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Heatmap Guide For Beginners: Boost UX and SEO with Click Tracking

Being humans, we love any sort of visual stimuli and respond to it compared to other stimuli. It is quite true in digital marketing; you need to figure out why the target audience does not convert or engage with your website. Website heat maps are scanned data with visual diagrams that help businesses and digital marketers pinpoint several parameters that affect their digital marketing efforts. 

In this blog, you will learn how to improve SEO with heatmaps and fundamentally what is a heatmap. A heatmap portrays tons of website data in a visual format with a colour code that might represent such as areas that garner the highest attention, number of scrolls, or number of clicks in a specified area of the page. For years, heatmaps have been used in digital marketing by SEO agencies and digital marketers. 

Beginners guide to Heatmap

What is a heatmap and how does a heatmap work?

Heatmaps in SEO: What are they? Heatmaps are visual representations of several kinds of website data. They have become popular because of their quick reading of information retrieval. It is fundamental to get a detailed overview of the quality and statistics of traffic and how they interact with your website. Different kinds of website heatmaps are available, such as scroll heat maps, click heat maps, mouse movement heatmaps, rage heat maps and so on. 

Website heatmaps

Heatmaps in SEO work using colours; different colours and their shades represent the intensity of data. Warm colours such as orange, yellow and red indicate increased interactions by the target audience, while cool colour scale with colours such as green, blue and grey indicate slackened interaction. So you have an idea of how heatmaps works. 

Different heatmap types explained

Scroll Maps

Scroll maps are one of the most sought-after heatmap types used by digital marketers. They reveal portions of the website that are scrolled the most. It uses a colour code scale to inform you where the target audience scrolls and where they lose interest in a page, and how you can improve user experience. 

Click Maps

A click map indicates a portion of a website that is clicked. Just like scroll maps, it also uses a colour-coded scale to show you where your target persona clicks most of the time. It is the basic heatmap that is effective in visualising the target audience’s actions. High-frequency clicks are accompanied by an adequate amount of data.

Movement Maps

A mouse movement map is a heatmap that points out where your target audience goes with their cursor while visiting the website. This shows which parts of the website they look at most.

Rage Click Maps

As the name suggests, the rage of the target persona regarding your website is highlighted in this heatmap. This heatmap shows search behaviour analysis of users who experience irritation or friction when visiting your website.

Engagement Zone Maps

You get a visual representation of scanned data regarding all sorts of engagement on your website from an engagement zone map. With this type of heatmap, you can do visual analytics SEO easily and make changes accordingly. 

Device-specific heatmaps

Here, heatmap tools are used to understand how the target audience behaves on your website across different gadgets such as desktops, mobile phones and tablets. Digital marketers are interested in insights to provide an ultimate user experience on different portable platforms. 

 Hotjar heatmaps are counted as one of the top SEO heatmap tools. 

Why Heatmaps Matter for SEO

As we have seen, heatmaps help businesses and digital marketers to determine how well-received your website is among the target audience and, based on insights, how you can elevate user experience. Heatmap SEO strategy helps you find out how search engine optimisation efforts can be accentuated. Each engagement and subtle actions of any kind are tracked and analysed in a heatmap, so that you need not contemplate what users actually engage with vs what you think they do.

Reduced bounce rate

Reduced bounce rate occurs if you effectively rely on data scanned in the heatmap. A heatmap can provide a comprehensive overview of user behaviour, highlighting areas of low and high engagement. Besides, if you are into how to reduce bounce rate, it shows potential usability issues, too.

Improve call-to-action conversion rates

A heatmap provides insights about why a target audience does not respond to your call to action and how you can improve CTA conversion rates. Heatmap in digital marketing help you create better CTAs.

Help you understand user intent

Understanding search intent is one way to create stellar content and multimedia on a website. A heatmap provides insight into search intent, why certain parts of content matter and why some do not work anymore and so on.

