what local business clients need to know.
Google Trends allows me to identify and qualify search terms that my client's need to optimize their websites and social media content for.
Google Trends shows me what people are talking about in a specific location over a specific period of time. This is a great way to know what I should be posting on social media.
The user-interface isn't as friendly or appealing as Google's - very bland overall.
The way they present their Page Traffic report is a big turn-off. It's basically just a grid of numbers and arrows which is hard to interpret at a high level.
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 think that Bing does a good job of being a competitive product in a space that has very basic and insanely complex products. While Bing isn't pretty, it gets the job done and also gets you the right tools in a simple and straight forward backend UI. The ability to place Bing ads, track SEO and see how your site is performing, all from one backend interface is awesome!
Overall I think that Ahrefs is a better product when it comes to really drilling down and getting all the data that you need in order to understand a given behavior or problem. Ahrefs is much more powerful in its feature set but does not have the same level of overall data/visual data representation that Google Trends does.
