It’s not every day that the Chicago business environment can get changed in as short as six months. Whether increased costs have arisen from safety requirements at your local dentistry, or traffic is down 80%+ at your restaurant - it goes without saying that times have fundamentally changed. Last month, we spoke about the need for SEO in a post-pandemic environment. Today we want to touch on a more niche but highly untapped area of local SEO that can not only increase SEO rankings, but drive higher engagement and traffic to your physical store location – that niche being 3D Tours for your Google My Business page.

What are 3D Tours?

Most popular in real estate, 3D tours are virtual environments where folks can click through 3D photos and move around in the environment, not just a static image. We’ve attached an example below. They are made by stitching 3D photos together with software, giving a clear and interactive experience for the end user in the place they are touring. This gives a unique differentiator for a variety of industries: real estate, local business, museums, colleges, parks and many more. This technology has only gotten more important in a Covid-19 day to day environment, and will continue to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 34.5%.

-  Example of a great 3D restaurant tour here.

What are the Benefits?

Now that we’ve discussed what 3D tours are, why do they matter to Local SEO and Google My Business (GMB)? Well, it goes without saying that Google loves giving users information they want to see. With that in mind, lets look at a normal GMB listing.

A Complete GMB Listing Includes:

-  The Business Name

-  Industry / Service Type

-  User Reviews

-  Descriptions for Websites and the Business Itself

-  Hours of Operation

-  Photos

-  Link to Website

-  Phone Number

360 Tours are usually not included or forgotten in GMB listings. Supported since 2016, this feature allows businesses to upload images or fully made tours to their GMB listing. This includes keywords for photos, but also drives higher engagement with your content. This leads to users getting to know your business more, and can lead to higher traffic not only on your website, but physical location as well. This increased traffic to your physical location can lead to higher review counts, among many other positive benefits. Outside of physical traffic, it helps boost your website SEO with increased traffic from your GMB listing. This, coupled with higher SEO rankings found for comparable listings with and without 3D tours, shows that google values the more interactive experience for their users. While Google hasn’t released any data on value provided, we do have another large platform that has released info on their newly released 3D software – Zillow. Released in 2019, Zillow 3D Home Tours has allowed thousands of realtors and photographers to upload 3D home tours directly to their listings. The data from this new feature is very promising. It shows double the views on average, 50% more engagement and 10% lower days on market average.

Extrapolating this to your business, think of the benefits it could provide to your GMB listing. You have more engaging content that allows for more keyword attribution on the images and your first time customers can get a better understanding of what your location is like. You also get access to view counts on your tours, so you can quantify the value that it creates every time you log into your Google Business profile.

The Bigger Picture and Wivisor’s Opinion

Taking a big picture look on what 3D Tours provide; it goes without saying that the technology is only going to continue to grow and disrupt the brick and mortar space. The team at Wivisor believes that most local brick and mortar location businesses in Chicago should have a 3D virtual tour. Local SEO can be a very competitive space depending on your business focus, and increased engagement on your GMB listing, increased keyword attribution, increased physical traffic, analytics tracking, and increased SEO rankings make getting a 3D tour for your local business a no brainer.

If you would like to learn more about our Chicago local SEO services, feel free to reach out to us via our contact form, we’d love to talk to you about the many niche avenues that exist within the space to help differentiate your business and drive higher conversations, online traffic and sales. Thanks for reading!

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