5 Ways Virtual Tours Boost Your Business’ SEO

In every conversation we have with our customers, Advanced Online Insights reinforces the power of a virtual tour for search engine optimization, or SEO. This is a huge selling point to our customers of all sizes and in all industries: SEO can change the way your business operates, and more SEO power is typically better. Nearly all businesses are aiming to be found online, and virtual tours are a huge boost to doing just that. Here are five ways that virtual tours impact your business’s digital footprint–and these are five great reasons to give us a call today to discuss your business.

1. Highly relevant, high-quality content. Search engines like Google seek to answer their users’ questions as quickly and accurately as possible. When a user searches for “brunch restaurants near me,” Google wants to be right in suggesting a nearby cafe, and it knows that the user will likely want to see the restaurant and browse the menu before making a reservation or getting in the car to drive there. This is an example of SEO, and Advanced Online Insights virtual tours offer content that is visually beautiful, properly tagged for the customer’s market, and consists of updated and accurate information about the business. All of this feeds into Google, and as more people engage with the virtual tour, Google’s algorithm gains confidence that this is the right answer to the users questions, thus positioning the business to be extremely high in search results.
   
   
2. Virtual tours encourage more time spent on your page. In the world of SEO, there is a metric called “time on page.” This literally means the amount of time that people typically spend looking at a specific webpage, business listing, or website. Because of the interactivity of virtual tours, pages with virtual tours tend to generate much higher time-on-page results than websites without engaging photos, videos, or tours. The more time spent, the more Google’s algorithm trusts the information on the page and will continue to offer it as a result for similar searches.
   
   
3. Google prioritizes virtual tours. Due to the fact that virtual tours often come with high-quality, accurate content and highly engaging visuals, Google tends to favor business listings with virtual tours over other listings without them. Although this is not explicitly documented, the Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) clearly shows a preference for listings that include virtual tours by offering more “on-page real estate,” or space, for those listings specifically. In fact, business listings with virtual tours have twice as much space available for virtual tour imagery over standard visuals, which, in turn, makes these pages perform much better than competitors.
   
   
4. Increased social shares. In nearly all of our cases, customers who receive their completed virtual tours cannot wait to share it out via their social media networks. By posting the tour to Facebook, LinkedIn, and on their website, the company is encouraging people to engage with the content by liking it, sharing it, or commenting on it. This “social proof” of the legitimacy of the images and the information within them helps to bolster an existing SEO strategy.
   
   
5. Virtual tours are interesting and innovative. As the world moves quickly into virtual environments as part of the business community (check out our post on the Metaverse if you’re not familiar with this idea) virtual tours are an accessible tool that people understand. Google wants to support innovations, and it is designed to promote the latest and most successful trending technologies, including virtual tours. Google wants your business to be found if your business has the right information, products, and services people are looking for.