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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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