The Benefits of Heatmaps for SEO

There are many tools out there that exist to support you in finding the best ways to optimize your business, site, and content. Some tools are more invaluable than others to meet basic SEO tenets such as keyword research. Others can help give deeper insights to private practice owners looking to take their business to the next level. One of these handy tools to help gain an edge over the competition is referred to as a heatmap. 

First Off, What Is A Heatmap?

Heatmaps come in different forms. But, they often work to help therapists understand how visitors interact with their websites. Forms and surveys can also accomplish this. But, the results they share may or may not be accurate with what visitors actually do on the site. Heatmaps on the other hand visually show the most popular and overlooked parts of a page. This can be represented with a red to a blue color gradient. The more blue an area, the less engagement it has on the page. Similarly, the more red an area is, the more engagement there is. Yet, not all heatmaps track the same information. Different types of heatmaps may offer insight into aspects of your site such as:

• How to optimize the content of your page
• How to improve user experience on your site
• Ways to better understand what interests your readers most
• How to improve client conversion rates

So, let’s talk about some of the other types of heatmaps. Plus, how they can support local SEO for therapists.

Types of Heatmaps

When it comes to the most common heatmaps you may find, the top three include scroll maps, click maps, and hover maps. Each uses heatmaps in different but subtle ways. Scroll maps show you how far users scroll down your page. By doing so, you can better understand if they are reaching the most vital parts of your page that you want them to see, and where to place your most important content. Click maps also offer similar support. But, these focus on where users click most often on a page. This insight can help you determine which links or buttons are most popular on a page. Finally, hover maps also serve a similar role in tracking where users hover their mouse cursors most often on a page. This gives an idea of where most of the focus on the page is being placed, and how long people are hovering in a certain area.

These three work similarly to improve on-screen elements of SEO. But, there are still others that can also offer other forms of valuable information. Local SEO heatmaps can offer insight into how certain keywords perform in a given area, and other important stats based on geographical location. In fact, there are even more advanced heatmaps available that track how visitors actually  

How Heatmaps Can Benefit SEO for Therapists

Making use of the data heatmaps provide can offer a variety of benefits as previously mentioned. One of these benefits comes in the form of giving insight as to how effective the design of a given page is. By using heatmaps, therapists can better understand what aspects of a page may be getting overlooked by visitors to their site. As a result, they can work to redesign elements of their site in a way that improves the different elements the heatmap addresses. These elements can include:

• The actual design and layout of the site/page
• Optimizing the length of content on the site
• Understanding the type of content visitors spend most of their time reading
• Redistributing internal and external links on the page

However, this is not the only information that can be gained by using heatmaps. With different tools come alternative benefits.

Different Heatmaps Offer Different Benefits

Heatmaps that track data related to keywords or geographical location may not offer much support in terms of on-page optimization. Yet, they can still offer valuable off-page data to support therapist SEO. Heatmaps that focus on local SEO can show therapists how well they rank for specific keywords in specific service areas. With this data, therapists can better focus their keyword efforts on specific location indicators they hope to rank for. Plus, they can get also get an idea of what competitors in the area may be trying to rank for the same terms!

Conclusion

Heatmaps come in different forms and offer a variety of different insights. Therapists can use these insights to gain an edge in both on and off-page optimization. As tools like these continue to evolve and improve their ability to draw from different user experiences, so do the opportunities for private practice owners to improve their websites. By doing so, they can better connect with their ideal clients.

Begin Improving SEO for Therapists

The team at Simplified SEO Consulting is trained to offer support with both on and off-page elements of your site. Our team is happy to offer support across the country with on-page optimization and List Management tools including heatmaps! You can start improving your local SEO presence by following these simple steps:

1. Apply to work with us to improve your SEO
2. Meet with an SEO specialist.
3. Start improving your SEO!

Other Services Offered with Simplified SEO Consulting

Our team is happy to offer a variety of services in support of building your private practice website. Our team can offer support in optimizing your site with our Done For You SEO Services. We also offer DIY Online SEO Courses, and a 12-week Done With You Intensive SEO Program. Feel free to read other posts from our blog for more helpful information!

About the Author

Sterling Humburg-Cage graduated from the University of Missouri with a BA in Psychology in 2020. He integrates what he learned in school into his work as an SEO Specialist with Simplified SEO Consulting. Sterling prides himself on helping current clients & alumni problems solve difficult SEO issues.  He’s great at giving clients multiple options about how to approach a situation and responding quickly to client concerns.  Since he started, Sterling has met frequently with our alumni and provided them extra problem-solving support. He often goes the extra mile to do outside research and make sure private practice owners have everything they need to rank well on search engines long term for the keywords their ideal clients are using!