Enhancing Website Performance with Microsoft Clarity (FTF)

0:00Crystal Waddell​Well, hey guys, welcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast. This is Follow Through Fridays. I am your host, Crystal Waddell and this is episode of the week where I go back and revisit some of the expert advice that we've received from guests of the show.

0:15And this week I am revisiting the episode with Celeste Gonzalez. Who came on the simple and smart SEO show podcast to talk about Microsoft clarity.

0:24Now Microsoft clarity is a free product. It's a user experience product that allows you to view how people interact with your website. So super cool.

0:33Super neat.

0:34And today I'm going to talk just a little bit about some of the takeaways that I had from the episode, some of this stuff that I implemented.

0:40And then I'm also going to share a clip from the one of our SEO squad meetings.

0:45Where we went through setting up Microsoft clarity together.

0:49Let me go ahead and jump into a couple of the things that I took away from chatting with Celeste.

0:53First of all, it's just understanding that Microsoft clarity existed.

0:57And that I could implement it on my website. And so that was my first step.

1:01My first goal, after the show was to install Microsoft clarity on my websites. Now I have two websites in particular that I wanted to install it on.

1:09First is the simple and smart SEO show podcast website, which is simple and smart seo.com. So that website is through Wix and the installation with clarity on Wix was seamless.

1:20It was so easy. There were specific instructions. But there is a place to put the code. I put the code. We were up and going in moments. It was insane. Very cool.

1:29When I installed it on my Shopify store, which is collage and wood.com. That was a little bit trickier and Oh, that wasn't as seamless.

1:39And one of the reasons it wasn't as seamless was because it didn't populate immediately.

1:44So I, at first I was did I install it wrong? Because when I installed it on my Wix site, it was, almost instantaneous.

1:51When I installed it on my Shopify site. It. I just left it alone because I was like, look, I followed the instructions.

1:57I'm just going to leave it alone. And I checked back the next day and it was working. Those were the two different experiences I had.

2:02Now, someone in the SEO squad, she installed clarity and for her, it seemed to work almost immediately.

2:08And she, was using Shopify. So just a couple of different experiences there.

2:13The next thing I took a look at was just, the screen recordings of people using the site. And one thing I really thought was cool about Microsoft clarity is it shows you where people are coming from.

2:23So say someone visits the site from Pinterest or they visit the site from Google. I can see, how they got there and I can see what pages they're, landing on and going through.

2:33And I noticed one recording that showed people trying to click on like images or they're trying to click on words.

2:40Which I could link. And that would then take them to Etsy where I was talking about a particular product or something.

2:46And why that's really relevant to me is because I'm an Etsy affiliate. So it's ah, duh, those things that they're clicking on should be linked to something so that they can click on it and go check it out.

2:56And on the backside, if they purchase anything, I then get an affiliate commission. So it was like a win-win my customer's not frustrated and I still make money potentially. So that was neat to see. Another thing was the pop-up.

3:09Now I'm going to go in and change the pop-up today. But I noticed that a lot of times, if the pop-up came up, say mid scroll when they were like halfway down the page and they went to X out of the pop-up. A lot of times that seems to turn them off.

3:23And they would bounce. So they would leave. And so what I'm going to do instead is I want to create a pop-up that says, basically like, how can I help you?

3:32I'm going to brainstorm that with chat GPT, but it's more like, Hey, how can I help you?

3:36Are you looking for photo props? Are you looking for senior night gifts? Are you looking for a specific sport?

3:40Something where I can then, help guide them where it's not so much in your face? Hey, did you want to buy something? Did you want to buy something? ' cause that was really turning people off.

3:48It's really one of it's. Gosh, it's so hard to balance. It's like you want to capture their email address. You want to capture their information? As a site visitor.

3:57You want to convert them into a paying customer. But I think for me, the step right now is just figuring out, okay, when you come here, what are you trying to do?

4:05And how can I help you do it easier? So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to. I'm going to.

4:11I'm going to modify the pop-up a little bit and run an experiment.

4:15And see if I can get any better data on the people who are visiting and see how I can better help them.

4:20Because who knows, maybe there's a digital product or something that I could create that helps them solve the problem that they have. Let's see.

4:27Another takeaway was watching for the rage clicks and the dead clicks.

4:31Because if somebody is trying to click on a picture that they think should go somewhere, but it's not a clickable link. That's something that is really easily fixed. And we can help people on their journey.

4:42I did have some of those and. I forgot to say one of my favorite things about Microsoft clarity.

4:48Is, they send you a weekly report, like a Google search console sent you that report every month?

4:54Clarity, we'll send you a report every week. And so just having that report come to me for a few weeks.

5:00Now I'm starting to understand the language I'm starting to understand. What's good and bad. And what's relative to my site. Did I have more rage clicks this week than I had last week? Or did I have less?

5:09I'm like, I fixed that problem. I added a link to that picture. And so now there's less rage clicks and or now there's less dead clicks. And so it's good to see your progress there.

5:18And then the very last thing that I would say about Microsoft clarity before I jump into the short clip that I have of us talking about this within the SEO squad meeting.

5:27Make sure that you add the privacy policy that, lets people know that you are in fact recording them when they come onto your site.

