With rapidly developed Google Products and their domination on a market it is hard to find any business development manager/owner or marketer who does not understand an importance of using some Google Products.
There are plenty of such products that will help any business to grow. However there are some tricks that most people do not know as they are either too busy to find all relevant information on how to use these products properly or they simply do not understand how to use them.
We are not trying to cover all products offered by Google for businesses and are going to focus on free ones that are a must for every business and we can offer our services to improve a business visibility in Web Search and Search based on a customer location. They are Google Business Profile listing(further GBP listing) and Google Maps.
Google Business Profile Listing
We assume that most businesses are well aware of this free Google product, however for those who are not sure or even do not know what it is here is a Google definition of this product
Google Business Profile listing is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. By verifying and editing your business information, you can both help customers find you and tell them the story of your business.
As you can see from its definition using this product will allow a business to manage their online presence not just as a listing itself but also through Google Web Search and Google Maps. How does it work?
Most businesses do not know that in its current version GBP listings become more important than ever. Now GBP listings are a single point to collect all business information in one simple form in order to show it to any potential customer in the search and the maps. All views collected from a business website, its GMB listing and information shown on the maps for a business is now aggregated into one single metric and used in ranking your business across all Google business products,
For example a business website can have 100 views a day, 50 views for its GMB as a GMB profile in the Google Web Search and 200 views for business photos submitted under its GMB listing either by its business owner or by existing business customers. With all this data Google will count it as 350 total views a day for this business. This way any business visibility on Google is boosted through extra views that a business gets for their GMB listing and their information shown on Google Maps.
We often analyse local GMB listings to see how effective this GMB product is being used by some businesses. From that analysis we can say that they are very few businesses that are using it to its full potential.
Some business owners seem to have troubles even with initial verification of their business location leaving their GMB listing incomplete and unverified. And from those are lucky to complete verification process not all of them go further than providing just basic details.
Important: Without full and complete business information their GMB listings have a low priority in Google decision to include them in a search result on Google Maps and Google Search.
As a result these businesses loosing to their competitors being pushed and shown only at the end of search results or not shown at all.
Sometimes Google even offers the map users businesses that are further away from some user putting these businesses at the top of search results while a closeby business is shown at the very bottom. The reason for it that the closeby business has not provided all business information for their GMB listing and Google cannot see it as fully relevant to what a map user is looking for.
DIY Tip: Provide all information that Google asks for your GMB listing, skip nothing. Add business photos that tell your potential customers what you do and how you do it. Encourage your customer leave review and photos showing their interaction with your business product and services. Remember that photos will bring your more views from your listing shown on Google Maps and it affects your total visibility across all Google products.
We have seen a few instances where a business established a few years ago is loosing in visibility on Google Maps to a newly established competitor just because the older business despite on having more reviews with a higher overage rating is pushed at the end of a search result because the competitor has much more photographs under their GMB profile.
How can we help: We can audit a GMB listing and give an advice on how a business can get the best from all its features. When audit is ordered with our other services such as business photos or business 360 tours we can do it for free, otherwise we charge up to $99 for a GMB listing audit.
Business 360 degree tours for Google Street View
The biggest part in a business visibility across Google products plays media that a business is willing and ready to share with their potential customers under their GMB listings.
Media such as still photographs, videos, 360 degree photos and tours are not just a visual help for potential customers in order for them to make a decision to visit a business in person or even make a purchase or order one of offered services from it.
It’s also what brings a lot of views for a business GMB listing shown on Google Maps and its panel in web search results. It is proven by Google and independent studies(see information about requesting these studies from us at the end of this page) that businesses with a lot of photos and especially 360 degree photos & 360 degree business tours are getting more calls and visits from Google Maps than those who has no media or just few of them.
There is no magic it works that way because businesses with reach media GMB listings show their customers what their business is about and how it is run without any need for a customer to spend extra time to visit it in person and see it.
Moreover if a business has a 360 degree virtual tour done for their inside spaces(shop, restaurant, hotel rooms etc) and submitted to Google Maps as a business inside view this business is inviting potential customers to visit their business online and see it inside 24/7 without even going there.
It helps these customers to become familiar with a business and get a feeling that they know this business well and they can trust it. Even if they do not need any product/service from such a business right now they will recall it later when such product/service are needed.
And as usually comes with 360 degree business tours they are made from multiple 360 degree photos connected together to provide a walk through experience. A tour can be made from 5 or even 500 360 degree photos. It depends on a business space size and what they want to show through the tour.
