How Much Do Virtual Tours Cost?

(5 min read)

Welcome back to another Momentum Monday!

In this week’s blog, learn about virtual tour pricing and how much it really costs to get a virtual tour for your business. Let’s dive in!

There’s a whole lot of speculation in the digital world about the popular question, “How much do virtual tours cost?”

The answer? Well…it’s really quite easy to find out!

Pay Once – Keep Forever

Most virtual tours cost way too much, we fixed that. Only pay a one-time fee for your virtual tour and optimizations. There are no monthly or yearly recurring fees.

On top of this, our virtual tours offer a bundle of goodies in every single package. Not only do we provide virtual tours, we offer photography, video, drone footage and optimization for your site!

Virtual Tour costs start at $300 + 10% of your square footage and includes:

• Posting to your Google My Business, Google Street View, Website, and Social Media.

Some premium features include:

• Matterport software, the best virtual tour software in the world.
• Hosting on Matterport’s premium cloud.
• Unlimited “Mattertags” that help show off your business.
• Local SEO to help your business get noticed on Google.
• Repeat/multiple shoots to keep up with your seasonal changes and updated changes to your shop.

You can calculate your virtual tour cost here!

Many companies use a set price, some use square footage, and some use different packages. There are many ways to price these virtual tours.

The problem that many small-businesses face is finding a happy medium between pricing and services. This can often confuse them as well as the tour agency itself!

If you’re confused to this technology, don’t worry. We’ll answer all of your questions and make you feel more comfortable with this technology. You’re not alone. Virtual tours are still recently new, so it’s our job to properly inform society on how much do virtual tours cost.

Here at Momentum 360, we aim to provide quality and value, not revenue for us! So many business owners think that charging extremely high-priced virtual tours is the ticket to a successful agency. They’re wrong, and they will always be.

Do Virtual Tours Actually Work?

We wouldn’t be talking about them if they didn’t. In the over 50+ businesses we’ve shot, we have almost 250,000 impressions and 150,000 website visits. That’s an average 4,200 impressions and 2,500 website visits per client!

More eyeballs, more business. That’s the equation that we’ve used with our virtual tours to generate value for our clients. As you can see, we’ve generated a lot of value from these tours!

Where else are you going to get this kind of ROI? Google Ads? Possibly. But this piece of content is better targeted to suit people that genuinely have an interest in the business. This is the best marketing investment you can make in 2019.

So if you’re reading this in 2019, you better believe that this will be something that every business has in the next 5 years, so make sure to get one now.

I’ll discuss other aspects of why you should get a virtual tour in 2020, but for now I’ll just let the number speak from themselves. Without a virtual tour, consumers won’t be as engaged as they would be with one. Virtual tours command a presence that only real estate niches seem to understand.

How cool would it be to type in “date restaurants in Philadelphia” into Google, have a restaurant pop up, and see a virtual tour of the exact seat and table you’d like to sit at?

Imagine, you and your significant other are having trouble finding a place to eat at. You come across this one restaurant that not only ranks at the top of Google and has excellent reviews,  but you it has a virtual tour that allows you to check out the place a bit more!

On top of that, you can literally sort through each table, picking the perfect setting for you and your date.

It’s an individualized experience every time, making the consumer feel all warm and fuzzy with your business. Virtual tours make this happen.

How Are Virtual Tours Shot?

Our virtual tours are shot on a camera from Matterport. Matterport has a variety of hand-held and tripod cameras that make crystal clear tours every time. Momentum 360 uses the Pro2 3D Camera, which stands on a tripod and is moved each scan.

We’ve seen tremendous success with this camera. This is largely due to the fact that the tripod holds it still for the perfect shot, while we can adjust the height for the average person to see!

This way, we won’t have to risk human error for some of the smaller, handheld cameras that Matterport offers. After we’re finished shooting the place, the virtual tour is automatically sent to the Matterport cloud to render.

The whole rendering process takes around 1-2 hours.

First, the virtual tour has to upload to Matterport’s cloud and stitch all of the scans together. From here, it gives us a viewable preview link where we can edit and add features to jazz up the tour.

After rendering is finished, we implement Mattertags into the tour for more information about the business and SEO. These mattertags are bits of information about the business. We can embed YouTube videos, websites, anything! This helps with keywords and ranking on Google at a local level.

Do They Improve SEO?

In our last blog that you can view here, we discuss a case study we did with SOUTH, a jazz bar and restaurant in Philadelphia. Just from their virtual tour, we were able to help them rank for very competitive terms such as “Jazz bar in Philadelphia” and “Jazz in Philadelphia.”

