SEO
The Top 8 Heatmap Software Options Compared
Knowing how visitors are engaging with your website can provide your brand with invaluable insights.
Are users finding what they’re looking for right away?
Where and what are they clicking? Do they make it below the fold?
Answering these questions requires one simple solution: heatmap software.
What Is Heatmap Software?
Heatmap software can give your brand a transparent look at what elements on your website users are interacting with most, where they’re clicking, how far they’re scrolling down on the page, and even their mouse movements.
A heatmap tool can even record a user’s session on your site to see their entire journey with your web page.
Heatmaps can also help guide your SEO and web design strategy.
But with an abundance of options to choose from, how do you know which heatmap tool is best for your business?
Comparing The Top Heatmap Software Options
In this post, we will explore the top heatmap software options, comparing each and uncovering the unique features each has to offer.
1. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg gives brands an in-depth look at user behavior.
For example, its confetti heat map feature enables you to drill down to individual clicks visitors make, and segment them using different metrics.
This granular level of user activity allows you to better help customers navigate their journey across your company’s web page.
Unique Features
The Crazy Egg A/B Testing Page Editor functionality helps businesses test new designs before implementing them.
These design elements may include images, copy, or CTAs (call-to-action).
While this may seem like it requires a vast amount of technical knowledge, with this tool, these changes can be made without needing a developer.
Pricing
Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial, which can be canceled at any time.
It also offers a $29/month* Basic plan which includes 30,000 tracked pageviews, a $49/month* Standard Plan which includes 75,000/month tracked pageviews/mo, and a $99/month* Plus plan which includes 150,000 tracked pageviews/month.
2. Mouseflow
Removing the friction in user sessions starts with observing real customer journeys.
Session replays are a key feature Mouseflow focuses on to identify red-flag metrics by watching actual site users’ behavior.
It also features a conversion funnel optimization tool, so you can tackle obstacles that may be preventing sales.
Unique Features
Mouseflow enables brands to also create custom surveys to obtain critical customer feedback.
These surveys are customizable, so you can find the information you need to make navigating your brand’s website simple.
Current Mouseflow users say, “Feedback is very simple to use and implement for any user.”
Pricing
Mouseflow offers five different pricing plans, depending on the number of recordings, months of storage, and websites.
Plans start at $0 and go up to $299 per month when paid annually.
3. VWO
Data is invaluable (and necessary) to drive meaningful growth and improve pre-existing processes.
VWO not only offers heat mapping software, but also experience optimization through session recordings, testing, funnels, and form analytics.
You’ll understand how your visitors are interacting with you every throughout step of the sales funnel – from the moment they enter your site, through to where (or if) they drop off.
Unique Features
VWO gives end users the autonomy to implement most tests without the support of a designer.
This allows product and marketing teams to focus on other priorities while being able to scale the number of growth experiments.
Some of these tests include an A/B test, split URL test, and Multivariate test.
Pricing
VWO has three different pricing tiers, which include Growth, Pro, and Enterprise.
The Pro plan is recommended for small to mid-sized organizations and enterprise is recommended for large teams.
Enterprise includes onboarding and training, as well as a dedicated Account Manager.
4. Hotjar
Hotjar allows your team to prioritize what you want to (and should) work on without guesswork.
With the transparency to see where your visitors are looking and interacting, you’ll learn what your users love about your site, and what elements they ignore.
Hotjar’s software also enables you to spot opportunity areas or bugs hiding in plain sight, as your users see them.
This provides greater clarity on what your consumers want to see on your site, which can help you improve conversion rates and user engagement.
Unique Features
One unique Hotjar feature is its visitor recordings, which show exactly how customers are interacting with your site.
You can see how individual users click, scroll, and move their mouse on the page.
You can also replay recordings of their visits to further analyze behavior patterns.
Pricing
Hotjar’s pricing model varies based on the number of daily sessions you’d like to capture.
Its free version allows for 35 daily sessions, Plus is $31/month for 100 daily sessions, and Business is $79/month for 500 daily sessions.
There is also a Scale version for unlimited daily sessions.
5. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange equips brands with analytics tools to see their top visited web pages, landing pages, and where users are coming in from.
Additionally, rather than just seeing heatmap snapshots of previous user activity, you can see activity in real-time, and even start a live chat with them.
Visitor session recordings and advanced features such as automated replies to live chat messages can help improve a searcher’s overall digital experience with your brand.
Unique Features
Lucky Orange’s chat feature is unique and helps guide the user’s navigation path to create a more seamless experience.
You can give people the option to start a chat when they need help, or take a more proactive approach and create rules to automatically invite people to chat.
You can also directly ask people to chat if you think they need additional support navigating your site.
Pricing
Lucky Orange offers a free 7-day trial with no credit card required.
Plans start at $35/month for 40,000 pageviews/month, $70/month for 100,000 pageviews/month, $150/month for 300,000 pageviews/month and enterprise plans for 1,000,000+ pageviews/month.
6. FullStory
FullStory differs from other heatmap solutions in that it is primarily for leveraging session recordings to identify bugs and potential roadblocks.
The company recommends reviewing session recordings to see the bigger picture and learn how and if action is driving your desired results.
All website visitor’s sessions are recorded, which gives your brand comprehensive visitor analytics.
Unique Features
FullStory can alert you to”frustration signals”, which highlight areas users are experiencing errors.
You can then view the session replay to see where things may have gone wrong for the user, and where to improve the experience in the future.
Pricing
FullStory offers two pricing models.
The first is its Enterprise plan, which FullStory classifies as “large, cross-functional teams who need total clarity into their digital portfolio.”
The second is its Business plan, “For growth-minded teams who need actionable data to discover trends, perfect experiences, and plan roadmaps.”
You can also opt for a 14-day free trial.
7. Smartlook
Smartlook provides session recordings to help you determine what’s wrong with your brand’s mobile app or website.
It also provides funnel analysis to reveal snags in the user experience and uncover what is preventing people from converting.
Funnel analysis can help you focus your optimization efforts by showing you your website’s highest exit pages.
The company also offers heat mapping.
Unique Features
Smartlook also offers functionality for mobile applications, to ensure the best mobile app experience possible.
Pricing
Pricing plans are free for 1,500 sessions per month and up to three heatmaps, $39/monthly for 5,000 sessions per month and up to 10 heatmaps, and 15,000 sessions per month and up to 30 heatmaps.
8. Attention Insight
Keeping your audience engaged is a challenge.
That is the challenge Attention Insight aims to solve.
By identifying these potential issues during the design phase, you can ensure your concepts are solid before you even publish them.
Predictive attention heatmaps can help with this – and that is where Attention Insight comes in.
Unique Features
Attention Insight offers unique types of heatmaps, including AI attention heatmaps that use warm-to-cold colors to show what areas of your web page attract the most and least attention.
This information can help you determine which elements of your web page are most engaging to visitors.
Pricing
Solo pricing starts at 19 euros a month and includes three months of storage, and 1 user seat.
Team pricing starts at 399 euros a month, 12 months of storage, and includes five user seats.
You can also try Attention Insight with a 7-day free trial.
Which Heatmap Software Is Best For Your Business?
Now that you have more knowledge about the top heatmap platforms, it’s time to determine which is best for your business.
Features
Each of the aforementioned heatmap platforms offers different advantages.
Some offer better visitor analytics, including real-time analytics and visitor segmentation abilities.
Others have numerous heatmap features to see precisely where your customers are engaging with your page.
Price
Aside from visitor analytics, heatmap features, and other software capabilities, cost also plays a key role for many businesses.
As with most software, the most expensive heatmap software isn’t always the best.
Technical Setup
It’s also essential to consider the ease of getting started.
For smaller teams with limited development resources, you may want to opt for heatmap platforms that are easier to set up – or, heatmap platforms that take care of the technical aspects for you.
Bottom Line
The heatmap software solution that is best for your business may look different than what’s best for other businesses.
Consider your budget, the heatmap features and reports your business needs most, and your development team’s bandwidth.
All these considerations will allow you to choose the best software solution for your business.
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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