6 Tips on How to Stage and be Ready for your 360 Virtual Tour
You’re ready for your virtual tour. You’ve hired a company, or are thinking of hiring one. Whichever the case, here are some good pro-tips from experience to help you stage your tour and be ready beforehand.
Staging works great for both Google and custom tours, and it can really help stand out for the latter when you combine color schemes, table of content, and hotspots (info spots) to the virtual tour.
The Google tours are what people are first used to seeing as your Google tour will automatically be placed in their Maps results. These results are visited often, and may even provide indirect SEO benefits.
Here are some useful tips
In general, it’s great to have a bright interior space. If not, we have editing tools to improve all photos taken. Ensure that all your lights are working properly to have consistent light throughout the tour.
Stage your place
Stage your place just like you would want to showcase to a customer as they walk in your door. It’s these virtual, visual impressions that can bring people from their device and ready to walk in your door.
Display your safety protocols
Not just staging, but displaying your safety protocols helps make it safe, compelling, and ready for people to come visit you. Especially since 2020, customers are more conscious of distancing and sanitizing.
Safety protocols at check-in
Watch for the weather
It’s hard to measure the weather. When possible, days that are at least partly sunny are superior. Some of the 360 photos are exterior and having some blue in the sky help make the tour more compelling for the user.
Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, MN
Showcase specific photos
If you have machines, products, scenes, or anything you want to call out, let us know. You can have specific photos of these for your custom tour.
X-Ray Machine
Think about Stills and Tiny (little) Planet photos
Think about opportunities for stills and Tiny Planet photos. These can be a great, creative way for your use on social media and other content. Be the center of your planet!
Twitter Post on Tiny Planets and Stills
Here’s just another example of what can be done. This is a plain scene, although you can have features such as your staff be the center of the planet!
Armory – Minneapolis
Consider HIPAA and other precautions
From either HIPAA laws or personal choices, your location may need to be empty. For this reason, LocalMN is available for your tours on weekends.
LocalMN provides both custom and Google tours for you for 2 reasons:
The custom tours are superior. There are tables of contents, branding, your color schemes, and the control and assurance that all the arrows point to the right direction. This is what we recommend you embed on your website with a short and easy code that we provide for you.
Also, the tool we use to create these virtual tours allow us to publish both the Google and custom tours in not a lot of extra time. We pass this saving to you and you get the best of both worlds!
We have a lot of experience in Google My Business (now Google Business Profile). Have your virtual tour created by us and hit us up with any questions.
Virtual Tours in a COVID 2022
Virtual Tours in a COVID 2022
Safely Stand Out with Your 360 Photos
To comply with the different 2022 COVID orders, more businesses and organizations have been hosting virtual tours. Whether it’s a Google or custom tour, it’s to share your place with customers to tour with these 360 photo spheres, and from the safety of their device.
Do you have a recent virtual tour? If so, do you showcase safety features that you have for your customers, patients, or students? It’s pretty accepted that we’re in a new world with more safety precautions whether it winds up being continued distancing and sanitizing, or more. Here are some 2022 tips for your virtual tours, both in general and more specific to safety.
Safely staging your front door and main area is the starting point
This is often your virtual tour starting point. Just like a residential home, this clean area is what gives a first impression to the customer. Even if it’s just dusting and light cleaning, these virtual tours and 360 photos should be as close to an in-person tour as possible and the first impression of your business front door is so valuable.
Above is the entrance to an upper-end quartz countertop gallery. Below, this flower bouquet was staged up front just for the virtual tour. This small effort alone helps make the gallery more welcoming once viewers enter the front door.
Showcase your call-to-action features
More so with the custom virtual tours, but you can showcase your calls-to-action in Google tours, too. Google is just way more limited.
For both, it’s generally a good idea to have each photo sphere, or scene, point in the same or similar direction (the above examples are South). This is done to help ensure ease-of-use for the many customers who just navigate by the arrows, while still having the opportunity to swipe to different directions.
In this case, a dental office has a newer, modern 3d x-ray machine that they wanted to call out so we turned the machine slightly and added an infospot (hotspot) to explain the machine.
They take COVID seriously and we decided to showcase a couple safety protocols for their patients including a plexiglass panel up front along with hand sanitizers to build trust.
Showcase your exterior 360 photos
This is incredibly important and serves two major purposes:
- To show your building and features to let users become familiar with the look
- To show roads, street signs, address, and any landmark to not only let users know exactly where you are, but for them to automatically know how they will get there.
We have a lot of experience in both of these and know how to make it tick. People want convenience and easy answers and this is a great way to provide both.
This customer wanted to showcase the building address and parking lot from the neighboring road.
