As someone who is making money online, I have learned (the hard way) that there is one more important aspect than web traffic: Conversion. I thought that web traffic is everything, but I was wrong. Traffic is probably king, but conversion is king of kings.
We do know that content – including sales copy – is important in generating interest, and eventually leads or sales. However, we must not forget about website layout.
Your website layout – not the flashy design and eye-candy design – is all that matters to give the best first impression to your site visitors. It is your online real estate.
How layout is important
There are plenty of reasons why website layout is important.
If you run a small business blog like Noobpreneur.com, your website layout means better-presented content, as well as more clicks on your ads. If you run an online store, optimising your website layout allows you to have less shopping cart abandonment. If you have a site purposed mainly for company profile, you want your prospects to learn as much as they can about your business during the short attention-span of site visitors.
Now as I mentioned above, your site design can help presenting your business brand, but not necessarily your conversion. Again, layout design is more important than graphic design.
Using heat map to help you design better layout
There are best practices we can follow in designing an effective site layout. However, we must be aware that a site layout’s effectiveness is often depending on the niche you are in; you need to view conversion case-by-case.
You need tools to help you find the best layout for your small business website – heat map tool is one of those tools.
Heat maps can help you see the “hot zones” and “cold zones” on your site. The zones can be defined by either the number of clicks on your site or the eye movements across your site.
Heat maps can help you discover problems in your site layout and solve those problems to instantly boost your site conversion.
Here are two heat map tools I recommend:
1. Click-based heat map: Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg allows you to build heat maps and track clicks (and view your site’s analytics visually.) You can signup for as low as $9/month for up to 10,000 tracked visits and up to 10 pages to track.
2. View based heat map: Feng-GUI
Feng-GUI tracks viewers’ eyes to gauge attention and attraction. This heat map tool is best used to measure the effectiveness of your ads and any of your viewers’ interest. For a limited functionality, you can signup for free.
Have you tried any heat map tools? If so, are they really helping you to better your small business website? Please share your experience by commenting on this article.
Ivan Widjaya
Heat map tools