5:35So Microsoft clarity has a great little blurb that you can put in your privacy policy. They also have a wonderful checklist.

5:41So as you're going through to set this up on your website, if you follow the checklist all the way through, it will prompt you to put the privacy policy on your website.

5:50To let people know that you're using Microsoft clarity.

5:53So those are just a few things that I really enjoyed about installing Microsoft clarity and looking at the data that it was giving.

6:01I would say with a caveatit's important that you make it part of your procedures. That you look at this, like once a week, because again, getting used to seeing the data is the first thing, like getting comfortable with what you're looking at.

6:14So that way, when you decide you want to make some changes, You can make changes that make sense.

6:18Crystal WaddellAnd so yeah, I just wanted to put that out there and now let's pop into a recent meeting with the SEO squad, my weekly SEO group which is open for new members right now.

6:32If you join in. September, just like if you joined in August, you will get a free brand interview with me.

6:39Which essentially means I will ask you. All sorts of questions about your company.

6:44You can contribute questions that you'd like me to ask you. I can generate the list of questions and send them to you for approval or mix of the two.

6:52But what's really great is you'll then have video for your website.

6:56You'll have content to guide chat GPT as it creates different types of content for your business. And it's just really a powerful exercise to help you create a cohesive message.

7:08Go to simple and smart seo.com forward slash SEO dash squad.

7:12And you can sign up today. $48 a month, and we meet every week to talk about your websites.

7:18So let's jump into this meeting. And what we were discussing with Microsoft clarity and I will see you on the other side.

7:27Okay. So we're here on the dashboard and it's going to give you like all of your sessions, all of these different metrics. Which some of these metrics, I don't fully know how applicable they are to my business or to yours.

7:42CrystalBut one thing I did know is that. I want to know us visitors only.

7:47So whatever your target market is, if it's, Canada, if it includes the UK, whatever, you can add that to you can make a segment to where it is just those people.

7:56And so this is how you do it. You just go up to the days right here. And like I said, I did 14. You could probably align this with your Google search console. So if you do it, every week, every 28 days, every 3 months, whatever.

8:11That kind of makes sense. So you could compare data to data.

8:14That's the same. But for right now, I'm just applying 14 days.

8:17You go to filters and that's where you can choose how you want to filter it like. Day of the week. I don't really have a specific day of the week that people shop versus others. But that may be relevant to you.

8:29You can exclude browsers, include certain browsers. I'm just leaving all of that to its default to include everything.

8:35Because, like I said, the most important thing for me right now is that I choose the location of the United States.

8:42Now, once I have it applied, I can go and save it as a segment. And so when I save it as a segment, it's going to ask me, do you want to save a new segment? Or do you want to update an existing 1? I'm Obviously, if you've already created a segment and then you're like, Ooh, it makes more sense to add in this piece of layer of data, then you'd want to update that.

9:00If not, you'll just save it as a new one. I'm going to close out because I've already got it over here. Okay. Now, the only other thing that I did so far was I I made 2 different segments. I had a new visitor segment and I had a returning visitor segment. Because I want to see the difference in the people who've actually been to the site before and the people who haven't.

9:23Anybody have any questions or thoughts about that?

9:25MichelleI think that's a great idea. What kind of settings that? New and returning. Okay, I'm going to do that.

9:30CrystalYeah. And then that way, you're looking at the same data.

9:34Because if you look at 28 days versus the last 3 days, your numbers are going to really shift.

9:39And you wanna try to keep your comparisons very similar, like control for what you can control for as much as possible.

9:46Oh, view heat maps or view recordings.

9:48Okay. So one thing I noticed with my recordings, I'm not, I'd love to what you've seen in your recordings. My people are hating the pop ups. They're leaving after the pop up pops up.

9:58So go ahead, Sarah.

9:59SarahI just wanted to say, when you go to your dashboard, you have to create that watch list yourself. So you add it says my watch list then you had to add those segments that you just created to see them,

10:11Crystalyes, you're right. Yes, you're right That's right. You have to go over here and add the segment. Yeah, thank you.

10:16So then once you create the segment, click add to watch list. You can click here. And you choose segment.

10:23There's other options, so you'll select segment and then you can pick the segment that you want to watch.

10:28And then it'll show up in your watch list. Yeah, thank you, Sarah.

10:31Crystal WaddellAll right, guys.

10:31Thank you so much for joining me on the simple and smart SEO show podcast follow through Fridays.

10:36I hope that you can take advantage of some of these really amazing free tools that help you understand what's happening on your website.

10:43So that you can make changes that benefit your customers and then on the flip side, increase your conversions.

10:49And if you need some extra help, I would love to have you inside the SEO squad.

10:53Remember that simple and smart seo.com forward slash SEO dash squad.

10:57We'd love to have you join us inside there.

10:59And if you have any questions about this episode, there's a link in the show notes where you can send me a text message. I'll also have a link to the clarity website.

11:07Where you can get their step-by-step guides to install Microsoft clarity on your website. But again, No overwhelm here.

11:13Just pick one thing that we talked about today to optimize your site and help your visibility online.

11:18And remember. Keep moving forward. I'll see you next time.