Benefits of Google Maps Street View for Businesses

Show your business inside and out!
Photos and virtual tours help people decide to visit a business. Ramp up your online presence and show your business in its best light, indoor and outdoor. Let your customers know what to expect while browsing Street View imagery before they visit.


When visiting a place for the first time, we trawl their website for information or dig through review sites to find all the information we could possibly need: “Is there enough parking spaces?” “Do I need to come early to get a spot?” “Where can I park if I don’t get a spot?”
With Google Maps Street View customers can get the answer to all of these and more questions in one place. By taking a virtual tour around your spaces, they can plan accordingly for the occasion, and they don’t have to worry about hiccups.


Let people know what to expect with a 360 view of your storefront.

Create outdoor imagery to guide visitors to your location and show them important information like where they can park, or if your entrance is wheelchair accessible. Street View is a powerful tool that adds an extra dimension to your presence on Google. By using Street View you give prospects and customers the chance to take a virtual tour around your business. This allows them to get excited about your place even before walking through the doors.


Make your business stand out with a virtual tour!

Welcome customers inside to help them get a feel for your business and what it has to offer before they arrive. Capture shots of your facilities, product shelves, and menus and publish them to Street View yourself, or with the help of a professional. Today’s consumer is research obsessed. According to Google, researched-obsessed consumers are driven by three things: Getting excited, getting confident, and creating the best experience possible. In other words, preparing for something is emotionally rewarding and more importantly, it adds to the overall experience. Google Maps Street View you can meet customers’ need for research by giving them the information they would have to dig for on other sites in a more trustworthy way. Plus, it can potentially increase sales as customers are excited and prepared before stepping foot in your business.




Improve the Connection with your Customers.

By allowing customers to virtually visit your store or restaurant from the comfort of their home, you show them you care for them and that you’ll do everything to give them the best possible customer experience.
A lot of businesses try to lure customers to their business under false pretenses. This creates a bad experience, when customers realize the business is not what they were hoping for. Google Maps Street View lets you show the atmosphere of your restaurant or demonstrate the quality of your business, so customers can see that your business matches their exact needs.


Reach your target audience.

Speaking of customers’ needs, Google Maps Street View is also a great way to reach your target audience.
Let's say you're a sports bar whose target audience is college football fans. To attract your target audience, you've hung up football banners and memorabilia throughout your restaurant. Showing off the decor is a great way to reach your target audience and Google Maps Street View gives you the platform to do so. Suddenly, college football fans can take a virtual tour of your restaurant and get hooked when they see your decor. Google Maps relies heavily on proximity. This means that when people in the area are searching for a place to eat and your restaurant comes up on the results page, the street view imagery of your restaurant may just be the tipping point, when they compare you to your local competitors who don’t offer street view access.
Build Trust
One of the most important benefits of Google Maps Street View is trust.
We live in an era of mistrust. Mistrust of institutions, of governments, of businesses, and of marketing. Most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day and we no longer trust advertising messages blindly. This makes authenticity more important than ever before. Street View allows you to be transparent and show customers you don’t have anything to hide. Instead of just telling them who you are, you can show them. This can help you build trust and it’s a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition.


Passive Marketing!!!!!

User-generated content, word-of-mouth, and reviews are all examples of trustworthy and highly effective marketing. By giving customers Google Maps Street View access to your business, you can further boost these marketing “strategies” as your advocates can now show their family, friends, and followers what they’re talking about. Picture this, one of your customers is having dinner with friends and tells about his visit at your place of business the week before. He praises the food and the waiters, but he also describes the cozy atmosphere. To show his friends what he’s talking about, he grabs his phone and give them a virtual tour around your spaces. Chances are, the friends will think of your restaurant the next time they’re going out because they know it’s good and they’re already excited about thanks to their virtual visit.


A Convenient and Comfortable Experience

Google Maps Street View can be used whenever, wherever and since today’s consumers are impatient and used to finding answers to all their questions quickly and easily on Google, Street View is a great platform to give them the information they need. According to research, the brain processes visual sixty times faster than text, and images are forty times more likely to be shared on social media. Add to that the fact that we’re more likely to remember content with images and video. In other words, the Street View images will be processed faster than a description of your business and it increases the chance of people remembering your business. As they say, a picture says more than a thousand words.






