Nightwatch Reviews & Alternatives — A Robust Tool for Experienced SEOs
Nightwatch is a cloud-based rank tracker that provides accurate, up-to-date information regarding your site’s SEO performance. Apart from keyword tracking, the tool also supports backlink monitoring and site audits, giving you invaluable insights that can help you improve the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns.
The wealth of data Nightwatch gathers makes it an appealing option for SEO professionals, marketers, and agencies with a decent marketing budget that want to track a large number of keywords. The tool also integrates with Google Analytics and Search Console and allows you to discover and monitor the performance of your competitors for the desired keywords.
That said, the variety of options available within Nightwatch and the sheer amount of data it gathers, alongside the limitations associated with the “Personal” accounts, make the tool a bit less enticing for individuals — affiliates, bloggers, and SEOs with limited experience.
If you’re looking for a simple rank tracker or a more budget-friendly option, there are quite a few alternatives to Nightwatch.
We reviewed over 35+ of the best rank trackers based on accuracy, speed, check frequency, search engine and device support, and other important features.
Click here to see how Nightwatch compares to the competition.
Why You Should Listen to Us About Nightwatch
We understand how Google actually works and know the ins and outs of SEO — and we have the data to prove it.
In the last year alone, we took three different projects from virtually no organic search traffic to over 100,000 monthly organic search visitors.
DoNotPay (B2C SaaS)
CampusReel (B2C SaaS)
If you’re looking for B2C SEO, check out our CampusReel case study.
Doggypedia.org (Publisher)
See how we took Doggypedia to 18,500,000 Pinterest impressions and over 5,700 hours watched on YouTube in 2019.
We’re not just sharing our opinion on what we “believe” works or trying to pitch you a specific tool. Instead, we’ll give you a detailed, unbiased review of Nightwatch, so you can make an informed decision and determine whether the tool meets the needs of your business.
About Nightwatch
Nightwatch is an SEO tracker designed to help you monitor, assess, and improve the performance of your SEO campaigns.
At its core, the tool is a keyword rank tracker, but it does offer other valuable features like backlink monitoring and website audit.
The search data Nightwatch gathers can be segmented, and it’s presented through lists and color-coded graphs and charts. This means that, while the tool presents a wealth of information regarding your SEO, you won’t ever feel overwhelmed.
The tool’s filtering functionality allows you to create dynamic keyword lists, allowing you to see which keywords meet specific criteria. You can filter the lists by position, language, location, search volume, etc. Although a relatively simple function, the dynamic filters are an excellent way to sort the data and are especially useful for people doing SEO for a number of different clients.
Put simply, Nightwatch enables you to manage high volumes of keywords efficiently and adjust the displayed data to suit your SEO needs.
Nightwatch offers a free trial option, so you can check the tool out without any commitment. Simply click the “Start Free Trial” button from the tool’s homepage and enter your email address and password.
Nightwatch Free Trial
The free trial signup is a two-step process. After entering your email address and password, the tool will ask you to input information regarding your company size, but it doesn’t pry any further.
Once you create your account and confirm your email address, the tool will prompt you to add a website and start tracking.
What we recommend doing instead is checking out their video tutorials. You can access them from the top-right corner of the dashboard. There are 19 short videos in total that will introduce you to the tool and explain how its features work.
Nightwatch Video Tutorials
Going through all of them takes about 20 minutes, so we definitely recommend checking them out and familiarizing yourself with the tool before you create your first campaign in Nightwatch.
One thing to keep in mind that there are some limitations to the free trial account:
- You can track up to 100 keywords
- You can check up to 20 URLs
- Backlink monitoring and site audit are disabled
To access some of the advanced features Nightwatch offers, you will need to upgrade to the Business Account.
Nightwatch offers three different account types:
- Personal
- Business
- Agency
Personal accounts increase the number of keywords you can track and backlinks you can monitor, but you’ll still be locked out of site audits and data integration and will be able to generate a limited number of reports.
With a Business account, you’ll have access to all of Nightwatch’s features. The trouble is, you can still track only 1,000 keywords at $99/month.
Nightwatch Pricing
If you opt for the annual plan, you’ll save 20%, but even then, Nightwatch is a bit pricier than its competitors.
We need to take a closer look at Nightwatch’s features to see if the tool’s functionality justifies the price. Before we do, here’s a quick overview of Nightwatch:
|
Nightwatch Overview |
|
| Monthly cost | From $19/month to $699/month |
| Number of keywords | From 100 to 10,000 depending on the plan |
| Search frequency | 30 |
| Actual searches per month | 3,000 – 300,000 |
| Cost per keywords/monthly | $0.0033 |
| Year funded | 2016 |
| Number of employees | 10 – 20 |
| Capterra reviews | 4.9/5 stars |
| g2 reviews | 4.8/5 stars |
| Facebook followers | 3,097 |
| Twitter followers | 1,919 |
The overabundance of positive reviews hints at the fact that Nightwatch is a truly amazing rank tracker. Let’s see exactly what this tool can do.
