Heatmaps useful for SEO?
As a relatively new adopter of heatmap technology, I can only say one thing really… I wished they had been around much longer! If you haven’t seen a heatmap before, then have a look at http://www.feng-gui.com/. This innovative company is providing a free plugin for our favourite browser Firefox which allows you to see where on your pages your visitors are clicking.
Traditionally, eye tracking charts have been used to see where people look with traditional paper advertising mediums, but with heatmaps you can get a visual clue as to where people are likely to look on your pages, based on neuro-science studies of humans.
One company, Crazy Egg (crazyegg.com) have combined this heatmap technology with the use of mouse and click tracking so that you get an overall picture of who is looking at what, and when they are looking at it… which is great if your website is there to actually make money, as you can change the website to make it easier for people to actually find your products!
I would advise everyone to sign up for a free crazyegg account to try it out - I have found their confetti feature particularly useful as it not only lists the clicks but lays the clicks out heat map fashion so you know exactly where people are clicking.
Below is a screenshot using the Firefox screenshot and heatmap plugin.
As you can see, the heatmap shows where people are likely to click, however if you take a look at the crazy egg combined heat / confetti / click map you can see that the same page shows much more information. I will upload a heatmap created by crazy egg once the cycle has been running for a while (you have to install a tracking script unfortunately).
March 6th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Nice catch on the firefox toolbar. The heatmap script can be downloaded for free somewhere in PHP. I’ve not managed to get it working yet - probably me more tahn the script. Seems to be the basis for CrazyEgg and ClickDensity - I prefer the latter as you can track a whole website with only one script - rather than Crazy Egg where you have to set up all the tests and everything like that.
March 6th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Thanks Michael I’ll have a look at ClickDensity.com, sounds like a better way of doing things to me.