How does one create an effective SEO strategy?
Determining user behavior and how they interact with your website is one of the best ways to boost your SEO strategy. At Forthea, we use a variety of tools to help our clients understand how users interact with their website, and what keeps them coming back.
Our favorite of these tools to use is Hotjar, which provides feedback through use of heatmaps and recordings to help determine which parts of a website can be improved and help users throughout their journey.
Here are 5 ways that Hotjar can help your SEO strategy:
1.Taking advantage of the different heatmaps
2. Recordings
3.Funnels
4.Forms
5.Incoming feedback
1. Taking advantage of the different Heatmaps
Hotjar’s heatmaps are one of the easiest ways to gain insights into user behavior.
Hotjar has 3 different types of heatmaps: Click, Move, and Scroll.
For a Click heatmap, when a user interacts with a webpage via a click, this is recorded as a colored dot and as more and more users click a link, button, etc., this dot grows in intensity and changes to a redder color.
This allows one to visually see what the most popular links are on a page as well as to check if your CTA (call to action) is getting attention.
The next heatmap is a Move heatmap, which only shows desktop users, and allows one to see just where users are moving their mouse as they navigate a page.
If a certain image is getting a lot of attention, or a specific section, this is where one would focus their attention to.
Finally, the Scroll heatmap shows how far a user scrolls down a page. If a piece of content is not getting the organic traffic it deserves, the scroll heatmap will show a huge contrast in color and reveal where the user has lost interest and continued their journey elsewhere.
2. Recordings
Recordings are an excellent way to become the user, as it shows their journey throughout a website. This allows one to see the landing page URL, how long they have been on the website, what device they are on as well as many other metrics about the user.
Pay close attention to how a user navigates. Do they get stuck on a page? Does it produce an error (404)? Does it take too long to load?
These questions are some of the more important questions to ask, especially when noticing the same behavior across multiple users.
3. Funnels
Funnels are a great way to look for opportunities as well as find where users are dropping off. By understanding each step of the funnel, you are able to recognize barriers and how to eliminate them.
Depending on your goals, funnels can be set up to track where in their journey a user has trouble with or where additional improvements can be made.
You definitely want to create a funnel that can track a user’s journey from the homepage to the checkout page, so that you can see if the process is easy and seamless.
For users starting at a landing page, you can see if it has the information or product that they were looking for, or if their attention is drawn towards something else.
Hotjar also allows you to create a funnel report, which is a great way to visually present findings to your team and to clients.
4. Forms
Hotjar’s forms allow you to check where in the process users are having trouble, which fields are left blank, as well as why they leave that page.
One of the more important metrics to look at is interactions. This tells us what part of your form a user is having trouble with, such as if a field is clickable, or a button does not work. If a client is receiving a lot of forms with missing fields, this tells us a few things: they are unable to fill in that section, it does not make sense, or it is completely unrelated to the form.
Once you uncover the underlying problems on existing forms, you should be seeing an increase in successful form submissions and eventually add in more queries in your forms to gain more insights.
5. Incoming Feedback
Incoming feedback is a great way to get instant feedback about your website.
Not only do you receive ratings of users’ experiences, but you will also be able to gain insights from users that you may have never thought about.
For instance, while optimizing a particular page that you may be familiar with, it might not occur to you that someone new to that page could be having issues.
Another way to gain valuable insight is to provide a question that can be easily answered for users, such as “Were you able to find what you were looking for?” or “What parts of the website can be better?”. These and similar questions like it can go a long way in providing the best user experience that you can for visitors.
How Can Forthea Help?
At Forthea, Hotjar has been a very valuable tool that we use to help leverage and elevate insights across all our clients.
By taking advantage of each feature Hotjar provides, we are able to see just how users behave as well as how they interact to changes across a website.
We take great strides in analyzing every part of a user’s journey, and we fully understand what it takes to help you succeed.
Contact us today so that we can help you gain an advantage on your competitors.