What Are Web Heat Maps and How to Take Advantage of Them?

When you’re working towards improving your website to boost user experience, you need to take the guesswork out of your process and rely on actual data.

Heatmaps have become essential for businesses to understand how their visitors interact with their website content.

In this blog, we’ll understand what is a heatmap and how you can use it to improve the conversion rate for your website and landing pages with your current traffic.

What Is a Heat Map?

The first step towards improving your website performance is identifying critical areas on your website or landing page that aren’t performing well.

Sure, while there are several different factors you have to consider, one of the most crucial ones is user experience.

Here’s where heatmaps come into the picture.

Leveraging heatmaps and other user behavior analytics tools help you identify issues stopping your users from taking a particular action.

But what is a heat map?

Heatmaps are a visual analysis tool that helps you gain context into the data you obtain from traditional analytics. It enables you to get into the heads of your users and understand precisely what drives user behavior, and make changes to your website accordingly.

The best part about using heatmap analysis is that it isn’t rocket science!

It’s pretty straightforward to understand what the visuals on the screen are telling you.

It makes it easy to identify sections on your website where your users spend the most time.

Traditional data analytic tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can tell you what’s happening, and heatmaps can help you understand why.

Heatmaps allow you to restructure the content on your site according to user behavior and offer a much better user experience.

How Do Heat Maps Work?

Now that we’ve answered the question — what is a heatmap? — let’s understand how heatmaps work.

In simple terms, the more dense the activity around a particular area, the “hotter” the site is.

Heatmap works by monitoring and collecting the data from a web page via cursor and screen activity.

The simplest heatmap tools focus on the number of clicks that happen at a particular point. When the number of clicks on a specific area increases, the “hotter” the area becomes.

Types of Heatmaps

Map by clicks.

Click heatmap allows you to see sections where your users are clicking the most and where there isn’t any activity at all. Clickmaps also enable businesses to identify navigational gaps they may have on their website.

For example, if visitors are browsing through your website and clicking on non-clickable elements, you know they’re expecting to be redirected to another web page to find more information.

Map by movement.

The next type of heatmap is the move heatmap. Unlike the click heatmap, movemaps don’t work on tablets or mobile devices.

This is because the movement heatmap lets you see the sections on your site where your users are moving their cursor the most.

Most users tend to bring their cursor to the section they’re paying particular attention to. This could be because they find it extremely interesting and engaging, or they may be taking some time to understand what you’re trying to say because the messaging isn’t easy to understand or simply confusing.

Scroll map.

The last type of heatmap is the Scroll Heatmap. As you may have gathered from the name, a scroll heatmap is a visual representation of your visitors’ scrolling behavior.

It helps you understand how far down a web page your users typically go and how long they spend on a particular section.

With scroll heatmaps, you understand precisely where your users spend the most time on your page so that you can place the most critical content on these areas.

Benefits of Heatmaps

Optimize the structure of the page

More often than not, we simply leave the structure of our page to the web designer or developer to build something that looks beautiful and elegant.

We have the formatting of the page right with the correct spaces and headline tags. However, with heatmaps, you can understand how your users interact with different elements on your web page, like your CTA buttons and build a site focusing on a great user experience.

You can identify sections where your users experience the most friction and optimize your site to make the navigation smoother for them.

Check out this example.

Most of the user’s attention is focused on the baby’s face on this page.

In this second version, the baby faces the web copy, which redirects the user’s attention to the messaging and the offer.

Learn more about User Intent

Heatmaps help you gain a visual understanding of which parts of the copy do your users care about the most? What sections of your web page do your visitors pay attention to, and what parts do they simply scroll over?

And more importantly, at what point on your site do your users drop off?

You should also pay attention to the menus and categories your users click on — this will help you understand the topics your users care about.

This insight into your users’ minds will help you a great deal while you craft PPC campaigns, ad copy, and even social media posts.

Identify Best Content-Length

It’s always been drilled into our heads that Google loves longer blog posts. However, we’ve constantly noticed shorter blog posts outrank longer ones.

It’s not difficult to identify the reason for this — word count doesn’t equate to the quality of the content.

Therefore, instead of simply churning out blogs that simply take up a lot of space, work on delivering what your target audience is looking for.

With scroll heatmaps, you can understand where your users are dropping off while reading your blogs.

Maybe they drop off after getting the information they’re looking for, or perhaps they drop off early because they feel you’re not getting to the point fast enough?

While heatmaps may not give you all the answers, it’s an excellent place to start asking these questions.

How to Use the Data from Heatmaps?

According to Hotjar, there are five questions you should ask to make better use of your heatmap analysis.

1. Are people paying attention to the important content?

With heatmaps, you can ensure that your target audience is looking at the crucial sections of your website. This includes your call-to-actions (CTAs), contact form, product/service information, and so on.

You can use scroll maps to see how far down your users are scrolling. With this, you can identify the best sections where you can place critical information.

2. Are people clicking on the key elements on your web page?

With heatmaps, you can identify the exact spaces your users are clicking on and the volume of clicks for each element on your web page.

Let’s say you’ve included an introductory video above the fold — the section of the website you see on your screen before scrolling. Now, if out of the 700 people visiting your site, only six are clicking somewhere within the vicinity of the video to play it, you know you have a problem.

If you’re sharing crucial information within the video that you haven’t included as text throughout the web page, you know you have to do something about it.

Heatmaps allow you to identify situations like these and take appropriate actions to tackle them.

3. Are people being confused by non-clickable elements?

Heatmaps show you where most of your users are clicking and if they’re clicking on sections that aren’t really clickable.

Maybe you have logos displayed on your home page. Here, you may find that there is a hot section because your users are clicking on these logos expecting to be shown a testimonial or a case study.

You can take advantage of this knowledge, make some design changes on your site, and differentiate between your clickable and non-clickable elements.

4. Are people getting distracted?

Let’s understand this with an example. If your heatmap shows clicks distributed all over the page, it could mean that your visitors aren’t sure where to focus their attention.

However, if you have elements like “Buy now” or “Learn More,” your user activity is focused and makes your audience take the action you want them to take.

On the flip side, if you notice key elements that people aren’t focusing on, you should move them to sections you know they’re paying attention to.

5. Are people experiencing problems across different devices?

Most heatmap service providers like Hotjar allow users to gain insight into how users are interacting with their website on different devices like desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.

Maybe your users aren’t clicking as much on the primary CTA as they do when they access it via their desktop. This indicates that your copy is good, but the positioning of your CTA on mobile devices isn’t ideal.

Maybe they just don’t notice it, or the font is too small to be clickable.

Final Thoughts

Without heatmaps, you’ll get numbers about how many people visit your website and your conversion and bounce rates. However, you won’t have a clear understanding of what exactly these visitors are doing on your website.

Instead of making changes to your website based on intuition, you can leverage heatmaps to understand what you’re doing right and, more importantly, what you’ve to improve.

By understanding how visitors behave on your site, you can push up the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

• You can improve the structure and usability of your website.

• You can experiment with content length and find the optimal content length and style that works for you.

• You can also access user perception by implementing the insights you’ve gained from heatmaps and using A/B testing to optimize your site to its highest level.

It’s no surprise that heatmaps can have a significant impact on your SEO strategy.

If you’d like help building out the primary aspects of an SEO campaign (like Technical SEO) for your business, feel free to book a no-strings-attached discovery call with Teranga today!