Can user behavior analytics help boost your search engine optimization (SEO)?
Knowing how users interact with your website and understanding why they do so can give you valuable insights you can use to guide your SEO efforts.
What is User Behavior Analytics?
User behavior analytics is the practice of collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative user data on how users interact with your site. This data helps you clearly understand what visitors to your website want, what’s important to them, and what they struggle with.
Traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console give you quantitative data on what happens on your site. These metrics help you know how many people visitors come to your website and where they come from. They’re excellent in helping you know if your strategies are working or not.
On the other hand, user behavior analytics goes further and gives you insight into why visitors take particular actions on your site. It’s like peeking from behind their shoulders to see what they’re doing.
How to Get User Behavior Analytics On Your Website
There are many user behavior analytics tools on the market. But if you’re a WordPress user, one of the easiest ways to tap into your user analytics is by tracking through Microsoft Clarity.
FYI, Microsoft Clarity is a free user behavior analytics tool
If you’re an AIOSEO user, you’ll love the plugin’s ease of use in adding a Microsoft Clarity tracking code to your WordPress website.
AIOSEO is a top-rated SEO plugin trusted by over 3 million websites. It was designed to be an easy-to-use SEO toolkit for those who want to DIY their SEO.
To get started using Microsoft Clarity on your website (the easy way), you need the Pro version of AIOSEO 4.1.9 or newer.Â
Don’t have AIOSEO yet?
Go ahead and install and activate it here.
Once you’ve installed and activated AIOSEO, you can use the Webmaster Tools feature to set up Microsoft Clarity. To do that head to General Settings » Webmaster Tools Verification to turn on and set up the Microsoft Clarity integration.Â
Click on the Microsoft Clarity, and you’ll be asked to create a new project if you’re a new user.
The link will take you to the Microsoft Clarity website, where you’ll set up your Microsoft Clarity account. Once you’ve done that, click on the gear icon in the Clarity dashboard to open the settings tab. This is where you’ll find the Clarity Project ID required in the setup process in your AIOSEO dashboard.
Copy the Clarity Project ID and paste it into the relevant field, then click Save. Once you do this, the tracking script will automatically be added to your website’s <head> tag.
Just like that, you’ve added Microsoft Clarity to your WordPress website.
User Behavior Analytics Data You Get from Microsoft Clarity
Wondering what kind of data you’ll be able to get from Microsoft Clarity to your site?
Let’s briefly run through the different user behavior analytics data you can get from Clarity.
Heatmaps
A heatmap is a graphical representation of data where color variations represent values. They are an excellent way of seeing how website visitors interact with your pages.
Heatmaps come in two main types:
- Click maps: These show the elements users interact with the most, indicating which are more important to them.
- Scroll maps: Scroll maps show how far down your pages users go and are a great way of identifying friction points on your web pages.
Heatmaps provide a great way of understanding what users are looking for on your site and what they see on your site.
Session Recordings
Wish you could stand behind all your website visitors and see the exact actions they take on your website?
Session recordings bring you pretty close.
Microsoft Clarity records all movements users make on your website.
This gives you insight into every action they take. Examples include:
- Mouse movements
- Clicks
- Taps
- Scroll depth
- Number of sessions
This data is recorded for all users across all devices and browsers, giving you a clear picture of everything you need to know about your visitors.
4 Ways User Behavior Analytics Data from Clarity can Help Boost Your SEO
Now that you’ve added Microsoft Clarity to your site, you can take your SEO game to another level. Here are four ways you can leverage user behavior analysis data to boost your SEO:
1. Reduce Your Bounce Rates
A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your site and doesn’t go to another. Instead, they click back where they came from (to the browser or other resource that led them to your site). Therefore, bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that only visit one page on your site and click back where they came from.
High bounce rates signal to search engines that your content isn’t providing value to users. As a result, pages with high bounce rates rank lower.
Some of the main reasons for high bounce rates include, among other things:
- Content that doesn’t meet user intent
- Hard to read or confusing content
- Misleading content
- Pages that load slowly
Microsoft Clarity helps you see pages with high bounce rates. But, more importantly, it helps you see the exact points on a page that most people bounce off.
Armed with this data, you can easily troubleshoot your pages and eliminate the cause of the high bounce rates. This, in turn, will boost your SEO.
