Local SEO Heat Map: Elevate Your Brand’s Online Search Visibility

Local SEO heat map is a colour-coded visual representation of the search visibility of your local business.

Among other things, a heat map in SEO can show you the impact of your local SEO campaign at different places in your target areas.

In this Innocams blog post, let’s explore this useful tool to understand how heat mapping can elevate a brand’s online search visibility. 

What is a Heat Map?

A heat map is a mapping tool that uses colour-coded data points to show how your business ranks for your target keywords at different places in a specific geographic area. By analysing these data you can understand the strength or weakness of your local SEO efforts at those places. 

The levels of activities of your users are represented by the density of colours. A darker colour represents a place where your local SEO is doing well and attracting traffic. On the other hand a lighter colour will mean areas where your local SEO needs improvement. 

In short the heat map scan can show you where your optimisation drive is more successful and where it is not doing as well as you want it to through darker and lighter colours respectively.

Benefits of Local SEO Heat Map

Businesses and SEO executives use this tool to understand their target audience’s behaviour at different areas with a view to modifying or changing their optimisation strategies for those areas.

Here are the key benefits of using the local SEO heat map report: 

It Shows You Where You are Right

This report will tell you where you are going right and your local SEO is effectively improving your local search visibility.

This will tell you the right strategies to improve your SEO campaign. This insight will help you when…

It Shows You Where You are Wrong

The heat map report will tell you where your Local SEO is not working well. 

Then you can formulate proper strategy to plug your SEO loopholes in the low-density areas. 

You can select proper keywords and apply the effective strategies you used in the success areas to improve your SEO. 

It Gives Insights into Your Competition

This heat map report also provides an insight into how and why your competitors are beating you in your target market areas where your SEO efforts are not successful.  

You can use this knowledge to formulate a better local SEO strategy for those weak areas.

Importance of Local SEO

Before we go deeper into the relationship between local SEO and heat map, allow me to jog your memory about the importance of SEO for local businesses.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of helping a website’s pages rank high, preferably the 1st, 2nd or 3rd ranks, in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). 

Studies have shown over and over again that a guy, searching online for a product or service, usually does business with companies who occupy the first three positions on the first SERP when he searches for what he wants to buy. 

Businesses Can’t Do Without SEO

That’s why an effective and continuous SEO campaign has become a staple for businesses all over the world. 

This campaign is costly, time-consuming and unpredictable. Still businesses swallow this bitter pill as ranking higher in online search results means more visibility, more traffic and of course, more profits. 

And an SEO drive, if successful, can actualise this high rank for a local business web pages.

Local SEO can Make or Break SMEs

When it comes to local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this SEO assumes an added significance.

SMEs must tap the potential of their local markets as they don’t have the resources to compete with multinational companies.

That means, they must spread the awareness of their brands among their local target customers. 

They also must highlight the superiority of their products or services to their competitors’.

And to achieve these tough objectives, they must launch a tougher SEO campaign to improve their SERP visibility.

In short, for local businesses an effective SEO campaign is a bitter but life-saving pill.

And a local SEO heat map will help them monitor their SEO efficacy and take immediate steps if there are any issues.

Local SEO Heat Map: Key Functionalities

This heat mapping has four key functionalities. Here are they with brief explanations:

1. It provides ranking data of an SMEs website pages in different areas of the geographic location the SME targets.

2. It shows a heat map interpretation of performance of the target keywords of the local businesses SEO in those areas.

3. Local SEO heat map reveals the search intent of his target audiences across the locations of an SME’s target market area.

4. It also shows how its competitors are doing in its target market and target market area.

Local SEO Heat Map: How It Works

This tool uses data of the search volume of your keywords in your target market area. It also uses data of what keywords your target customers are using in the areas you want a heat map report on. 

Then this data is plotted on a map of the area to show where and how your target market is using your target keywords and keywords that are relevant to the product or service you sell.

A chromatic representation of this heat map report is shown on the map. Places where your local SEO is successful are shown in darker colour and where it is not doing so well in a lighter colour. 

How to Use Local SEO Heat Map?

Follow these steps to get your local business’s SEO heat map report: 

First Step to Your Heat Map Report

Select keywords that are relevant to your business. Do a keyword research to find out what keywords your target area is using while looking for info on the product or service you offer.

Second Step to Your Heat Map Report

Select the areas you want to get a heat map report on. Select the colours you want the tool to use while showing you the report.

Third Step to Your Heat Map Report

Feed the heat map tool with all this data and your business details as per Google Business Profile like NAP, location  etc. Then run an audit. 

The tool will show you a chromatic representation of the report of your keyword search volume in the selected areas in a colour code. 

The colour of the high-density search volume areas will be in a darker colour and low-density areas will be in a lighter colour.

Meaning of a Local SEO Heat Map Report

A local SEO heat map report on your business will reveal several aspects of your pages’ optimisation campaign in your targeted areas. 

Some key interpretations of this report are given below. 

• Where more people are using your target keywords and visiting your site. It means your SEO drive is effective in these areas.
• Where fewer people using your target keywords and visiting your site less. 
• How your competitors are faring in those areas.
• What keywords, apart from your target ones, your competitors are using in places they are ranking higher than you.

Using Heat Map Report to Boost Local SEO

So far so good. We’ve used the heat mapping tool, we now know the report, we’ve interpreted it and known what the report means. 

Now we’ll use the insights this report provided to improve our local SEO. Here’s how to go about it:

Focus on Weak Areas

Concentrate on your target market areas where your visibility is low. Using the insight gained from the local SEO heat map report, formulate strategies to improve your visibility in those areas.

You can use Ads, relevant keywords etc to improve your local SEO.

Optimise Google My Business

Google My Business plays a crucial ranking factor in local SEO. Optimise yours so it can give your SEO campaign a leg-up. 

Do a Competitor Analysis

Use the insight gained from your local SEO heat map report, do an analysis of your competitors and change or update your keyword strategies for better results.

Cons of Local SEO Heat Map

These tools may help you improve your local SEO campaign, but they have their share of disadvantages. Here are a few of them.

1. You will have to interpret the heat map report to get the useful insights. The tool will not do it for you and this task may be challenging for some.
2. Expert and experienced SEO executives may find this tool too simple and may not need it.
3. SMEs without a brick-and-mortar presence may not be able to use Google My Business, which is a key component in local SEO heat mapping.
4. Though Google supports the use of heat map tools for better local SEO, make sure any of your heat map report interpretation doesn’t conflict with Google’s SEO best practices guidelines. 

Conclusion

Local SEO heat map is a tool that shows the search visibility of local businesses in their target market areas. 

This insight may help SMEs to improve their local SEO campaigns for greater visibility and increased traffic and profits. 

The report from this heat mapping tool may offer significant insights into the pros and cons of a local SEO.

And this may help local businesses to formulate better strategies for more effective optimisation campaigns to tap the target market potential.

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