How Matterport 3D Virtual Tours Can Help With Your SEO Strategy

When you offer a Matterport Showcase  with your property listings, you capture the attention of your customers and multiply the benefits to your business. Far beyond a simple slideshow of photographs, a high-quality virtual tour provides an immersive 3D experience for prospective homebuyers. It renders a realistic sense of what the property looks like through virtual reality technology. It allows customers to visit a new home from the comfort of their current home, or office, or restaurant booth. But more than that, it draws them into an interactive environment and begins to develop in them a sense of ownership long before they step over the threshold.

Enhanced user experience is a key to getting and keeping clients. But the advantages of a Matterport Showcase do not stop there. Simply offering the service on your listing helps you to stand out from the competition, gives you the competitive edge. It is efficient, saving you time and money . And a virtual tour serves to qualify buyers before they schedule an appointment. It narrows down their choices. That way you do not end up running back and forth to unfruitful showings because a client did not like the dimensions of a bathroom or the size of a closet. Your Matterport Showcase becomes a permanent open house event without the need for a cleaning service each time a virtual visitor takes a look inside.

User experience is important. Conserving your resources is important too. Still, there is more. A Matterport Showcase is also an excellent opportunity to elevate your online effectiveness when optimized as an SEO strategy.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO ) is the process of making a web page or site more visible to Google and other search engines. When you list a property on your website, your hope is that people will see it. That is why you might include QR codes in your print advertising to send people to your website. After all, more than ninety percent of homebuyers begin their real estate search online. But finding your website or your listing cannot be left to chance, especially given the millions of searches and thousands of websites available. So, SEO strategy aims at improving your page’s position on the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP.

When a person enters a query into a search engine text box, millions of results appear within a fraction of a second. That is because search engines have already scoured the internet for information (before anyone typed a word) and stored it in their massive servers around the world. That information is then ranked in terms of relevance to the user’s question and level of authority. As a result of a query, the search engine presents what it believes to be the most relevant and authoritative answers – in rank order.

The problem is, even with millions of possible answers waiting for the click of a mouse or the touch of a finger, the first three offerings on the very first results page receive nearly seventy percent of the clicks. And it is estimated that some years over ninety percent of searches end on the first page, only ten answers deep. Think about that. About six percent of searches ever make it to page two.

So if most homebuyers who search online only ever see page one of the SERP, how do you ensure that your page is listed there? What is the secret to attracting the attention of Google, or any other search engine for that matter?

Well, that is the million dollar question. SEO specialists work tirelessly to help you develop a well-structured website that not only improves user experience for your customers and generates more web traffic, but also appeals to the likes of Google and its proprietary search algorithms. There is both an art and a science to the process. And, although search engines intentionally do not publish the parameters necessary to move up the ladder (more on that in a moment), there are proven principles that help to improve your rankings on the SERP.

When it comes to your real estate business, there are several strategies to help elevate your SERP rankings. One of those strategies is the use of virtual tours . While these factors can be considered across many different SEO strategies, they are applied here to virtual tours – one of your strongest boosts to improved SERP rankings.

Consider these five ways your Matterport Showcase can help with your SEO strategy.

Content

It is often said that, when it comes to SEO, “content is king.” You need finely-crafted material on your website that is relevant and useful to your audience. There was a time when people trying to optimize their web pages for better SERP results could simply focus on adding various keywords and linking to and from other websites. And those are solid strategies. A keyword is a word or phrase commonly used in online searches. By carefully selecting from those words and phrases with the highest search volume, you can increase the likelihood that your page will be seen by search engines. 

For your Matterport Showcase , using high-value targeted keywords in your virtual tour meta-data, i.e., title, description, hashtags, and any other related text on the web page.

But keyword placement on a page is not enough. In response to website developers cramming their pages full of keywords in order to “trick” search engines into choosing them, Google (and others) have changed – and continue to change – their search algorithms so as to produce the most authentic, organic , results possible. No longer is it suitable to stuff a web page with keywords. In fact, your website can be penalized for running with that as a sole strategy.

