If you have a real estate website but haven’t integrated virtual tours of your projects yet, you are missing out on an opportunity to captivate readers with an impressive visual display.
But creating virtual tours and incorporating them isn’t enough, you need an SEO strategy to get your website noticed in the SERPs based on those. So how can you do that? That’s what we are going to share in today’s post.
Continue reading to discover some powerful strategies for optimizing virtual tours and online listings.
Strategies for Optimizing Virtual Tours and Online Listings
Here are some proven real estate search engine optimization strategies to generate more engagement through virtual tours:
Target the Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is one of the fundamentals of search engine optimization. You must know what keywords are the most relevant to your real estate business and the intent behind each. If your aim is to drive business through your website, you should target more commercial keywords.
Consider using such keywords while writing the title and description for your virtual tour. Google will be able to understand the content on the page better and display the page containing the virtual tour on Googe against the relevant queries.
You can also consider adding keywords that contain phrases like “3D tour” and “virtual tour” to boost your chances of getting noticed in the SERPs.
Invest in the Content
Content is king. This stays true even for the virtual tours you create and the page where it is displayed. The content on the page where the virtual tour is displayed should complement the content used for the tour. Besides being SEO-friendly, the content needs to be engaging as bounce rate and the average session time are considered important SEO factors.
Thus, consider the content for the 3D tour page or the listing where you are posting about your real estate business. Post little but make sure whatever you are putting there on behalf of your brand is not fluff and doesn’t contain redundant information.
Content is the force that generates leads and drives sales for an online real estate website. Thus, it’s always part of the SEO strategy for real estate. So make sure your content for the virtual tours and the overall website is user-driven, skimmable, and delivers value to the readers.
Create Backlinks
According to Hubspot, 69% of marketers believe that buying links leads to b better search rankings. Link building has massive potential, high-quality backlinks not only bring referral traffic but also boost your authority on Google. Apart from that, there is always a chance of getting leads through traffic coming from another website.
Hence, consider creating backlinks for the page where the virtual tours are placed. The more backlinks you create for it the higher its organic visibility will get over time, allowing you to showcase your properties in an engaging manner.
But make sure the backlinks you are creating are of high quality. Getting a link from a spammy website will do more harm than good.
Optimize Your Website for Page Speed
Page speed is one of the most important ranking factors. According to a study, if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 53% of mobile visitors will leave. And 79% of shoppers who experience trouble with site performance, won’t return to the site to buy again.
While it’s tempting to add virtual tours to your website, one has to be careful regarding the weight it adds to your website. In case it is affecting the page loading speed, cut down some parts and optimize it until you feel the pages are loading in a seamless manner.
Transcribe the Virtual Tour
Transcribed text can get your website noticed in the SERPs. If you are adding a 3D tour to your website, transcribe it. The transcribed text might also contain keywords and phrases searched on Google. So when you are giving an explanation of what a user could encounter on their virtual tour, you enable Google to understand the content better and show it to the relevant audience.
Also, it’s not necessary that the transcribed text will always have the niche-specific keywords in it; you can add those yourself once the text is transcribed.
Why Use Virtual Tours in a Real Estate Website?
For a real estate website, there are various benefits of using a 3D video or a virtual tour video.
1. Higher engagement
People love visuals because they are informative, engaging, and easy to understand. No matter how boring a certain piece of information is, a video or infographic can add some fun to it. Also, the information consumed through visuals can be retained for a longer period of time.
Virtual tours add grandeur to real estate properties. All the amenities and features of a project can be seen at once. This entices the target audience to come again in the future and spend more time on the website.
2. Show multiple properties at once
While offering guaranteed SEO services to our clients, we encourage them to add a virtual tour to their websites as virtual tours can display multiple properties at once. For instance, if you have a website for a society under construction, you can show the different types of villas and apartments available there with varying amenities.
This way not only can you sell multiple properties at once but also reduce your marketing expenditure. Promoting each property on a separate page can be costly, so why not display everything in a single tour?
3. Improved targeting
Virtual tours give you the freedom to give a customized view of the property, helping you target the right people for a particular location. Also, a 3D virtual tour can depict the benefits associated with a particular location or other features according to the taste of the buyers.
This way you will be able to close more deals as buyers are likely to be interested in properties that target their specific preferences.
4. Save prospects’ time
By giving a virtual tour of the property, you can save people’s time and create convenience for them. Not everyone h the time to pay a physical visit to a site and inspect the property; such prospects love virtual tours.
Besides that, virtual tours can also attract international buyers. For example, someone living in the UAE can buy a property in London after being impressed by the property’s virtual tour.
5. Higher conversion rate
As it goes without saying, virtual tours can boost your conversion rate. SEO for real estate investors can be tricky, and even when you start getting the traffic there’s no guarantee that the traffic will convert. Virtual tours can boost the conversion rate and lead to an increased ROI.
So if you are eager to convert more visitors to your real estate website, consider adding 3D tours.
Conclusion
Real estate SEO is quite competitive. As one of the leading SEO agencies in the USA offering guaranteed SEO services, we are aware of the challenges involved in real estate SEO.
By adding virtual tours and optimizing those for the SERPs, not only you can improve the organic visibility but also amp up the conversion rate.