Heatmap software is a vital tool that aids marketers in comprehending how users are interacting with a website. These visualize data to give you an idea of where your users are clicking, scrolling and hovering over in your web pages. So, you get to know what kinds of content draw your audience’s attention the most, where they are facing issues with navigation, and more.
Marketers and businesses can derive insights from this information and put these to meaningful use. This can help improve their site’s SEO. This blog tells you how this can be done. We have discussed this under several heads, including what are heatmaps, how these can be utilized to improve SEO, and what software can help you in this regard.
So, what are heatmaps?
Heatmaps are analytical tools that give you a visual presentation of user interaction trends in your website to help you comprehend what to do next. These are capable of displaying complex statistical data simply on the web page itself using warm-to-cool color spectrums.
The warmer colors depict the areas receiving the most attention while the cooler ones represent the least attention receiving regions. Thus, heatmaps simplify data analytics visualization and allow more effective web activity tracking.
Heatmap software has different kinds of tracking tools for tracking user interaction in different aspects. These tools include a scroll map, a click map, and a hover map.
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Scroll Map: Scroll maps give you a visualization of the length of each page that most users scroll down to. These help you decide the ideal length of your page. Based on these, you can determine whether your readers prefer short descriptions or in-depth and detailed ones.
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Click Map: Click maps tell you the regions of a page where users click the most. It lets you know which links and buttons are clicked the most. You can use this to know what kind of CTA attracts and what doesn’t for your business.
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Hover Map: Hover maps are also known as mouse movement maps. These display the mouse movement of your users. You can find which areas have more movements and which have fewer.
Now that you have got a basic idea of what a heatmap is, let’s move on to know how to enhance your site’s SEO.
How can you utilize heatmap software to improve SEO?
Heatmaps help you understand how users interact with your site. Based on this comprehension, you can formulate strategies and improve aspects of your site to make your users stay and gradually convert them into loyal customers.
1. Learn more about user intent
Heatmaps help you learn more about your visitor behavior. You get to know what they are looking for in your site, which content attracts them the most, which buttons and links they click on the most, which content they scroll over without reading, which point they exit your site, and more.
Thus, you can put the data collected to meaningful use by designing and developing your future blog posts and landing pages according to these. And this, in turn, will boost your SEO. You can also direct your PPC campaigns as per these.
2. Determine the ideal content length
The ideal length of content differs for different sites. It may be simple 250 words descriptions for one business, 2000 words of in-depth, informative content for another, and somewhere in between for yet another.
Scroll maps help you know what length suits your brand the best. They tell you where on the page your audience is bouncing. This will allow you to know whether your audience prefers concise, moderately long, or super-long content.
3. Optimize page structure
When it comes to structuring web pages, oftentimes, you tend to be limited by standard things such as heading, subheadings (H2, H3), and white space. Many other aspects are contributing towards developing a great user experience.
By analyzing your site’s heatmaps, you can know how users interact with your on-page elements like navigation, CTA buttons, links, etc. You also identify the friction-causing elements. This will help you optimize your page layout.
4. Improve internal linking
SEO encompasses your site’s internal and external linking. Heatmaps can provide you with a wealth of valuable info on internal linking. Make sure that your links add value to the visitor in a non-interruptive manner. Helpfully incorporate them to avoid looking spammy. They should connect your entire site in a useful way.
When done properly, your internal linking will aid visitors to navigate through your site seamlessly and get closer to the buying process. Such effective internal linking helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently and index new pages.
5. Improve image positioning
Visuals like images, videos, GIFs, etc., are vital to your online success. Having responsive images on almost every page you visit can attract more visitors to your site and increase their on-page time. This makes search engines too to be fond of images.
However, you need to get to know things like the best positioning of images, the ideal number of those in a post, whether the image needs a caption, and the styles preferred to optimize image positioning on your site. You can use heatmaps to find more about these.
6. Improve your CTAs
Your Call-To-Action buttons are one of the most vital factors in driving conversions. However, the effective CTA for a brand may not always be similar to that of another. Though the standard colour that works for links is blue and for buttons is red, it may be different for your brand and audience.
Likewise, the positioning of the button above the fold works for most brands. Use heat mapping to know what works when it comes to the copy, phrasing, colour, size, and placement of your CTA button.
