You did the work. The SEO work, we mean. And now traffic is flowing freely from the search engines to your home improvement website. But…nothing is happening.

High traffic numbers are a good sign, but if your traffic isn’t converting, you’re spending time and money on SEO and website marketing without seeing anything in return.

If you can’t figure out what’s causing this disconnect between traffic and sales, heat mapping might help.

What Is Heat Mapping?
Heatmaps provide a visual picture of what people are doing on your site. They indicate what the “hot” parts of your page are with color coding. “Hotter” areas are those that people viewed, hovered their mouse over, or interacted with more than others.

What Can Heatmaps Show You?
Heatmaps can provide some insight into what’s working—and what’s not— on your pages. For example:

• If the area around your buy now buttons are stone cold on a heatmap, that means no one is clicking. They’re not even hovering and considering. Clearly that’s a problem, and you might realize you need to relocate your buy now button or rewrite your CTA.
• If a random area on your page shows up hot, it means people are interacting with it or hovering over it a lot. That might be a good place for a link, button, or other interactive element.
• If the top part of your page has some warm colors but you see nothing as you scroll down, it could indicate people aren’t exploring below the fold. (Below the fold means the part of the page you have to scroll to see.) That could indicate your content isn’t engaging enough to make it worth the effort.

As you can see, heatmaps make it easy to visually analyze visitor behavior on your site. You can use that information to make decisions to improve your website marketing.

Where Can You Get Heatmaps?
Services such as Hotjar provide heatmaps for your website. You can find free versions with limited functionality or data. For example, Hotjar offers a free account that lets you view maps for up to 2,000 page views daily. But you can also pay for more information if you find heatmaps helpful; Hotjar charges $39 per month for data from up to 10,000 page views daily.

Does everyone need heatmaps? No. But if you’ve looked at analytics and tweaked your site and are still coming up short on conversions despite plenty of traffic, heatmaps might offer some low-cost answers.