Whether you’re creating reports to audit your site or you’re optimizing your website to enhance keyword visibility, there’s a lot of steps to take. It’s even harder if you’re relying on unreliable data that requires manual compilation.
Nightwatch offers a powerful solution that combines accurate search data with comprehensive SEO features to make it easy to track your SEO progress.
In this in-depth review, we’ll explore what Nightwatch excels at and where it could improve, its different pricing plans, and whether or not it’s a good choice for you.
Nightwatch: The Good and the Bad
Today, some SEO platforms are packaged as all-in-one solutions. Others focus on key areas like keyword tracking, site audit, and backlink analysis. Nightwatch is one of the latter. It provides accurate keyword ranking reports, a wide range of useful SEO features, and end-to-end testing capabilities.
What Nightwatch Is Good At
Accurate rank tracking with custom segments: Nightwatch gives you the inside track on ranking data by tapping into Google’s data centers. By pulling rank data from multiple sources, Nightwatch prevents anomalies.
With Nightwatch, you can see how your brand pages are performing versus product pages, or monitor progress across locations. Other products force you to view all keywords together in one jumbled report, but smart segmentation on Nightwatch lets you laser focus on just the data you need.
Nightwatch’s custom segments cut through the noise and differentiate by keyword theme, making it easy to track accuracy and customization where no other platform can.
Automated reporting: Compiling your tracking and reporting data can be tedious. Nightwatch’s drag-and-drop report builder lets you create polished reports in minutes.
Highlight the most meaningful insights without overwhelming readers, then choose your customization option whether your client is a CEO or a social media manager.
Nightwatch’s automated reporting lets you schedule reports to reach clients’ inboxes daily, weekly, or monthly. By taking report creation off your plate, Nightwatch lets you devote your energy to high-impact analysis and strategy.
Site audit tool: Nightwatch tirelessly scans your pages, uncovering broken links, missing title tags, incorrect hreflang implementation, and more.
The page-by-page breakdown helps prioritize your optimization so you can dive into granular details or take action whenever you want. Have a high-traffic section of your site? Simply customize URL filters to laser-focus audits on pages that matter most.
While manual audits take days, Nightwatch performs comprehensive technical SEO checks in minutes, equipping you with the insights needed to keep your site in tip-top shape.
Powerful API: Whether you use Moz, Semrush, Google Analytics, or even proprietary web analytics programs, Nightwatch’s API connects with just about every platform and tool out there to give you 360-degree visibility into your site’s rankings.
Nightwatch’s technical team handles API integration for you. Their developers are experienced, so it’s easy to offload the grunt work and focus on interpreting the ranking insights yourself.
By far, the coolest API feature is the user actions tool. With just a few lines of code, you can program Nightwatch to automatically navigate sites, fill out forms, and interact with elements. If you want to centralize all your rank tracking or leverage an integration, Nightwatch can make it happen.
Beautiful design and intuitive UI: Nightwatch’s design comes with two striking light and dark mode configurations. And that’s not all.
As soon as you log in to your Nightwatch dashboard, you’ll navigate right to where you need to go without clunky tabs and sidebars. The sleek interface makes it easy to go straight to your site’s rankings, displayed in easy-to-read graphs.
The dashboard consolidates all your key metrics into a single view. Instead of jumping between different pages, you’ll find traffic, rankings, links, and more in one convenient spot.
Google Data Studio integration: Nightwatch integrates seamlessly with Google Data Studio so you can pull out your organic and paid search data directly without any delay.
No other SEO tool allows you to slice and dice data so easily. Dive into rankings and trends by keyword, landing page, device, country, and more.
You can also create customized dashboards to track KPIs like ranking distribution, visibility growth, and volatility. Build historical charts to pinpoint ranking fluctuations or drops. Access real-time ranking insights to make data-backed optimizations on the fly.
With Nightwatch and Data Studio, you can dynamically filter data to spotlight winners and losers or even craft comparison views to showcase progress over time and impress clients.
