Some time ago, the hype around Virtual Reality (VR) began, and its marketing potential is becoming increasingly clear.
It offers countless opportunities, from finding the coolest dive spot without stepping foot in the water to seeing a new place while sitting on your couch. Using virtual reality offers a new and exciting way to showcase the vast amount of content on the internet. You get the opportunity to be creative and unique.
Compared to traditional video, immersive VR content is more effective at telling stories and getting messages across. According to a study from last year, VR significantly improves engagement and empathy. That’s why VR is becoming increasingly popular with marketers.
Although VR can offer obvious benefits, the technology is still too new for many companies to adopt. There’s also the issue of discoverability, which goes beyond price and accessibility. Are search engines able to find content from VR? And is the virtual reality content even search engine optimized?
Fortunately, virtual reality search optimization isn’t as hard as you might think.
Increasing Accessibility Of VR
In recent years, virtual reality has made great strides, even though many still consider it a young technology. Google has introduced several thoughtful innovations that have made virtual reality easier to access and use. One important feature Google introduced in 2016 to optimize VR performance is VR view, which allows users to embed 360-degree content VR into websites and native apps.
The misconception that VR content is inaccessible is why companies refuse to embrace it. VR Content isn’t only accessible to Oculus Rift owners. But you don’t have to own a special device to use it, either.
Virtual reality content can be easily embedded into websites via frames so that anyone can take advantage of the technology. For a truly immersive experience, you can use a Google Cardboard headset or the Daydream headset, a more robust version without the price tag of the Oculus Rift.
Optimizing VR For Search
You may be wondering if VR content is visible in search or how to optimize 360 degree videos for VR, for that, you need to know a few things. If your content can’t be found in Google search results, your audience reach is severely limited. Google is already investing heavily in VR technology, so they’ll make it available to everyone and reward those who use it.
- Embedding with Google VR View
A tool like this was created for a reason, and Google created it to serve its users. With VR View, all the tricky technical details are handled by our experts to ensure maximum compatibility.
Videos can also be embedded directly from YouTube and other video platforms. This is important for SEO and content marketing because you don’t want users to leave your site.
- Put metadata in the correct place.
The best way to ensure your content is found in Google VR search results and indexed by search engines is to add descriptive metadata. Write a short title and description. Add any relevant keywords that will help readers understand your Topic.
Also, make sure you change the filename to give search engines additional information and avoid generic media names like “media13.mp4”.
- Add schema markup
Adding schema markup to your pages can improve your search engine rankings, as it helps search engines understand your content better. Submitting a video sitemap can also help improve your search engine rankings.
- Optimize the page itself
Don’t forget to optimize the website itself according to SEO best practices and the content of VR itself. You can get good rankings for your VR video search even if it doesn’t show up in the SERPs. This is where SEO 101 works: content that’s both shareable and valuable but so obvious that we can’t ignore it.
Most importantly, make sure the content is intriguing, informative, and entertaining. Use all marketing channels to promote the content and make it shareable effectively – the rest will take care of itself if you provide value to your users.
Final Words!
Search engine optimization for VR isn’t that different from optimization for other content. Everything will be fine as long as you stick to the normal SEO strategies. There are just a few technicalities when it comes to embedding VR content.
VR Technology will continue to evolve, and Google VR View confirms this accessibility. It’s only natural that users will find VR content easier on Google.