Many of their patients also enter the area from the back end so we focused this 360 photo on the street sign.
Highlight pristine outdoor views
If you’re in an attractive area, let’s do everything we can to showcase it like a dental clinic virtual tour I did. It can provide both implied prestige to the customer and even convince them to safely enjoy the area during their visit literally right outside by walking the promenade at Edina’s Centennial Lake. Side note, if you ice skate, this lake is a big, local skating destination in the winter.
As well, the same clinic offers a free or discounted coffee for their customers at Ambrosia Coffee on the main floor. We decided to use a couple 360 photos that show open space to compel users. Customers can even safely enjoy their coffee while walking around the lake area.
And the exterior with a couple tables safely apart.
Stills and Tiny Planet photos
It’s important to have these, at the least just to have on hand. You can add stills to your Google Business Profile at any time which helps keep it updated with very little time. I use Google Photos and everything is very user-friendly and organized, for me anyway. There are plenty of other options as well.
I do love Tiny Planet photos just for the wow and cool factor. It’s not necessarily going to make a direct impact on sales or new customers, but they indirectly could, especially depending on your industry. These often bring personality to your group and can give users a trusting feel for you, especially if you use people or even staff in these photos.
This photo below turned out effective, and these all can easily be included with virtual tours. They’re actually great for Google Posts and Instagram and should only grow in popularity in 2022.
By taking just a little time before your virtual tour, you can have your place staged to your liking. Having a 2022 safety strategy for virtual tours still during COVID for your custom or Google tour is even better! It can be just these little things that can turn a casual browser to a customer at your location.
Feel free to comment on Twitter!
Google Local Services Ads for 2021
I first wrote about Local Service Ads upon its inception in 2017. It’s a great concept. Don’t pay for ranking, or even conversions. Just pay for actual local leads. Now we’re looking at 2021 and they’ve slowly and continuously expanded.
First, Google shows how you can learn how to start your own campaign by seeing how Local Services work.
Many industries are available for this, and here’s a few current carpet cleaning industry Twin Cities Local Services Ad search results for Google Guaranteed:
Google Guaranteed does give you that green check for visual trust, and they may also back you with a money-back guarantee. Plus, these stick towards the top of search results.
More industries are now qualified in Minnesota for 2021, including lawyers and specialties within, and many others including the carpet cleaning example above. One thing stays the same:
Google’s signup process is unique for each business category. This means that a turnkey solution to just leave it for companies to fulfill for you may not be the best for you. It does take your effort.
You must pass rigorous checks to be able to use Local Service Ads for your business.
These include passing a criminal background check, having valid liability insurance and proving you have the correct licenses to be able to carry out work in the first place.
For local businesses, this gives you the ability to measure your ad cost. You can choose how much or not your lead is worth to you.
Scroll and see the embedded Google Spreadsheet to see the categories currently available in Minnesota:
Google Local Services ads can also give you more real estate in search results in addition to your organic listings and standard Google Ads.
Here’s where you can sign up to be Google Guaranteed for your respective services.
Localmn Interactive provides Local Services Ads consulting for our virtual tours customers.
Virtual Tours During COVID
Virtual tours for businesses have been very compelling well before the COVID pandemic came. They simply let users tour your location to get a good feel and then hopefully visit you.
Some of you are open, some of you are not. COVID still brings a challenge. Potential customers can’t just show up in person beforehand, but you can keep your visual process moving forward.
Benefits of Local Business Virtual Tours
Visually showcase your social distancing guidelines
You may have plexiglass at your arrival to separate you from customers or social distancing floor stickers. Showcase these in your virtual tours to help ensure safety for your visitors.
Reach more potential customers with less
By letting people remotely tour your location, you can reach more while keeping face-to-face contact low to help limit the spread.
Increase conversions
At the end of the tour, you can direct users to book a reservation or appointment. It can be as easy as placing a simple form on your respective web page.
Virtual Tour Options
- Google Street View and virtual tours – show in your Google My Business (maps) profile and it’s highly searchable
- Custom virtual tours – like the Google Street View tours, and with customized features and branding for your business to embed on your site, social media, and other relevant places
- Matterport – very popular and a definite leader in the real estate industry
One myth: “Having Google Virtual Tours helps your SEO rankings”. Beware of this claim. This can arguably be indirectly true since the more complete your Google My Business profile is, the better your local SEO rankings are in general. A Google virtual tour will help. With that said, virtual tours do not have a direct impact on your SEO rankings.
We hope this all helps you understand virtual tours and the impact it can make.
LocalMN specializes in virtual tours. See our Google and custom virtual tour page for more information.
