How Heatmaps Can Help With Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Have you seen someone tracking an animal using infrared goggles before?

What if I told you that you could do the same with your website?

Whether you’re in the woods or a digital jungle, everything leaves a trace. When you follow a digital trail with heatmaps, you get invaluable insights into your customers.

Do you want to know that kind of information for yourself? Keep reading and prepare to take notes.

What Do You Learn from Heatmaps?

Following user activity sounds useful, but where’s the proof? You won’t believe the benefits, and you’ll inspire yourself to use heatmap software in creative ways for your company.

User Intent

Do you know what content visitors to your website want? Do you know what sections they scroll past without reading? When do your customers bounce away from your site?

Visual analytics like heatmaps give you the chance to learn about these behaviors. You also have insight into what part of each page gets the most attention. Every data point informs how you want to organize your PPC campaigns, blog posts, and landing pages.

If you can stand any more good news, heatmap data can be the secret weapon you need to discover keyword opportunities you didn’t see before.

Bounce rates from Google Analytics only give you so much information. Unless you can track where your site has heat, your online sales will go cold.

Discover the Why Behind the Metrics

Have you ever felt dumbfounded by your website data? For example, why won’t customers click that “Add to Cart” button?

Analytics give you quantitative data, but it doesn’t tell you why your reports look the way they do.

Imagine that a heatmap shows you more activity around the bottom of your page. If you notice this trend, you’re making customers scroll too far to find the information they want.

Imagine that you have heavy activity for one button that doesn’t convert to sales. When you track the heat, you’ll find the fire.

Find the Best Length for Content

Are you tired of getting confusing advice about your blog content?

How many times have you heard that 1,000-word posts give the best results?

The way digital marketing trends, that may not be the case next month. Whatever changes may come, Google and other companies have data that proves your content matters more than the length.

Ask these key questions to determine how users interact with your content:

• Do your readers scan the information and leave?
• Do your readers find your content valuable?
• Does your content match the search results from your visitors?
• Do you answer a big question at the top of the page?

If you’re honest about the answers, you can’t help but improve your website.

Improve Your Page Layout

Do you remember the last time you got lost surfing a website?

How did you find your way to the information you wanted? You used common sense based on previous experiences and navigated yourself through the confusion.

Don’t make visitors to your website do the same. Younger users may be savvy, but they don’t like inconveniences any more than the gray hairs.

You can study your page layout in hundreds of different ways with heatmap software. Most users gain information about:

• How customers navigate their site
• Where visitors run into problems
• How people treat CTA buttons.

Combine with On-Page Surveys

Have you heard of a one-two punch? Boxers use the term to refer to a left-handed jab followed by a right cross. If you land both punches, your opponent will struggle to keep their bearings.

Heatmaps with on-page surveys are your digital one-two punch. Ask your customers to visit specific pages and gather their feedback afterward. Those questions should center around two basic principles:

• How would they describe their experience?
• What would they change or add to your site?

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Choose a known-issue with your site and deal with one problem at a time. You don’t want to use heatmaps to put yourself into a state of analysis paralysis.

Discover Confusing Parts of Your Website

Do you remember the last time that you clicked on a link that didn’t work?

Despite your best efforts, your visitors may experience the same frustration. Heatmaps give you the upper hand because you have data that tells you which parts customers found confusing or frustrating.

Compare your website to your emails. You check your grammar and spelling before pressing send, right? How do you feel when someone doesn’t do that in a message they send to you?

When your website doesn’t work, you might as well put a giant spelling error in your header. Heatmaps give you the room you need to make improvements.

Improve Your Internal Link Strategy

Do you want a quick boost to your SEO ranking? Then you need to up your internal link game starting today.

Google cannot read your site without internal links. Heatmaps tell you which links get clicked.

Other proven benefits include:

• Improving how pages connect will give you a jump in rankings
• Creating a hierarchy where the most important pages have the most value
• Building trust and authority with customers

Improve Your External Link Strategy

Have you tried a finger trap before? The harder you try to pull away, the tighter the paper wraps around your digits. With heatmap software, you won’t have the temptation to hold onto your traffic too tight.

You’re not driving traffic away from your site. People don’t believe it when you say it, so it’s worth saying again:

You’re not driving traffic away from your site when you use external links.

Look at external links as an opportunity to increase your credibility with your customers. If you link to Billy Bob’s Super Duper Website, your visitors will punish you for it.

Kidding aside, you won’t know which links help or hinder your goals unless you use a heatmap.

What Should You Do Now?

You wouldn’t trust only one source for anything, would you? Follow the links in this article to great resources about heatmaps. Enjoy diving into a rabbit hole that will drive better results for your website.

Did you find this post helpful? Check out the rest of the articles on the site for more marketing and business advice.