You must have been asked this question more than once if you are a virtual tour photographer. Clients always want to know “How virtual tours can affect your SEO”, “Are virtual tours good for your SEO?”, “Does my website rank higher with virtual tours?” – The answer to this question is a simple, YES!
By adding virtual tours to your property website:
- You will receive more backlinks
- You will get more social signals
- Clients will spend more time on your website
- Your bounce rate will decrease
- You will receive more traffic
How does this work? Well let’s dive into some specifics…
1. You will receive more “back links”
Websites with virtual tours will in general receive 30% more backlinks than sites that don’t have a virtual tour. Why? Because the page where the virtual tour is placed, will have more interesting content and is therefore more valuable to link back to by other companies.
“Link juice” is important to a website, especially if the link is coming from a website that has a high authority. If the site linking back to your website is ranking high in Google then this will positively affect your SEO too and you will soon see that in your own page rankings!
Continue reading about backlinks here
2. You will receive more social signals
If you have virtual tours on your website, you will likely be shared a lot more than sites that don’t have virtual tours. Not only will you share your own page once the tour is added, other people visiting your website will also be 50% more likely to share your content than if you didn’t have a virtual tour on your site.
The more people share your content, the more chances that people click on the link to view your web page. This will increase your traffic and in turn will positively affect your rankings.
Especially if you have a virtual tour software that allows you to share the tour on Social media direct from your website – Google KNOWS that people are doing this and if it happens a lot, Google thinks “This page must have interesting information on it for people to share it so often” and thus it will give you more credit towards that page.
3. People will spend more time on your website
One thing that Google likes if that people do 1 search and don’t immediately come back to the search engine to perform the same search again. If you have virtual tours on your website, this means people will stay on your site for longer, letting Google know they found what they were looking for.
On average, we have seen an increase of a massive 80% in the time people are spending on a site with virtual tours compared to one that doesn’t. This will definitely have a positive impact on your SEO
4. It reduces the bounce rate
Much like in tip number 3, the bounce rate is also important. A bounce is when people come on to your website and immediately close it again. A virtual tour will increase the time people spend on your website and therefore the bounce rate will decrease. This is also very good for your SEO and have a positive impact.
5. You will receive more traffic
This one depends on how you have configured your virtual tour and if your virtual tour software allows you to add links in your tour (like you can with My360). If you can add links in your virtual tour to the property or your website, then even if the tour link is shared (as opposed to your website link) people will click inside the tour to visit your website or the page where your property lives. This will give you more traffic and that is good for your SEO.
These are 5 points you can tell your client when they ask how virtual tours are going to affect their SEO. But always keep this in mind:
Google likes content – content is King as they say. Therefore, if a client has a good page with relevant content combined with an interesting virtual tour, the chances are that their site is going to benefit a lot from having virtual tours added.
Not only will their SEO increase, but they will also make their website stand out from the millions of others that all show the same pictures and the same styles. Virtual tours will make the difference and the client will soon see more leads coming through now that they have added virtual tours to their portfolio!
