You need to know what visitors are up to on your website. Heat maps are powerful tools that optimize your content and web design. A heat map refers to a color-coded representation of all your website visitors’ movements and clicks. You can see the visitor engagements and what they are searching for. This allows you to make a behavior analysis by monitoring their clicks and also where their mouse hovers. Here are a few ways you can use heat maps to improve your website’s design.

1. Determine the Content and Structure

Content is the crux of all SEO strategies. Without quality content, your website cannot achieve top ranking. One of the most significant factors of search engine optimization is content length. Digital marketers have for years insisted that longer content is the best, which is not necessarily true.

If your visitors read up to a thousand words and lose interest, that should give you a rough idea at how long your content should be. Run tests via a heat map and see if you need to do anything different.

2. Efficacy of CTA Buttons

The use of CTA (Call to action) buttons in the right place makes a lot of difference in user experience and conversions. For a better user experience, the CTA button should be strategically placed so that users do not have to wonder or look for it.

A heat map helps you identify if the CTA buttons have any traction and identify if visitors are clicking on-page elements, if the CTA is compelling, etc.

3. Navigation

If visitors to your site are struggling to find content, or your site’s navigation flow is frustrating, they will have a bad user experience and drop off with no conversion. Heat maps allow you to monitor and analyze your visitors’ navigation patterns, and you can create a navigational map that is appealing to your visitors. Heatmaps provide you with data for helping you to identify broken, missing or redundant links that affect navigation.

4. Text and Images

Text and images make up most of a website’s design. The logo could be made of text or images. The problem arises when the text or prints are not optimized in terms of placement and quality, affecting conversions.

Using heatmaps allows you to identify your website’s most visited section, and you can place crucial text or images there. A logo and text explaining your company mission statement would be a good idea. For an eye-catching logo, a professionally done job would work best. You can use a professional, or do it yourself by using a free logo maker online to make excellent logos. Get a content creator to write SEO friendly content for you to rank higher.

“A mouse tracking heatmap lets you follow the visitors’ cursors, and via click maps, you can identify the most clicked at areas. Eye-tracking heatmaps allow you to collect data on the visitors’ frequency and gaze length on particular sites. Discover what they look at most, for how long, which images they are attracted to, what text catches their attention, etc.” Source: Web Integrations

5. Page Layout

You may have an excellent service or product and have the best content for your website, but this does not automatically make your website the best. You may have well-written content, but inappropriate images that do not appeal to visitors. You may get everything else right, but the CTA is impossible to locate.

Heatmaps help you in placing critical information in the most visited website sections. The heatmaps enable you in designing the best layout for high conversion home, landing, product, checkout and other pages.

6. Test and Make Changes

When you look at your web site through your visitors’ eyes, you can improve their user experience, and improve conversion rates. Discover which elements get the least and most attention. Evaluate if you use color-contrasts to guide the visitors towards what you need them to focus on. If your CTA is hard to find, change it.

Conclusion

Website heatmaps give you a lot of useful information that is easy to understand. This data should let you identify any patterns that your visitors follow. With this data, you can make changes to your website, depending on the results. Your text or images could be the problem, it could be the content, or it could be all. The heatmaps’ data allows you to understand where you are going wrong and what you need to change to make the user experience better and to improve conversion rates.

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