To ensure that their SERP results present authoritative answers, search engines (especially Google) place a high priority on quality content . Your focus for your website should be not on generating a bunch of useless information chock full of keywords, but on delivering competent and useful educational content to your customers. Create meaningful, valuable, and detailed content and Google will recognize and reward it in the SERP rankings.

Google’s algorithms also seem to lean toward and reward creative, innovative, and interactive content, like videos – and virtual tours. Not only will the keywords and content be attractive to search engines’ web-crawling robots, but your Matterport Showcase automatically brings you up a notch in the arena of innovation.

Bounce Rate and CTR

No matter where your website or page ends up in an online search, it is of little value unless users actually click on your link. Of course, the likelihood of that happening rises exponentially if you perform well on SERP results. 

Two measures of the effectiveness of your online campaign are bounce rate and click-through rate (CTR). Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your web page who leave (bounce) without moving on to other pages on your site or interacting with your content. CTR is the ratio of users who click on your link to the total users who view the page (or email, advertisement, etc.). An effective site engages visitors beyond the first page and entices them to click through the various links you offer.

Your Matterport 3D Virtual Tour presents excellent opportunities for your visitors to explore, and therefore navigate from one page to another on your website.

Time On Page

Search engines want to see that visitors to your website are not there to window shop. But in order to keep customers on your page, you need to present content that is compelling enough that they are disinclined to leave. Where bounce rate measures whether people interact with the content on a single page, time on page gauges how long they do so. It reveals if they are actually reading or otherwise engaging with the content, and how well that content is performing.

For instance, if you include an 1800-word article on one of your web pages, but find that visitors only remain on the page for thirty or forty seconds, you can be sure that they are not fully-engaging with the content. You can also be sure that Google will notice the lack of time spent on that page.

Creating an online Matterport strategy gives your visitors a compelling reason to remain on your site as they peruse high-resolution panoramic images, lifelike with vibrant colors and superb depth and contrast. Multiple views provide a simulated 3D aerial perspective of the floorplan , a cross section dollhouse view of each floor, and an interior 360-degree tour that positions viewers in every hallway and room in the house where they can see every surface and feature. Your Matterport Showcase has the power to engage homebuyers on your website longer than many other strategies.

Backlinks

Another fundamental component of your SEO strategy focuses on the placement of hyperlinks on external websites that point back to your web page. When they come from other authoritative domains, these backlinks serve as a signal to search engines that your content must be important and relevant. The more backlinks you receive from high quality (authoritative) websites, the better your ranking with Google.

Your virtual walk-throughs present an excellent opportunity for the creation of backlinks to your site and your listings. Anyone who refers to your property on their website can embed a link to your virtual tours to engage visitors on their own sites – and send them to yours. If you own multiple domains or have partner sites you can co-op with this would be ideal for a robust backlink strategy. In addition, some media outlets look for engaging content to relate to topics on their websites. Backlinks from high “domain authority” websites provide valuable algorithmic weight for website rankings and also can drive a significant amount of traffic to your site.

Shares on Social Media

Often overlooked, social media marketing is an important channel of potential traffic to your web page. Social media engagement including likes, shares, and comments are valuable in ranking a website or page in SERPs. There is, without a doubt, a correlation between a high-volume social media presence and engagement and high search engine ranking. 

Social media can be a fantastic tool to get the word out about – and links back to – your website. Your Matterport Showcase is an exciting and highly-shareable tool that sits well on social media sites. 

 Matterport Showcases offer an inviting user experience for your visitors, clients, and potential customers anywhere in the world and on any digital device. They are practical, saving you time and money. They position you above your competition. More than that, these virtual tours can create a solid core for sound SEO practices that can help to generate more traffic to your website and to your business when added to your overall marketing strategy .

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