Nightwatch.io Review: The 24/7 Rank Tracking Tool to Cure SEO Insomnia

Most people’s workday stops around five in the afternoon.

But not an SEO specialist’s workday.

Always on edge, SEOs are under constant pressure to deliver into the wee hours of the morning. Sleepless night after night with a bad case of insomnia.

They’re made to jump one hurdle after another, from tasks which range from constant site performance monitoring to managing and auditing backlink profiles to ranking target keywords organically.

To say SEO specialists have a lot on their plate is quite the understatement!

Clearly, SEOs need a helping hand to survive the day and keep their minds at ease after sundown. If not a person, then at least a tool to help them sleep soundly.

But what kind of tool could gather information about a site’s link profile and organic ranking and then provide a report based on this collected data? And what tool could present this data in digestible chunks everyone—content marketers or agencies and their clients—can understand?

Like a high-end mattress, you want a reliable SEO platform that has your back while you comfortably drift off to dreamland. Is there such a tool?

Yes, there is! And it’s time you learned about Nightwatch.

What Is Nightwatch?

Nightwatch is a cloud-based platform designed to provide your site and keyword performance data exactly when you need it.

On the Nightwatch dashboard, users can view current rankings, keyword distribution, traffic information and more. In addition, Nightwatch integrates with Google Analytics and Search Console, discovers competitors, and creates reports to send to clients on a regular basis.

Nightwatch—put simply—is a handy SEO performance monitoring tool for the new generation.

Nightwatch Features

Nightwatch has three main features that make it a compelling addition to any content marketing team’s toolbox.

Rank tracking

At its core, Nightwatch provides you with ranking data to help plan a sensible course of action.

One powerful feature of the tool is how it allows track rankings for any location. These localized reports provide content marketing teams and their clients a clearer picture on where they stand on the SERPs, including local map results. This feature alone makes Nightwatch an important local SEO tool.

Nightwatch provides ranking reports for all the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and YouTube. You can just as easily check on your competitors and see how they’re performing for similar keywords.

Another key feature is the keyword discovery. By entering a URL, Nightwatch pulls numerous relevant keywords that’ll boost your ranking. In addition, you can organize these keywords by segment and create a strategy to ramp up your campaign. Furthermore, you can assign tags to particular keywords, which allows you can analyze them separately.

All of these rank tracking reports can be managed in one easy-to-use interface. And when ready, your marketing team can create simple, customizable graphs to demonstrate results to clients.

Backlink monitoring

Backlink monitoring and backlink assessing can be a tedious process. Doing so manually requires a lot of time and manpower.

But Nightwatch, thanks to its powerful backlink tracker, keeps it relatively pain-free.

The dashboard is a treasure trove of information one can use to access a site properly. You get to view the total number of backlinks, how diverse those backlinks are, each backlinks’ quality and their current status. The tool allows users to filter the results by their characteristic.

Users can also receive notifications on a regular basis to stay up-to-date on newly discovered backlinks.

Reporting

Arguably its best feature, Nightwatch’s reporting feature keeps users and clients informed without skipping a beat. You can design custom reports and have them sent automatically via email to concerned parties. You can break down keywords and only present the relevant ones based on criteria you set.

If needed, you can add custom graphs and attach to reports. Creating a graph is easy. You can visualize all the data that’s available in Nightwatch, filter through dimensions, and select which metrics to add to your graph.

For example, you can create graphs to show your average position, click potential, clicks, sessions, impressions, indexed pages and more.

Sometimes, clients only need to see reports for keywords that meet certain conditions. With Nightwatch, you can do just that. If they only want to see the results for keywords that went up, you can set up your reporting to display just that.

These features make Nightwatch a must-have for content marketing teams, content marketing agencies and freelance SEO specialists. Having reports automatically generated and sent eases the minds of your clients.

The Pros and Cons of Nightwatch

Given how powerful the cloud-based platform is, there are a lot of upsides to a Nightwatch subscription and very few reasons not to invest in one. Let’s break down all the reasons.

Pro: Comprehensive rank tracking

It’s hard not to be impressed by Nightwatch’s rank tracking capability. Not only does it deliver ranking updates on a daily basis, but it also provides you snack pack data information.

Google snack packs, for the unfamiliar, is the box that shows local business listings relevant to your search query. With Nightwatch, you’re made aware of whether or not your site makes the cut.

Pro: Great UX/UI

The minute you log in, you instantly know the user experience was one of Nightwatch’s top priorities.

Setting up an account is easy and takes five minutes. First-time users are prompted to provide basic information, then offered a chance to integrate a Google account. Once accomplished, you’re already up and running.

The main dashboard itself is clean and well-organized. The site’s dark theme is non-straining and easy on the eyes (but a bright color mode is also available). And navigation is a breeze with all important details conveniently placed in the sidebar.

Pro: Easy-to-understand reporting

Reports can be set up right from the dashboard. Nightwatch provides a couple of templates you could use as a starting point. From there, you can configure which elements to include in your report through different drop-down menus.

As you make changes, you’re given a real-time view of what the report would look like.

Reports can be exported in PDF, CSV or HTML formats.

Con: Not for everyone

Nightwatch is very good at what it does. However, the pricing can be challenging for someone who’s just starting out.

The base price starts at $19 for 100 keywords. But as the need for more keywords arises, so does the price. It can go as high as $699 a month for 10,000 keywords. Not everyone is able to afford the product—but if you’ve got enough of a marketing budget to be targeting 10,000 keywords with your content, that monthly subscription cost is probably not unexpected.

If you’re a one-man team, having a tool that automatically tracks and reports your ranking might be worth the cost.

That said, it’s clear Nightwatch is for SEO agencies who can shoulder the costs of the tool’s keyword tracking and other features.

Before you commit, however, you need to figure out how much value Nightwatch can add to your agency. Signing up for a 10-day free trial affords you the opportunity to see if the rank tracking software is perfect for your team.

Also, be aware that if you subscribe for a trial version, the backlink tracking feature is not available.

The Nightwatch.io Verdict

The market is saturated with rank tracking tools and it’s easy to dismiss Nightwatch as just another entry in the mix. However, SEO agencies seeking more robust solutions to stay on top of their client’s keywords will find a lot to love with this tool.

Personally, the feature that stands out the most is its reporting capabilities. The data it provides and its presentation make your agency look capable, qualified and professional.

More importantly, you have the freedom to tailor fit reports to clients and auto-send them. It’s a time-saver.

Also, while Nightwatch is not an all-inclusive SEO tool, it nonetheless does a good job handling keyword discovery and backlink monitoring. Really, this is what all SEOs desperately need—a tool to make their job much, much easier.

And Nightwatch clearly fits the bill.

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