7. Enhance external linking
Often site owners tend to believe that external or outbound linking within their content can drive away users. It is not; it is good for SEO. For, when you reference reputed sources, search engines and readers feel that you care enough to provide valuable info- irrespective of its source. You must link to credible sources and not spammy ones.
You can use heatmaps to know which links your users’ click-through the most. These will be what they find credible/interesting. And when you see your scroll maps showing a particular place where users have dropped off, those are the links that people perceive as incredible/spammy links. So, use the credible ones and eliminate the spammy ones.
8. Boost related post engagement
Upon completing reading a blog, your reader has two options: leave your site, or read another blog. You can make your users spend more time on your site by manually adding links to related content at the end of every blog post. You can also include links to direct users towards conversion. That is, towards buying a particular product or signing up for an e-book discussed by the post.
However, it can be exhausting to manually do this. So, just install a plugin that can do the related posts suggestion work. After this, analyze related post engagement using heatmaps to know whether readers are clicking on your suggestions, which posts are the best performing ones, and what can be done to optimize user engagement. Use this info to boost related post engagement.
9. Optimize keyword usage
Keywords are important for SEO. They help search engines rank your site and users discover the content. However, overusing keywords can interrupt the flow of the article and impart a slight spammy feel even though a human writer has written it. Further, keyword stuffing is a bad idea.
So, you need to know the optimum number of keywords you should use in your blogs. Here is where scroll maps come into use. Find the exact point where your readers are dropping off while reading a blog post. This must be the highest number of keywords they would tolerate in a post. Optimize your future blog posts accordingly.
10. Identify friction causing elements
You can also analyze your heatmaps to know those specifics of elements and areas on your site where users are facing difficulty using. Sometimes, users may expect to click through some spots on your site. If these links or spots aren’t clickable, it can be disappointing and annoying to them. By viewing your click maps, you can find these. Now just add links in these areas to meet your audience’s expectations.
Likewise, you can also find other friction-causing elements with your heatmaps. Look at your hover maps to identify these regions. You can spot these when you find yourself hovering at weird places for a long time or many drop-offs at a place. These can be images that appear like buttons, poor checkout experience, or complicated copies. Note down all these areas so that you can work on those to improve user experience and thereby increase conversions and lower bounce rates.
Which heatmap software can help you in this regard?
Heat Mapping tools help you visually analyze how your visitors interact with your site. NotifyVisitors heatmap software comes with tools for hover, click, and scroll mapping; and has real-time analytics, multiple domain usage, and real-time web page features. It also includes a user session replay feature that allows you to record and replay user sessions just like a movie clip.
Since you get to see live individual online visitor interactions, you get to identify where they are getting stuck on a webpage, where they are dropping off, where they are spending more time, etc. You can use this valuable information to enhance your user experience. The tool also lets you test your newly enhanced pages or features to know how visitors are reacting to the modification.
NotifyVisitors heatmap software has a tool for form analysis. It gives you meaningful info on how users are interacting with the forms on your site. You can analyze various metrics like left blanks, field interactions, drop-offs, submission attempts, interaction time, etc., to increase form submission rates.
You can easily configure the form analysis feature to your forms by just including the custom from name, giving the form’s URL, and selecting the field to be tracked.
Apart from these great features, NotifyVisitors heatmap software comes with features for easy integration with other applications, easy setup, and flexibility to view reports with easy navigation. The tool also provides heatmaps for different devices and generates individual reports for each of those.
The software lets you use a single code for all the sites associated with your business, provides an unlimited number of sub-users to include all your team members, keeps track of your analytics right from the start, is equipped to serve an enormous audience capacity, and provides conversion counting (successful form submissions).
Wrapping up
Heatmap software is a data visualization tool that helps businesses and marketers comprehend how users interact with their websites. These tell you where users are clicking, scrolling, and hovering over in your web pages. So, you get to know what kinds of content draw your audience’s attention the most, where they are facing issues with navigation, and more.
You can employ heatmap software to learn more about user intent, determine the ideal content length, optimize page structure, improve internal linking, improve image positioning, enhance your CTAs, enhance outbound linking, boost related post engagement, optimize keyword usage, and identify friction causing elements.
NotifyVisitors heatmap software is an ideal tool for heat mapping your website and the forms on it. It has features for real-time analytics, multiple domain usage, real-time webpages, user session replay, newly enhanced pages/features testing, and more. It is easy to set up, flexible, and easily integrates with other applications. It also provides heatmaps for different devices and generates individual reports for each of those.