Behind the Scenes of My Website

My website can use some fixing.

It’s true. There are areas of my site that could be more effective.

It’s not that something is horribly broken, but I view my website as a work in progress.

It’s an ongoing experiment, and fairly regularly I make tweaks to it – in an effort to further build my list and bring in more revenue.

Once you put time, energy, and money in your website, it’s tempting to sit back and think “Phew… that’s done. Now I can cross that off my list.”

And, yes, once you create your website, you should take a break and focus on other areas of your business.

But, if you find yourself thinking “I wish I had more people opt-ing into my list,” or “I wish more people were contacting me about my services,” then it’s a great time to take a closer look at your site.

But, how can you actually “take a closer look” at your site?

While you may be able to navigate through your site and notice things you’d like to change, it is invaluable to be able to look “behind the scenes” and see what people are doing when they land on your site.

Heat maps are one powerful tool you can use to see how your visitors use your site.

What the heck is a heat map?

It’s a visual representation of where people are clicking on your site. There are free and low-cost tools you can use that will give you this information. (More on this in a bit.)

Heat Maps will show you:

• If your visitors are distracted by too many choices
• How to improve conversions
• How to get more email subscribers
• What to emphasize, repurpose, and remove from your pages
• Which images to reuse for ads, sales pages, and emails

If you use heat maps, I suggest you start by focusing on your home page, because this is the most important page on your site.

Before you look at the heat map, ask yourself, “What’s the #1 objective of my home page? What do I want people to do on my home page?”

My #1 objective for our home page is to get people to opt-in for our free gift. I specifically want them to click on the orange “call-to-action” button.

Let’s see how I’m doing with that objective, by looking at a a heat map of our home page.

 
What this tells me…

• People are very focused on clicking on the orange call-to-action button, so we don’t need any changes there.
• A good number of people are clicking on the ebook graphic. Luckily, the ebook graphic already clicks to an opt-in form.
• A large number of people are clicking on the links in our main navigation, with more people clicking on the first three links. If I wanted to keep the focus on list building, I could choose to move or minimize the navigation bar on the home page.

Now, let’s take a look at our Free Training page.

My #1 goal with this page is to build my list.

Here’s the heat map of our Free Training page.

 
What this tells me…

• A large number of people are clicking on the “more free training” link at the bottom of the page. Because I want to keep people focused on this page, I should either remove or minimize that link.
• People are rarely clicking on two of the sections on the page, so I can simplify the page by removing those.
• More people are clicking on “about” and “work with us” in the main navigation than on the free training areas. Given this, I may tweak the design and wording of the free training areas, to see if that causes more people to click on those boxes.

Want to set-up a heat map on your site?

SumoMe offers a free tool, which you can get by clicking here. Their free tool automatically adds a SumoMe icon to your site. You can remove that by upgrading to their $10/month Starter package.

When looking at heat maps for your site, ask yourself these questions:

• Is my #1 objective the most clicked / hottest spot?
• What 3 areas are being the most clicked?
• What hot spots were unexpected?
• What type of medium received the most clicks (images, video, text, buttons)?
• Which images received more clicks than others on the same page?

After you’ve analyzed your heat maps, it’s time to take action.

Consider the following…

• How can I repurpose the hot spots to achieve my #1 objective?
• What hot spots / links can I remove that distract from my objective?
• How can I add more of the content (images/video/text) that my audience engages with?

Now I’d love to hear from you.
Have you ever looked at a heat map for your site? If so, what did you learn? If you haven’t every used a heat map, what would you most want to learn from one?