SEO is a major concern for a lot of businesses. And many of the ranking or analytics tools out there are difficult to make sense of if you’re not experienced in the field. But Nightwatch offers a tool that is meant to be flexible and intuitive. And the company behind it has an interesting backstory and team tradition as well. Read more about the company in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.
What the Business Does
Provides an SEO tool.
Founder Aljaz Fajmut told Small Business Trends, “Nightwatch is an all-in-one intelligent SEO performance tracker for forward-thinking companies and agencies focused on scaling.”
Business Niche
Offering an intuitive design.
Fajmut says, “Our users love us because of the thoughtful way our tool is designed and because of its flexibility. With Nightwatch’s exceptional design and abilities to segment and visualize data, our users can easily analyze, dig deeper into their SEO performance data, and gain important insights — like with no other tool.”
How the Business Got Started
To help with affiliate marketing sites.
Fajmut explains, “I was involved with affiliate marketing for a long time, and back in the time there was no reliable tool for tracking rankings. Being a developer myself, I decided to code a prototype that would report the rankings of my affiliate sites, and this was the birth of our first tool RankTrackr.”
Biggest Win
Improving their own SEO.
Fajmut says, “I would say the biggest win was becoming the top 3 results by keywords “rank tracker” and “rank tracking” years ago, which enabled us to start acquiring first users. This was also the time of realization that we should scale the company.”
Biggest Risk
Investing in a new partnership.
Fajmut adds, “It proved to be a pretty bad decision; we spent a lot of time and energy on the development and planning the partnership, but in the end, nothing worked out.”
Lesson Learned
Focus more on marketing.
Fajmut explains, “For quite some time we were investing all our energies into product development, and maybe only 10% of that into marketing and spreading the message.”
How They’d Spend an Extra $100,000
Growing the team.
Fajmut says, “For hiring additional A-players in the team and rewarding other members of the team to perform even better.”
Team Tradition
Annual retreats for the remote team.
Fajmut says, “Once a year we try to gather somewhere abroad, and the last time we went to Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks and while the stories are classified, we can just tell you that it was a blast!”
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Images: Nightwatch; Third Image: Fajmut and the development team in the Dominican Republic