The Ways Virtual Tours Improve SEO Strategy

Your website is your showcase, it represents what you sell, it represents your agency, and ultimately it represents you. As a result, it's essential to have a well-positioned website to generate more traffic from search engines like Google and increase your chances of drawing in new customers.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is about improving your position in a search engine results page (SERP). Google is the dominant search engine, accounting for over 90% of searches processed globally. There are some regional exceptions; in China, Baidu holds 66% of the market, Google represents only 10%. Bing, Yahoo and Yandex are other minority share search engines, but when we talk about SEO, we usually refer to Google search results.

Why is SEO important?

To increase the number of visitors and therefore gain greater brand awareness, prospects and sales, you have to look at the ranking of your website in terms of relevant keywords. Your ranking is very important because the first three positions on Google receive more than 60% of clicks. If you are not the first page, then you will receive very little traffic to your site.

Keywords Optimization

First you need to identify the strategic keywords that you want to rank for in Google's SERP. How do you identify them? By choosing from those that are regularly typed by internet users (search volume). You can use search tools such as Google Keyword Planner for that insight. You need a Google Ads account, but signing up is free. Once you have found the search terms that your potential customers use, you can include them in the structure and content strategy of your website.

How virtual tours can help you

Adding these keywords analysis to your navigable Matterport space, for instance, will help Google understand that the content of your pages where it's displayed should be shown in searches for those terms. You can add the keywords in the title, add links in the template and add the address of that analysis, all of which can be tracked in Google.

Content (on the site) is king

Google loves "content", especially new content that visitors to your website will spend time interacting with and sharing. Google's algorithms take into account parameters such as bounce rate, time spent on the page and shares. The more content your website has, the better Google will rank your pages.

Backlinks

Backlinks are external websites that want to reference your site by linking to it in their own content, directing visitors to your page. The more backlinks you get from high quality or "authority" websites, the better.

Google considers these backlinks another key element of its algorithm in ensuring it displays relevant pages from authoritative websites. Google uses your backlinks profile to create an authority score for your website, a measure that allows you to determine which websites have a high value and should be included in the search results. If many high-authority websites direct their visitors to your website (via backlinks), it is a vote of confidence in your content. MOZ has created the domain authority score that is now widely used by SEOs. You can find out more about this here and see your DA score for free using this tool.

Wrapping Up

SEO is much more than what we've discussed here, but this article should provide a quick overview of how virtual tours can help you in your SEO strategy. Improving ranking in Google is a long-term process but the quality of your website content will always be fundamental to attracting more visitors to your website and converting them to customers as they find you an interesting and valuable resource.

To view the original article, visit the Matterport blog.