2. Increase Dwell Time
One of the benefits of reducing your bounce rates is that it increases dwell time. Dwell time refers to the duration of time between a user landing on your page to the time they go back to the search engine results pages (SERPs). High dwell times signal to search engines that users have found your content to be relevant and valuable.
While Google does not expressly say dwell time is a ranking factor, they imply that it has an influence as they use machine learning to help present users with better results.
With that being said, improving your dwell time is essential from an SEO standpoint and a business one. The more time users spend on your website, the higher the chances of converting.
That’s why tools like Microsoft Clarity come in handy. The session recordings will help you gain insight into what causes poor dwell time on your site. Fixing these issues will lead to visitors spending more time on your site, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable. As a result, you’ll enjoy better rankings.
3. Optimize Your User Experience
Another way user behavior analytics can help with your SEO is by enabling you to optimize your user experience (UX).
UX has always been an important element in building websites that convert. But ever since Google announced that page experience is a significant ranking factor, UX has become vital to SEO. User behavior analytics is an essential tool that can help you interpret engagement metrics on your website. Because of that, you can use them to optimize your pages. Here are two UX areas this data can help you optimize:
Site Architecture
Site architecture plays a huge role in how users experience your site. If your site architecture is not user-friendly, users will struggle to navigate it. User behavior analytics tools like Microsoft Clarity help pinpoint site architecture and navigation issues, enabling you to fix them.
Besides users, a well-planned site architecture makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
Using the data from user behavior analytics, you can create a better site architecture. You can also use it to optimize your breadcrumb navigation, giving users a positive experience and helping search engines understand your site better.
Frustration Hotspots
As much as you may do your best to design the best website and create perfect copy, sections of your website may frustrate visitors. This is another area where user behavior analytics will come in handy. For example, Microsoft Clarity has metrics like Excessive Scrolling, Rage Clicks, Dead Clicks, and more that help you discover sections of your pages that frustrate users.
Ensuring the best possible experience for users is essential to improving your engagement metrics. The more your visitors engage with your site, the more search engines consider it worth ranking higher.
4. Create Content Users Love
Content. It’s the reason people visit your website — they’ll be looking for information that can help them solve a problem or achieve a goal.
Because content lies at the center of every SEO strategy, creating best-in-class content should be a priority. User behavior analytics can help you do just that as they give you insight into content readers spend more time on, which gets little to no attention. This will help you figure out what your target audience needs, allowing you to direct your content marketing efforts in that direction.
Also, monitoring what users do on your website will help you answer important questions like:
- What are users looking for?
- What do they want to achieve?
- How can we make it easier for them to accomplish their goals?
This will help you optimize your content for search intent, resulting in better engagement metrics and conversions. Both result in a boost in SEO.
AIOSEO and Microsoft Clarity: Helping You Execute Data-driven SEO Strategies
Effective SEO requires the right tools and data. The AIOSEO and Microsoft Clarity integration gives you both.
Remember, your website serves two primary purposes:
- Driving traffic
- Converting that traffic
To do this, you need to optimize it for visibility and conversions. This is a challenge most marketers face. However, it becomes easier when you understand what your users are looking for and what they want to achieve.
That’s where Microsoft Clarity and AIOSEO come in.
If you’re a WordPress user and want an easy way to take advantage of user behavior analytics, AIOSEO is the tool to help you. It makes it easy to add Microsoft Clarity to your site and start tracking how your visitors engage with your site.
If you’re not using AIOSEO yet, you’re missing out on many features that can help you rank higher. So go ahead and download the best SEO toolkit now.
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Microsoft Clarity is FREE and yet need to pay for pro version of AIOSEO to get access, so is it FREE?
Hi, Chee Shi Teo. The Microsoft Clarity feature in All in One SEO is available in both our Lite and Pro plugins. You don’t need to pay for All in One SEO Pro to get this feature.
Just out of curiosity, did you only see the Clarity feature on the Pro versions and not the Lite? Want to make sure it’s showing up on the light version for everyone. Thanks again.
Wow!, This is cool. Especially the session recording quality.
Is the plugin free for WordPress users?
Hi Casandra, thank you for your comment. The Microsoft Clarity feature is free. It’s available on both our Lite and Pro plugins.
Thank you for these pieces of vital information. It helps me discover something better to boost my website rank.
Hey Adebayo! Glad you found the post helpful. All the best with your website.