It never hurts to refresh and repeat business information that bears repeating.  Your virtual tour company website is your window to the world and if you don’t know where you stand, then you don’t know if the world is seeing you.

There are three areas I’d like to discuss today  1) SEOBOOK.com 2) Google Alerts.com 3) Google Analytics

These are not new to many of you since RTV provides extensive training in this area, but for newbies and for those in which ‘Life gets in the way’ and they aren’t cashing in their ‘roundtoits’ yet, it is a good time to review.

SEOBOOK.com is a rank checker. http://www.seobook.com/ Look for rank checker. It is easy to set up and easy to use.  It reviews your ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing. You set it up according to the URL you wish to check against. For instance I put in   www.AlamoAreaVirtualTours.com and then I want to see where I rank if someone searches for    ‘San Antonio Virtual Tours’ or  ‘San Antonio Virtual Tour Provider’ or ‘San Antonio Virtual tour photographer’.  When you have these in place, you simply tell it to start and lo and behold, up comes the ranking for each of those search phrases. Why is this important? It’s incredibly important because if you are showing up more than 10, you have work to do. Anything much past 10 is pretty well lost as far as being seen by a serious viewer.

Google Alerts.com is a monitoring service. www.google.com/support/alerts  This allows you to pick up on new content to the web.  I have put in my google alert: ‘San Antonio virtual Tours’. It is surprising what comes up under that phrase. How does that help me?  I go to those sites and see 1) what is my competition doing and how much 2) what kind of quality are they producing (and in most cases  not nearly the quality that https://www.realtourvision.com/ produces) and then I have marketing ammunition 3) What some call virtual tours are really nothing. Keep it geographical as Jason has repeated, otherwise you’ll be inundated with superfluous junk.

Google Analytics is more than just a traffic counter and is crucial!!  http://www.google.com/analytics/ If you are not checking out how many hits you are getting and more importantly, where they are coming from, you are being a flamingo.  There are hit counters out there, but (unless I’m not informed), most do not have a map overlay that allows you to see where the hits are coming from, how long they visit, what they visit and if they are new or repeat  visits.

Having said all of the above, if you are serious about Organic SEO and being in place on the search engines, you need to use the tools above. For instance, following the advice from Jason and company, blogs are critically important. Case in point: A week ago www.alamoareavirtualtours.com  was 168 on Google, not a very impressive showing. Now, the beginning of this week this was number two but today it is #78. However, I ask you all to do this for me, put in ‘San Antonio virtual tour provider’  in google and see that it comes up on page one and rank of number one or two out of over 500,000. To me that is important, but most important is the fact that I went from 168 to page 1 because I have been emailing my blog submissions to RTV and getting google juice pumped back to my site from the Virtual Tour Provider site and the new PanoramaJack Site. I also refreshed my featured tours to tours that are currently being searched, i.e. new tours that are out on facebook, etc. Links, links, links!!!!! Now I need to get back on the bankwagon and do some more blogging.

Ciao from   L’oeil L’esprit (mind’s eye)
James Hoback
Owner / Organizer
Alamo Area Virtual Tours
Order a virtual tour: 210-325-2675