Nightwatch Features
Nightwatch is more than just a rank tracker. It’s a robust SEO tool that helps you improve the efficiency of your SEO campaigns on all fronts.
The key features Nightwatch provides are:
- Search engine, location, and device support
- Check frequency
- Backlink monitoring
- Reporting
- Site Audit
- Competitor tracking
- White-labeling
Search Engine, Location, and Device Support
Every decent rank tracker should allow you to check your rankings on multiple search engines, not just Google. Apart from the world’s #1 search engine, Nightwatch also supports Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and YouTube.
While the tool does not cater to the Chinese and Russian markets (no support for Baidu or Yandex), it’s great that it provides the ability to track your rankings for YouTube searches. Many businesses rely on videos, so having a comprehensive overview of how your YouTube channel is doing and where your videos show up in YouTube search is definitely a plus.
When it comes to location support, Nightwatch allows you to select the country and language you want to see results for. You can also narrow down your search to show only the results for a specific city, region, or district, which is a must-have option for local businesses that target a specific geographic market.
Nightwatch Campaign Creation
Nightwatch also lets you choose whether you want to track keywords for desktop, mobile, or both. Keep in mind that, if you select both desktop and mobile, the tool counts this as two keywords towards your total keyword limit.
Check Frequency
Unfortunately, there is no option to adjust the check frequency in Nightwatch, and you can’t refresh the keywords manually. The tool will update the rankings of your tracked keywords daily.
As far as backlinks go, Nightwatch will check for new backlinks and add them to the list once every three days.
Backlink Monitoring
Nightwatch provides a backlink monitoring tool that allows you to track your backlinks with ease and get an overview of the strength of your backlink profile in seconds.
The tool’s backlink dashboard shows you the number of backlinks, what pages they’re linking to, and each backlink’s status and quality.
Nightwatch Backlink Monitoring
Image credit: Nightwatch
The backlink monitoring feature also includes automatic notifications. Whenever a new backlink is discovered, or an existing backlink is lost, the tool will let you know. Nightwatch relies on its crawlers and multiple external tracking sources to ensure the backlink data it shows is accurate and up-to-date.
Reporting
The reporting feature of Nightwatch is excellent.
The tool allows you to generate three types of reports:
- Basic report — a comprehensive overview of the keywords you’re tracking
- Progress report — a report that focuses on changes in your rankings
- Competitor report — a report that compares your site’s performance against your competitors
There are literally hundreds of options to choose from when it comes to how you want the data in the report to be presented. You can choose to have the columns show anything from current rank, change, and search volume to daily clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR), and the average cost per click (CPC).
Nightwatch Reports
The reports can be exported as PDF, CSV, or HTML files, and you can schedule them and even add your own logo (the white-labeling option is available in Business and Agency plans).
Site Audit
The Nightwatch Site Audit is an excellent way to get insights regarding your website’s health and overall SEO performance. Nightwatch displays the site’s health as a percentage on a scale from 0 to 100 — the closer you are to 100%, the better.
As with all other features of the tool, you can select from a variety of filters to have Nightwatch display the data you’re most interested in. You can also navigate to the “Audit Checks” menu, which shows you exactly which problems your website is facing.
Nightwatch Audit Checks
Click on any of the SEO issues, and the tool will list out all the pages that share the problem. You can also choose a specific SEO issue from the drop-down menu to see all the pages that meet certain criteria (e.g., Response Code >= 400 to see all pages that show error 404).
This is a great way for experienced SEOs to assess the overall performance of theirs or their clients’ sites, but the tool doesn’t provide suggestions on how to fix the problems.
This is another example of the fact that Nightwatch doesn’t exactly cater to people with limited or no previous SEO experience.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend checking out some of the Nightwatch alternatives.
Competitor Tracking
When you first go to create the campaign, one of the steps will feature a form that requires you to add competitors you wish to check your rankings against.
The tool discovers a few competitors automatically, but you can also remove them and add new competitors manually if you want.
Nightwatch Competitors
You can always add or remove competitors later down the line by navigating to Settings and choosing the Competitors option.
When you add the competitors, Nightwatch will check immediately how each of them ranks for the keywords you’re tracking and provide you with a graph that shows the data regarding the average position of each website.
Nightwatch Competitor Graph
You can also add new “Dimensions” to the graph to see even more information.