Nightwatch’s Potential Drawbacks
Limited competitor analysis: Nightwatch only lets you track five competitors on its lower-priced plans. For small businesses, this may not be an issue. But this may not be enough for larger companies with a lot of competition.
Note that Nightwatch does offer flexible Enterprise plans, so if you have a need to track more than five competitors, you can reach out to them to see what other options are available for you.
Could Get Costly: Nightwatch offers tiered pricing based on the amount of keywords, websites, and site audit pages you want to track. At the low end of the spectrum, you can track 250 keywords, 50 websites, and 5,000 site audit pages at $32 per month with an annual plan. This price quickly begins to increase if you need to track more.
If you’re a growing business, just keep in mind you’ll likely need to opt for a higher-priced tier as your tracking needs grow.
Nightwatch Plans and Pricing
While there is no free plan, Nightwatch offers various pricing tier options. Each level is based on the amount of keywords offered, and higher tiers come with additional features. Note that you can try a free 14-day risk-free trial with any of its tiers.
We’ve broken down the pricing levels into four main tiers below.
Tier 1
At the first tier, you can track either 250 or 500 keywords. No matter which option you choose, you’ll gain insights into your website’s visibility and competitor strategies plus keyword monitoring through Google, YouTube, and Bing. Plus, Nightwatch works nicely with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Go month-to-month at $39 for 250 keywords or $59 per month for 500. Or save with the yearly subscription at $32 per month for 250 keywords, or $47 per month for 500 keywords.
Boasting 50 tracked websites and 5 tracked competitors, this plan empowers you to watch over your own sites while keeping an eye on the competition. With 5,000 site audit pages, you’ll have the content you need to plan all your future optimization opportunities.
Tier 2
Covering 1,000 to 5,000 keywords, this tier delivers serious tracking and insights from $99 to $399 per month. Go annual from $82 per month for 1,000 keywords or $319 per month for the full 5,000.
At Tier 2, you’ll receive 200 website trackers, monitoring 5 key competitors across 10,000 audit pages. All the standard Tier 1 perks are included, plus extras like 15 white label reports, API access for seamless data flows, and a Google Data Studio connector.
Nightwatch’s second tier offers an affordable sweet spot if you’re ready to step up your SEO game and get granular with larger keyword tracking, competitor monitoring, and robust site auditing.
Tier 3
The Tier 3 plan comes in at a monthly rate of $459 for 6,000 keywords, $519 for 7,000, $579 for 8,000, $639 for 9,000, and $699 for the full 10,000 keywords tracked. The yearly price falls to $367 per month for 6,000 keywords, $415 for 7,000, $463 for 8,000, $511 for 9,000, and $559 for 10,000.
At this level, you’ll receive 1,000 tracked websites to monitor your online presence plus tracking on five key competitors and 50,000 site audit pages. It’s a package suited for established agencies and power users handling numerous large accounts.
You get all the robust features from Nightwatch’s Tier 2 plan like rank tracking, SEO audits, backlink tracking, rank distribution graphs, and more. But Tier 3 takes it further with unlimited user seats and white label reports.
Tier 4
This premium offering lets you track and monitor over 10,001 keywords at a flexible pricing plan tailored to your needs—just speak with the team at Nightwatch to determine your price. It’s the perfect solution for large enterprises, agencies, and power users.
The expanded keyword allowance gives you the freedom to monitor all of your client accounts and properties in one centralized platform. You gain more data and insights to make smarter SEO decisions.
At this level, you can access robust features for high-volume keyword tracking and the expertise of the Nightwatch team to support your enterprise SEO and marketing needs.
Final Thoughts
Nightwatch’s unique combination of accurate data, extensive features, and high-powered capabilities make it a valuable SEO tool. For many professionals and marketers, Nightwatch could be a welcome addition. Just remember that as your business grows, you may need to opt for a higher-priced tier to get access to more tracking features.