Best SEO Heatmap Tools to Try

Understanding engagement with the help of a heatmap can be easily executed with the help of prominent SEO heatmap tools:

Hotjar

With the help of Hotjar, you will get a timely understanding of what your end-users do on your website. It’s a free heatmap tool that you can blindly use.

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity heatmaps are created instantly with the given information, and you can easily find what parts of the website need a rewrite.

Crazy Egg

Just like any top heatmap tool, CrazyEgg’s heatmap also outlines and pinpoints every action of the target persona.

Mouseflow

Visualisation of website data with the help of Mouseflow heatmap can be conducted within a matter of time, as there is no manual setup needed.

Smartlook

Smartlook heatmap is a versatile tool that helps you get an aggregate of information about your website in a single image. 

Review page-specific performance

Every website needs some kind of visual analytics SEO using heatmaps because there are a number of pages that need specific attention, such as the home page, landing page and insight page. 

User behaviour tracking for SEO

With a colour code scale, you get a detailed understanding of user behaviour so that you can align content creation and website structure as per trends identified.  Interaction and non-interaction can be ascertained with a heatmap. 

Support for SEO content optimisation

If you are someone who thinks of how to improve SEO with heatmaps, you can rest assured that SEO content optimisation can be covered with this tool. Engagement ratio, scroll depth, eye tracking, rage patterns, and click patterns altogether provide a complete picture of how well your content works for the target audience. Such multidimensional visual data helps you craft the best-performing content marketing campaigns. 

SEO use cases: How to use Heatmaps on your website

Landing pages

Heatmaps in SEO are useful in landing pages. They show visually where visitors click, scroll, and move their mouse on a page. They use colours to indicate areas of high and low user engagement, helping identify what attracts attention and what is ignored. This data helps marketers optimise landing pages for conversions and improve user experience. 

High-traffic blog posts

Heatmaps in SEO blog posts are quite helpful visual tools that display where users click, scroll, and engage on a page. They help understand user behaviour and optimize the blog’s design and content. By highlighting areas of high and low engagement with colour, heatmaps reveal which sections of a blog post are most engaging. 

Product or service pages

Heatmaps in SEO visualise user behaviour on product or service pages by using colour gradients to show which areas of the page receive the most attention, helping to identify areas for improvement. They effectively highlight where users are clicking, scrolling, and moving their mouse, revealing patterns and trends that can inform the design of service pages.

CTAS and form optimisation

Heatmap types of all kinds help you visualise user behaviour on a website, revealing where users click, scroll, and linger. This data can be used to optimise CTAS by identifying areas where they are poorly placed or not compelling, and to improve form optimization by pinpointing areas where users drop off or experience hesitation. 

Cross-device testing (mobile vs desktop)

Heatmap types can be invaluable for comparing user behaviour on mobile and desktop devices, offering insights into how users interact differently on each platform. By analysing click, scroll, and movement patterns, developers can understand how different screen sizes and input methods impact user experience.

Tips on how to improve SEO with heatmaps

Adhering to these tips helps you figure out better how heatmap works wonders for your business. 

  • Don’t overwhelm with too many tools – After careful market research, stick to one heatmap tool to get the desired results.
  • Always test one change at a time – The pile of information you get from heatmaps cannot be executed all at once, so it’s best to always test one change at a time.
  • Focus on high-traffic pages first – High-traffic pages have lots of quality traffic, and you can use insights from heatmaps on these pages to amass the benefits.
  • Use heatmaps regularly for ongoing improvements – Be consistent with the use of heatmaps to get ongoing results.

So you have an idea on how to improve SEO with heatmaps, and what is heatmap in SEO. Now is the time to build a heatmap SEO strategy to accentuate your SEO efforts. You can try using a free tool like Hotjar and later upgrade to paid tools to see what works for your business. Even a small change makes a big difference in SERP results. 

Omkar Khatale Jangam

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