To help improve the SEO, we simply embed keywords into the Mattertags and use a simply backlinking strategy to the company website and other reputable websites. For example, we linked out to VisitPhilly, Philly Magazine, and Daily News. These three reputable sources in Philadelphia have a high DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority)

To this day, SOUTH’s virtual tour has generated:

• Over 28,000 Impressions
• Over 24,000 Website Visits
• Over 15,000 Unique Visitors
• Over 1,600 Monthly Views

Google cares about a lot of things, you can check out this blog to learn more about what Google values in terms of ranking!

Virtual tours include both, can your content say the same?

If your context only checks one of the two boxes, or neither of them, then it’s time to start looking at a virtual tour to help drive more traffic to your site! All we have to do is publish this lovely piece of content, Google does the rest.

If you ask where SOUTH currently ranks, they’re still at the top of Google on the first page. They’ve made an investment with the virtual tour, and now they’re reaping the benefits.

Ultimately, Why Get A Virtual Tour?

Don’t just take it from me, take it from two happy clients that we literally just worked with last week!

Laura Kao, Owner of Room244 says:

“Working with Sean was quick and easy! He was flexible with scheduling and within 1hr he was done filming. My virtual tour is a great asset for me to have for my clients who have been referencing it often. A job well done!.”

Andrew Domanski, Owner of The Little Gallery says:

“Momentum 360 just created a virtual tour of The Little Gallery for me. Sean, Huy and the entire team were great and helped this novice immensely. The final result is well beyond my expectations, and everyone that I’ve shown it to has said how fantastic it is. It’s out there on Google, my website and social media and I’m sure it will bring inquiries and customers into the Gallery. I consider this to have been money very well spent. Thank you very much. “

These two happy customers are already noticing the benefits of their virtual tour, and it’s only been a week! Hopefully, these two testimonials will convince you of the quality work that Momentum provides. We’ll talk about other key benefits in the blog too. Like how we only charge a one-time fee and allow you to keep the virtual tour forever!

Check out some of our recent work from the famous restaurant, Autograph Brasserie!

In addition, all of our team members are Google Trusted Photographers. This means we have exclusive rights with Google to help provide extra value to our clients.

Why is this Important?

Due to Google’s recent changes, now anyone with a camera can come and shoot your virtual tour. This has led to a lot of terrible production and has given virtual tours a bad reputation. Fortunately, our highly-talented team of Google Trusted Photographers make the process easy, leaving you with a premium virtual tour that’ll start bringing in more business.

Just a quick tip, anyone can simply slap a Google Trusted Photographer badge on their website/social media and call themselves a Google Trusted Photographer. To make sure that person is legit, simply go to their directory and search for them. You’ll see our team members Sean, James and Austin there! Say hi guys!

Doing some quick homework will pay dividends in the long run. Without doing homework on a potential photographer, you’ll be charged 10x more, be left with a terrible virtual tour, and won’t get anymore business because of it! Please do research, it literally takes 3 minutes. (Yes, we timed it)

It’s the least our team can do to help save you a couple bucks. We know how hard you work, so why not get a quality product that reflects that?

More Bang For Your Buck

Our Founder, Mac Frederick, actually worked at Google for several years. During his time at the search engine powerhouse, he learned how to rank small businesses on the first page of Google.

One of the best forms of content to accomplish this?

Virtual tours!

Thus, he helped start his own full-service digital marketing agency, Momentum Digital. With the help of his soon-to-be partner and Google Trusted Photographer Sean Boyle, they helped established Momentum 360, a full-service virtual tour agency.

These two brainstormed and thus created a process to make virtual tours help rank small businesses higher on Google! With our great partners at Matterport, they make it so much easier.

To be frank, most virtual tours aren’t optimized properly. They lack local seo, simple tactics and many other tricks of the trade that we utilize to achieve higher rankings.

Lower prices, higher quality, it’s a slam dunk. Our low virtual tours cost can only be attributed to help solve the client’s problems. This has been, and will be, the motto we carry throughout our tenure in business.

So…Why Go With Us?

Momentum 360 has been the leading-virtual tour provider in Philadelphia since our inception. Why? Because we deliver a top-quality product at a reasonable price. We take pride in helping small-businesses rise and get more traction. We lived through the struggle that most business owners go through on a daily basis, that’s why we get along with them so well.

If you’re looking to grow your online presence with a quality virtual tour, look no further.

You can schedule a call with Sean or Mac and always get more information on our website!

Our owners Mac Frederick and Sean Boyle have over 20+ years of digital marketing experience and are ready to help take your business to the next level! Our team members have also worked at Google and Facebook before, so we have the most up-to-date knowledge in the business. All to help your business rank at the top of Google and kickstart your journey to be a future lead generation machine!

Mac Frederick                                  Sean Boyle

You can email us or check out our website  for more information!

We hope this blog informed you on how to correctly publish your tour to Google Street View and the neat features that comes along with this!

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If you have any questions or concerns, leave them in the comments below! From everyone at Momentum 360, thanks for the love and until next time, build Momentum!