Since 2010 Google has let business owners hire a “Google Trusted Photographer” to come to their store or office, take a bunch of photos, and splice them together into a virtual tour. That tour is called Google Business View.
The walkthrough tour and photos get uploaded to your Google Places page. You can also feature them elsewhere, like on your website or Facebook page.
You can’t get a Google Business View photo shoot it if you’re a service-area or home-based business.
It may not be a good idea if you know your place of business just gives off the wrong vibes.
But otherwise, you’d be smart to fork over a few hundred dollars to have a photographer come out.
Here are 10 reasons you should get a Google Business View shoot:
1. Potential customers, clients, or patients want to know what your place looks like. If it’s a nice environment, it can be a selling point. But even an dingy little hovel can have a certain charm, and it’s usually wise to let people know what they’re in for.
2. The photo shoot may encourage more people to click through to your Places page or website. It shows up in your knowledge graph and in the Maps tab.
3. It may be a ranking factor. Trusted photographer Jeff Finkelstein explored that possibility in a nice Moz post last year, and he offered some good insights in my follow-up post. My guess is that a Google Business View photo shoot by itself is at most a very minor ranking factor, but can help your rankings more indirectly, because it can get more people to click (and Google knows when someone clicks). Again, just a hunch.
4. The “See inside” view is front-and-center when you view the Google Places page on a smartphone. (It’s even more prominent than it is on desktop.)
5. You can embed the photo shoot on your site.
6. You get 10 professionally-taken still photos.
7. Someone else is taking the time to take photos. That saves you time – especially if you’re picky about your photos. To take good photos is rarely quick or easy, because it’s a numbers game.
8. You can reuse the still shots elsewhere – on your site and on your non-Google business listings. You own the photos for good. You can do whatever you’d like with them. And if you don’t have a good cover photo yet, maybe you just found one.
9. It can be the start of a quid pro quo with your photographer. Google Trusted Photographers often have other online-marketing skills, so especially if you like the photo shoot and them personally you can probably get their help in other areas. It’s also possible you could get a link and/or a citation from the photographer.
10. Google seems to have plans for Business View. It’s been around for almost 5 years now – which is about 68 in Google product years.
It’s getting phased in, not phased out. In the “Google My Business” rebrand / facelift they put a pitch for it right at the top of your dashboard (unless you’re a service-area or home-based business).
Maybe someday they’ll integrate it with product feeds, so that you could “walk” through a store and click on the inventory and actually order it right from within the tour. Who knows what the Big G will think of next?
Bonus – reason #11. This one comes from Greg T’Kint of JHBathrooms.com. You can send potential customers “a link to a specific location within the virtual tour, in order to show a specific product or display within email communications.” (See Greg’s comment, below.)
Update (11/10/14): David Deering just told me about a Google service called PhotoSphere. Maybe it’s well-known in some circles, but I hadn’t heard of it. It’s an app that lets you take and embed your own panoramas. Those have been around for a while, but this one’s from Google. Obviously, you wouldn’t get some of the benefits of an”official” Google Business View photo shoot (see points 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and 10), but in some ways it might be a nice DIY alternative.
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What’s been your experience with Google Business View?
Can you think of other reasons to get a photo shoot (or not to)?
Leave a comment!
