A guide to heatmaps, also useful to SEO

They are called heatmaps, and they are a quick and effective tool for understanding what users do on the pages of a Web site: where they click, how far they scroll, what they look at or ignore. Compared to other analytical tools, heatmaps can provide a more complete overview of how users actually behave and the areas where they interact best, thus allowing us to get a picture of the strengths of the page and, more importantly, the critical points where we can intervene with appropriate corrections. This is precisely why they are also a valuable support for SEO strategy and allow us to find out what types of content and images best capture the attention of the audience and where people have difficulty navigating.

What heatmaps are

Sometimes also called heat maps, heatmaps are a visual representation of the browsing data of a web page, which through a color scale immediately show how users interact with that page, where they click and where they do not click, how far they have scrolled down a page, or what the results of eye-tracking tests are.

More specifically, the key feature of a heatmap is to provide in graphical form, through a color scale, key information to visualize the amount and distribution of certain variables within a dataset. In this sense, the heatmap is precisely a graphical representation of data in which values are represented by colors: typically, user behavior is measured on a scale from red to blue, with the hottest color indicating the highest level of engagement and the coldest indicating areas with the lowest levels of engagement. To simplify, then, warmer colors, such as red and orange, indicate areas of higher activity or interaction, while cooler colors, such as blue and green, indicate areas of lower activity.

Heatmaps are thus a tool for graphically visualizing the actions users take within web pages, making it easier to visualize complex data and understand it at a glance.The basic idea is to allow those who own or manage a site to understand the performance of a specific page and to quickly approach information from complex datasets through the representation of values using color.

What heatmaps are used for

Heatmaps are used in various forms of analytics, but they are most commonly used to show user behavior on Web pages or specific Web page templates, because thanks to color coding, they allow users to immediately understand which parts of that page receive the most attention, and thus provide information and insights on how to improve site structure or the placement of certain content and resources, such as clickable elements or the menu.

Indeed, heatmaps can become essential for detecting what works or does not work on a site or on a specific product page and for intervening in optimizing web usability-the ease of use and thus of understanding and navigating the site and its pages-which in turn can enable increased conversions. In practical terms, by leveraging techniques such as A/B testing to experiment with the placement of certain buttons and elements on the site, heat maps allow us to assess actual page performance and understand which parts of our website attract users’ attention the most (where they click, how much they scroll, where they linger the most), with the goal of using this information to increase user engagement and retention , improving their experience of interacting with the site.

For example, if we notice that users spend a lot of time on a particular section of our site, we might decide to place the most relevant content or call-to-actions there. Or, conversely, if we notice that a particular area of our site is being ignored, we might decide to revise the layout or design of that section.

How heatmaps work

There are a number of tools for understanding what impact our content and its organization has on users, and for example Google Analytics is a treasure trove of data for understanding how people arrive at our site, how many and which pages they visit, and from which page they leave the navigation, but they do not allow us to go into detail about the actual interaction.

Instead, the concept on which the application of heatmaps to the Web is based is as follows: scrolls, movements and mouse clicks are analyzed and, through specific software, transformed into concentrations of color that allow us to see the density of use of the various sections of a page.

The areas with which the user interacts the most are those marked with warm colors, such as red and orange, while green and blue (or at any rate generally cool colors) identify the areas with the least interactions: so it really only takes a glance to understand and see which parts of a page receive the most attention and thus draw indications on how to improve the structure or visibility of the page.

By aggregating user behavior, heat maps facilitate data analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative data, and provide a snapshot of how the target audience interacts with a single site or product page, what they click, scroll or ignore, on the average “fold” portion (the part of the page that people see on the screen without scrolling as soon as they land there).

In this way, heat maps provide marketers, digital and data analysts, UX designers, social media spec