Remember we have mentioned above that photo views are counted towards total Google ranking for a business. That means that a single map user or a website visitor can give a business as many views for the whole business profile on Google as a number of 360 degree photos the tour is made of.
DIY tip: Encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business with their own normal still photos and at least try to take your own photographs showing your potential customers what your business is about. When you take your own photographs remember they are not for you as a business owner/manager, they need to show your potential customers why they need to choose you and what makes your business unique and standing out from your competitors.
Unfortunately 360 degree photography requires some great experience in capturing, processing and building a 360 degree tour. Also a gear to capture such a media and software required for processing and building a tour are much more expensive that a professional service from a Google Trusted Photographer.
How can we help: As Google Trusted Photographer we can offer a great expertise and deliver fast a professionally created 360 degree tour for your business on Google Maps and for your business website. We have solutions that can suit any budget. Our prices for 360 business tours starts from $499(GST inc) as one time fee. We will never charge your for views/visitors/clicks and your tour will be a long-time solution for promoting your business among Google products. We are flexible and have a few solutions in terms of hardware & software that allows us to pick the right tool for just about any business industry. For example we can do 360 business website tours that are either hosted on a 3rd party website and have some small hosting fee or we can do a self hosted by a business tour that will be free of any hosting fee forever.
Basically if you spread our fee for creating a 360 business tour over just the first year of using it it can be even less $1 a day and again nothing to pay for each potential customer sent to you by Google. If your business is located in a high foot traffic area you can get 10 and even more new customers a day visiting or calling you while it still be that less than $1. And even if you choose a product with a 3rd party hosting fee it still makes it super cheap as our hosting fee for one tour will never exceed $20 per tour a month which will just add a bit more but still less than one $1 per day.
Just to compare it with another Google product called adWords which is the most popular among marketers and digital marketing agencies. You can expect to pay from $1 and up to even $100 to Google for every single visit your website gets from your adWords campaign.
As a result you spend a lot of money for most of expensive clicks from bots, your competitors. Most of other google users will still leave your website very soon or straight away bringing your business zero value over a lot of your budget spent on every click from adWords. With a 360 degree business tour placed on Google Maps however it will bring you 10s or even 100s of times more over some longer period of time for the same $1.
No more bots or competitors can waste your budget as you won’t be paying for clicks or views, just for the service to create a tour for your business and publishing it to Google Maps.
360 degree business tours for a business website
Remember we have mentioned above that all business views are now counted and aggregated as total views for a business across all Google products . That means that if you have a 360 degree business tour also published on your business website it also will work towards improving your overall business ranking by adding more views from your website business tour towards your total business views count. What we need to add here though that there is one extra benefit of having your business tour published on your business website. It is actually quite a huge benefit for any website.
One of the key factors that Google is using to rank any website is called Engagement rate. It is simply based on how long a website visitor stays on the website or how long they are engaged with the website content. Normally Engagement rates are really low as it won’t take too much time for a regular website visitor to scan all textual/visual information on the website. Normally it is one minute but most likely it can be 10s seconds after which a visitor leaves. However when you add a 360 business tour to your website you add something more interesting that just text and most visitors will spend much more time walking through your business tour increasing your business engagement rate almost to minutes. It will be an indicator for Google that your business website has some interesting content and Google will send you more of their customers from their Web search product putting your website higher in search results. Something like this would be very hard and sometimes it would be even impossible to achieve with any other product.
How much can it cost to create a 360 degree tour for a website? In most cases it costs nothing or ads a little bit extra to the fee for our service for a regular 360 degree business tour for Google Street View. Yes, that’s true you are getting two products but paying only one service fee.
Please note though that tours for business websites also can be custom designed and created as self hosted(no hosting fee ever) with high resolution professional photo cameras and can be have menus(for easy navigation inside a tour), videos and a lot of extra textual & visual information. They can even have a 360 aerial photo taken by us with a drone(we are CASA licensed pilots) as part of a 360 degree business tour.. Building a tour like this takes as much time as building & programming a micro website. That’s what brings extra expenses.
However it is worth it as the more information you supply inside a tour, whether it is just text, flat(not 360 degree) photos, videos and all 360 photos the tour built from the longer you will be keeping your website visitors on your business website. One thing you need to know though we will never push our clients for more expensive solution if we know there will be very little or no benefit vs money spent on making it in the most expensive way.
However if we see it will add more views and increase engagement rate for a business website with a custom designed self hosted 360 degree tour we will always offer it as a better alternative to a much cheaper regular service we use to build tours quickly making it affordable to any business.
If you want to read more about our business services or contact us for a chat or a quote please visit our Business Services section.
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