Google Trusted Verifier Program is now called Business Provider
Per this blog post by Mike Blumenthal, Google’s Trusted Verifier program is now replaced by their Business Provider program.
What this means for LocalMN Interactive is that we’re no longer eligible to offer these services. We’re an agency. From their Business Provider FAQ page:
The proposed partner must not have access to the business listings they are verifying.
Agencies, SEOs, and resellers are not eligible for this program.
I’m not too surprised with this, given the apparent ease to be accepted. A good couple years ago, to apply I believe you needed to be invited to by a friend to take a somewhat-detailed 10-question test. In some forum, the link got leaked, I jumped on it, answered all 10 questions correctly, and bam! I was a Google Trusted Verifier.
No serious leads ever came from it, and it really seemed to be a program ripe for manipulation.
As of now, I proactively updated that marketing page and took out internal links to it. Eventually, I’ll 301 redirect the page to the closet appropriate one. I’m taking out the Trusted Verified icon for future images to it and replaced it with a Theta camera icon shown here and just partially at the top icon on this post.
Google Icons with Theta
If you have any questions, certainly let me know.
LocalMN Interactive provides local search marketing services with a specialization in Google 360 Photography.
Happy 2020! Showcase Your Google Listings with 360 Photos and Virtual Tours
First of all, Happy New Year! I hope you had a fun and safe New Year, and all the best wishes for you in this new decade.
In 2010, 360 photos and virtual tours really didn’t exist. In fact, Google My Business (GMB) listings didn’t launch until June, 2014. The Rochester Post-Bulletin even recognized this in a piece written in August, 2017.
Here are a few known findings from Google:
- When searching for businesses, consumers use mapping products 44% of the time
- Listings with photos and a virtual tour are twice as likely to generate interest
- On average, 41% of these place searches result in an on-site visit
A brief overview of Google 360 Street View Trusted Pro Photographers:
Have you used this as a consumer? If so, you may have gotten great visuals of inside a location, implied directions, or compelling photos enticing you to visit their door. Maybe a show at First Avenue?
You can easily bring your location to life, and this is just one part of Google My Business that can help.
Here’s to you! Happy 2020, and all the best in using Google tools to help benefit your business or organization.
Localmn Interactive offers Google Street View Photography services with plenty of knowledge, experience, and local search strategies.
New Google Images Update for both Users and Marketers
Between Google My Business (GMB) and the new Google Images format, there are some opportunities. Some are from you, and some are just from being you.
There’s a difference between Google Images and your Google My Business (GMB) photos
For this read, It’s important to know though that Google Images and photos you take for Google My Business (GMB) are different. For users to see Google Images, for the most part they need to click on the image tab or images within the main search results. You can link to them though, including specific images. You just don’t get the SEO benefits.
From Google’s post titled Pick an idea and make it happen with Google Images:
Starting today (Aug 9th 2019), when you select an image, it appears in a side panel on the page, next to the search results. Importantly, it stays there as you scroll, letting you easily compare images with others on the page.
For retailers and publishers, this updated interface also means people are more likely to visit a web page to get information to help them with a task, or to buy a product on your site.
Google, The Keyword – Aug 6th 2019
I absolutely love the 1st point! I haven’t seen the 2nd as much, mostly because I’m in local lead generation and awareness, and only a bit in e-commerce.
Local examples of Google Images
McKinney Roe is in the growing Downtown East neighborhood in Minneapolis. Google mages include photos from the own site, Yelp, the Strib, City Pages, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Heavy Table, and many more. They all collectively provide compelling images to their offerings.
45th Parallel Distillery is an established craft distillery in New Richmond, WI. They naturally have Google images from their own site, Yelp, Heavy Table, and TripAdvisor. They also have local and niche images from City Pages, WCCO, Pioneer Press, and even CNN. The main image selected is a photo of Gamle Ode Aquavit news from The Growler.
A year ago August, Samatar Crossing opened, connecting the Minneapolis Cedar/Riverside neighborhood to Downtown East by U.S. Bank Stadium with a new multi-cultural connection including an ever-growing number of Google Images.
How Do I Link to these Image Pages?
This may be important for marketers and SEO professionals. These image result links are all dynamic, so it doesn’t help your SEO efforts. It doesn’t hinder it, either. Using a URL shortener like Bit.ly can at least help you measure the overall performance. The image links above are indeed Bit.ly shortened dynamic URLs.
This is just one way to shorten these dynamic URLs. I’d love to hear others that work well for you! Also, the new Google Images format is just a couple weeks old, and is in a different category from the GMB photos that you take. Have you used it to your advantage?