So you’ve got a great website, but you’re still not seeing the traffic you want? Are you looking to find a new way to boot the online presence of your websites pages/blog posts? This blog post will show you how to use virtual tours to exponentially boost your website’s SEO and help generate more traffic. Check out how virtual tours boost SEO to help gain a higher position in Google/Bing rankings.

How Virtual Tours Boost SEO For Your Website

Why Virtual Tours are a powerful SEO tool

Several years ago, I realised that virtual tours are a powerful digital marketing tool. At Simply 360, we create virtual tours to immerse the user into an in-depth experience. Many things make a virtual tour a powerful marketing tool. They let the person feel like they are physically onsite at any location they enter. 360 virtual tours are the only digital medium that is truly a self-guided experience.

They enable and encourage the user to journey at their own pace and venture deeper into a location. Lastly, it’s the only medium that gives the person a feeling that they have already been at the location in person when they physically arrive onsite. Even if they have never been before, they feel like they have already been there.

What is a 360 virtual tour?

A 360 virtual tour is an immersive digital tour that is photographed and designed to your company’s branding guidelines with a specific focus in mind. Additionally, all our photographers are Google Certified. You can navigate around a business/location by clicking and dragging your mouse.

This is an ideal tool for discovering a new location. It also gives you an excellent idea of what the space is like and if there is something unique on-site, like an onsite facility, impressive features or various points of interest. The best feature about this type of tour is that you can create multiple tours for different locations, so if you’re in your office and want to explore your city, you can click on a map and click ‘View Tour’. You can also add interactive features to your tours, like photos, video, audio and more.

The Benefits of a Virtual Tour

Every business has a target audience, so when you create a 360 virtual tour of your website, you’re essentially treating every visitor as a potential customer. Think about it: How can you get potential customers to engage with your website if you don’t show them what you’re about?

Virtual tours allow you to show potential customers the experiences that you can not traditionally showcase on your website. If you’ve never been to the Opera House, for instance, you can use your 360 virtual tour to show them what it’s like, what’s available onsite and what they can do/expect.

How to use Virtual Tours to boost your website’s SEO

There are plenty of different benefits that a virtual tour has on SEO. Below are some ranking factors for SEO and how a virtual tour can directly impact and strengthen your search ranking.

Dwell Time

Google takes dwell time very seriously, and this metric directly relates to factors when someone goes to your site from Google Search. This is referred to as long clicks vs short clicks. If a person goes to your site and is only there for 15 seconds, Google interprets that as a short time and not relevant to the result. If the person is on your site for many minutes, it tells Google that what the person is on is relevant, engaging and meaningful for what they searched. It is well known that virtual tours have been known to increase dwell time by 5 – 10 fold. We have some pages on our site where people spend 30+ minutes.

Useful Content

Our highest-ranking pages on Google are our pages/posts with virtual tours embedded in them. In a sea of ever-growing content, ours reaches people for a couple of reasons. First, we produce informative and useful content about virtual tours. Secondly, we embed our portfolio work in the blog itself. These multiply the blogs’ longevity by finding useful content and engaging in the rich virtual tour multimedia we create. This, in turn, increases our ranking on Google.

Multimedia

Content such as photos, videos, audio and virtual tours help pages rank in their own right. Pages/posts without relevant multimedia content rank lower, and studies have found that integrating multimedia into your pages increase ranking. A virtual tour can be a mix of photo, video, audio and a deeply engaging immersive experience for your audience.

RankBrain

Google doesn’t just measure what is on a webpage but also how people interact with the content. RankBrain is Googles AI-powered algorithm that determines how a person engages with content on the page itself. By hosting a virtual tour on your website, it shows Google that you have directly engaged relevant content for people to explore and stay on your site for longer.

SEO best practices

If you do not see the traffic you want, it’s time to reevaluate your website’s SEO strategy. Although SEO’s original purpose was to rank your website in Google to get more site visitors, the best SEO strategies nowadays are more focused on getting the right people to see your content and converting those visitors into leads and customers.

It’s still important to drive traffic to your website. To do that, you need to create content that’s engaging and fresh. It would be best if you also used the right tactics and strategies to make sure that traffic coming to your website gets your site’s best content and converts them into buyers.

Conclusion – Virtual Tours Boost SEO

The age of virtual reality is well and truly here. Virtual reality and 360 virtual tours can be a fantastic way to showcase and market your product and/or business. They have real potential to dramatically change how the public thinks about your brand and your service/products. If you are looking at creating an interactive virtual tour, contact us today.

Have you ever thought of using virtual tours to boost SEO ranking? Do you currently have a virtual tour for your business/organisation? Are you looking to improve your SEO score? Are there any other ranking factors that are not mentioned in this blog? Join the discussion today and comment down below :)

Dimitri Cassimatis( Founder )

Dimitri is the founder of Simply 360, which specialises in creating immersive, interactive and engaging 360 / VR virtual tours, AR integration and marketing consultancy. He has worked in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years and has a passion for creating virtual tours with a key focus in strategic implementation.