Simple ways to improve your company’s SEO with a heat map
Find out why your website’s performance is so important for SEO, and how you can improve it with a heat map.
Did you know your website has only 50 milliseconds to impress a user? Blink, and you lose them. Such high stakes coupled with the cutthroat landscape that is online commerce create a hunger for continual differentiation to get good traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tool of choice for many digital entrepreneurs to beat the competition.
However, if everyone is using SEO, you need to dig deeper into your bag of tricks, and that’s where a heat map comes in. A website heat map helps add value to your SEO, which drives up your results.
Keep reading for a deeper look at four foundational ways heat maps can help sharpen your SEO strategy.
1) Work out how long your content should be
As a rule of thumb, SEO that delivers sits on high-quality content. Short-circuiting that strategy is essentially putting lipstick on a pig. Thus, before pulling the trigger, you first need to settle on the content to draw your target user.
Generally, SEO experts agree that the longer your content, the higher the odds of you ranking better. However, that does not mean publishing longer content is your golden ticket to page one status.
The quality of that content still rules the day. You can have 2,000 words that don’t speak to the user’s intent, making for poor ranking. The length and quality have to go together.
To this end, heat maps can be your best friend in helping you discern what your target audience’s needs are. A scroll map can give you the capacity to detect how far users get down your page.
For example, say you have a web page featuring 3,000 words, and the scroll map shows that buyers tend to drop off at the 2,000-word mark. The implication here is that your content is too long.
With that insight, you can invest in shaping your content to the ideal length so users can find the highest value from it. You’ll be able to identify if users are leaving your site because they found what they are looking for or because they are dissatisfied.
Additionally, you’ll also better understand what your competitors are doing on pages similar to yours to know what changes you can make to differentiate your content and serve users.
And the beauty of it is that you can keep using scroll mapping to continually adjust to your users’ content length and remain relevant.
2) Strengthen your linking strategy
Inbound links receive a lot of attention on SEO, and rightly so. These are the links that arguably offer the highest impact on your visibility and ranking. With that said, internal links are just as crucial, and you need to leverage them as well.
Internal links enable search engines to better understand your content. The text you use to link various sections of your site offers more context on what your material is about, which can potentially signal value to the search engine.
Aside from that, internal links also help you set the hierarchy of your content so your most critical pages can get prime-time exposure.
Using a click map, you can accurately pinpoint the areas where users click on the most on your site. Essentially, a click map will visualize a pattern laying out user attention and interest.
From there, adjusting your linking strategy is feasible. For example, you can use that feedback to optimize your link points expertly. You can also learn how to leverage links to draw users to other parts of your website, growing your overall traffic throughput.
3) Align your website to the customer journey
A well-done website should direct users to portions of the content that resonate with their customer journey stage (go here for more information about customer journey). If you execute excellently here, you get to retain users and drive up your ranking.
A click map can help you assess the relevance of your strategy in ushering users to other parts of the site that can serve their needs. If the links direct users to content that is irrelevant, you risk losing them.
To assess how direct the customer journey with each click, you need to determine how long users stay on the new page after clicking through. A higher bounce rate will signal the need to redirect the user to more relevant material.
Furthermore, how far users scroll down the new page the link directs them to will say a lot about whether you grasp their customer journey. A scroll map will accurately help you to gauge how far users scroll to determine whether you need to redirect them elsewhere.
4) Eliminate friction in the user experience
An exemplary aisles process should be flawless if it’s to end up converting prospects to clients. Any friction along the way is akin to erecting severe bumps along a freeway—it’s jarring and unpleasant
When it comes to eliminating unnecessary steps in the user flow on your suite, you have to identify clickable items that don’t add value. If there’s one thing users hate, it’s clicking on items or links on a website that don’t aid them to get to their destination.
A click map helps you pick out areas users are clicking on your site as they expect to find a link. You can remedy any such areas that seem not to be helpful so users can intuitively find what they are looking for.
Another essential way heat maps can help you reduce friction is by showing you where users hover on a page. Unusual places users hiver at will guide you on alterations you’ll need to make in your user journey to enhance conversion.
Level up your SEO with the right heat map
SEO is a phenomenal tool, but as everyone pushes its boundaries, you have to add value to it. A heat map is a vital tool that can help chisel the outcome of your SEO strategy, so you can serve users more effectively.
Understand the various heat maps and how they work for you to best dovetail their intrinsic nature with your SEO needs.
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