More Ways To Improve Your Google Maps Ranking



Solid on-page content

Now that we’ve talked about improving your Google Maps ranking with citations on other website pages, let’s zoom in on how you can improve your ranking with good, organic on-page content on your own website. By content I don’t mean blog posts, eBooks, or the like. I mean information that is in line with the information in your Google My Business profile, such as your city or category. However, putting your category on, for instance, your homepage, might look a little weird. Instead, you can add a link to your footer with your primary My Business category and your city and state, e.g. ‘car rental services in Austin, Texas’.
The link should point to a location page, where you can add even more information. This could be a contact us page, but this is really much more about Google and creating strong SEO signals than it’s about telling your customers where to find you and how to get in touch, so you might not want to use your primary contact us page for this, but create a secondary one for SEO purposes.
The information you should add to the page is

a headline with your primary category and city and state

a bit of information about your company and services

the additional categories from your Google My Business profile including your city and state

your phone number and address - remember to be consistent

link to your major citation pages like Facebook, Youtube, or any other of the big places that apply to your business

hours of operations listed as in Google My Business

an embedded Google Maps map

a ‘directions’ hyperlink that points to a predefined map on Google Maps

The embedded map and the hyperlink to the predefined map are both really strong signals for Google to pull from. Another powerful signal is a youtube video. The content of the video doesn’t matter, as this is more for Google than for your customers, so it could just be a really short ‘hi and welcome to our site’ video. What matters is the title of your video. Again, you need to use our primary category from your Google My Business followed by your city and state. You can even go a step further and add your address in the title of your video.
I know this is a lot of information, but all of these things really work together to cement your location, which is going to help you show up in Google Maps.
How to do this: To embed maps or directions to your website, just follow these simple directions from Google support page.



Building Quality Links

The last tip in our Google Maps feature is building links from other websites to your site. This could be through guest blogs you write for other businesses or when partners link to your page. I know this is not just something you can do, but nevertheless, it has a positive impact on your ranking and should be part of our Google Maps Marketing blog series.


Citation building

If you want to improve your Google Maps ranking, you should take a look at your citations. A citation is any mention of your business anywhere on the internet. It doesn’t have to have a link, but just to mention your business.
Usually, citations consist of the NAP: Name, Address, and Phone number. The important thing about citations is consistency. They really have to be super consistent! So, spelling out the name ‘road’ sometimes and using the abbreviated form ‘Rd’ other times, or writing ‘New York’ on some websites and ‘NY’ on others, is a no go.


How to do this: Step one in citation building is making sure you don’t have any bad citations. To do that, go to a SEO search tool like the one on this site and type in your business’ name. Based on the number and quality of your citations on the internet, the search tool gives you a score from 0 to 100 percent, indicating how complete your profile is. If nothing comes up and you’re a new business, you probably don’t have any citations yet.
Step 2: The tool also shows you if there are any major places, such as Yelp, Superpages, Localeze, Factual, Facebook, Yellow Pages, or the like, where your business isn’t mentioned or where the tool can’t find your business. These pages are all major places to have citations, so if you see something like this, you should go to the site and make sure you have a citation there.
Step 3: You’ll also be able to see if you have any incomplete listings, including where they are and what you need to do to update them. For instance, it might tell you that you have an incomplete listing on Facebook, and that you need to add two more photos and a category to complete your listing. Incomplete listings can have a negative impact on your ability to rank well in search engine results, so remember to update these.
Step 4: Last but not least, the tool shows you where you have bad citations either because they’re lacking information, or the address is listed in a different way. As mentioned, consistency across the web is critical to ranking well, so make sure to fill out all the information correctly on the pages with inconsistent listings.
Step 5: When you’ve fixed the inconsistencies, added your profile to the suggested places, and updated incomplete listings, you want to look for new citations opportunities. One way to do this, is to go to this site, choose your country (the site only covers US, Canada, UK, or Australia), and it’ll show you by business category all the places where you should have citations on the web. When you’ve added your citations to the suggested places, you should do the same thing by city. A lot of the results will be the same, but there should also be some local sites among them.


Keep Your Visitors Coming Back with Fresh Imagery!
If you just completed a remodel or started offering new products? Call us to update your photos on Street View. Be in control of your online image by regularly keeping your customers in the loop with changes and exciting offers.