Some of the dimensions you can add are:
- Search visibility index
- Click potential
- Total keywords
- Keyword distribution
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Domain authority
- URL rating
This feature offers much more than simple competitor tracking. It can provide you with valuable insights regarding your own site and show you the effectiveness of your SEO efforts across a variety of different parameters.
If you want to explore some alternatives, you can check them all here
| Review Link | Monthly from price | G2/Capterra Reviews | Keywords |
| SERPRobot | $4.99 | / | 300 – 3,000 |
| Wincher | $11.32 | 4.9 | 100 – 5,000 |
| Serpfox | $10 | / | 100 – 60,000 |
| RankWatch | $29 | 4.3 | 250 – 1,000,000 |
| SerpBook | $24 | / | 100 – 1,500 |
| Dragon Metrics | $99 | 4.5 | 1,000 – 10,000 |
| Tiny Ranker | $19 | / | 100 – 2,000 |
| Nightwatch | $19 | 4.8 | 100 – 10,000 |
| White Spark | $86 | 4.6 | 100 – 2,500 |
| SerpWatcher | $29.90 | 4.4 | 100 – 1,200 |
| Rankedy | $29 | 4.3 | 100 – 1,000 |
How We Automate Keyword Research Before Using Nightwatch
Nightwatch is, without a doubt, an excellent SEO tool.
That said, the insights Nightwatch can provide are only valuable once you know exactly what keywords to track. In order to figure that out, you first need to perform high-quality keyword research.
The problem is, the way most people do keyword research is fundamentally flawed.
- Doing high-quality keyword research requires skill and experience
- Researching keywords manually can take weeks, if not months
- Most people base their keyword research on intuition, yet nobody is using data to make keyword decisions
- It’s virtually impossible to delegate expert-level keyword research to junior SEOs
- Deliverables are inconsistent from one person to another
The approach we advocate relies on raw data to ensure that your keyword research is perfect every time.
Here’s why keyword research with ClusterAi is superior to manual keyword research:
- ClusterAi pulls data directly from Google, turning keyword research from a guessing game into an exact science
- It eliminates the potential for human error from the process and automates weeks-worth of work, saving you a ton of valuable time
- ClusterAi does all the heavy lifting, meaning anyone can do high-quality keyword research, even if they have no prior SEO experience
- The tool clusters keywords together to creates unique content topics, showing you exactly which keywords you can rank for with a single page
How to Do Perfect Keyword Research Every Time
We understand that “perfect keyword research without any SEO experience” sounds almost too good to be true. That’s why we’ll give you a real-world example to show you exactly how ClusterAi makes this possible.
Say we wanted to start an affiliate website in the pet niche that focuses on different dog breeds and dog food.
- To get started, we’ll fire up the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and search for the term “dog”
- Then, we’ll select the “Having same terms” feature
Ahrefs will return over ten million different queries that contain the word “dog.”
To narrow this down and focus on a more specific topic, we’ll include the term “food.”
Now, the tool will provide us with a list of 455,000 variations.
We can go ahead and export the 25,000 keyword variations with the highest search volume.
Then, we’ll just import that list into ClusterAi and let the tool work its “magic.”
- ClusterAi scrapes the top ten results on Google for every keyword on the list
- It compares all 25,000 keywords against each other
- ClusterAi then looks for keywords that share three or more URLs
- It groups the ones that meet the criteria into unique content topics, based on the main keyword and its variations
Within minutes, the tool puts together a list of over 1,000 unique content topics.
The data is shown by:
- Main keyword
- Total search volume across all variations in a group
- The variations that can rank with the main keyword
You can click any cell to expand it and see the full list of variations.
That’s weeks-worth of keyword research that you can do in an instant. And since it’s all based on data pulled directly from Google, it’s perfect every time.
The process is completely automated, meaning anyone can do high-quality keyword research in minutes, even if they have absolutely no SEO experience.
Did You Find This Nightwatch Review on the First Page of Google?
With ClusterAi, we managed to rank on the first page of Google for over 100,000 different keywords, across our projects. And we did it without building backlinks or doing any complicated technical SEO.
DoNotPay (B2C SaaS)
If you want to learn how you can crush SEO and do perfect keyword research every single time, check out our free guides below:
-
- How Google Actually works
- How to leverage Brand Jacking to “steal” your competitors’ traffic
- SEO ROI Calculator
- How we crush B2B SaaS SEO
- How we dominate B2C SaaS SEO
- Where to find and how to hire affordable, high-quality writers
- How to get the fastest SEO results
- How to turn your writers into expert SEO content writers
- How to consistently rank high without backlinks
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