How to get your business on Google Street View

When someone searches for your business on Google, your listing shows your address, opening hours, reviews and photos. It can also show a 360° tour of the inside, so customers can step in from the street and look around before they visit. This guide explains how that works and how to get it.

What Street View for business is

Google Street View is best known for its street-level imagery of roads. The same technology is used for indoor tours: a series of 360° panoramas of your premises, connected so that people can move from room to room. Once published, the tour is linked to your Google Business Profile and appears in Google Maps and in Google Search results.

Why it is worth having

• Customers see inside before they come. Restaurants, hotels, gyms, shops and clinics are chosen partly on how they look and feel.
• A more complete listing. A profile with photos and a 360° tour looks active and trustworthy next to competitors without one.
• It works where people already are. There is nothing to download or install - the tour opens right in Google Maps on a phone or computer.
• You can use it on your own website too. Google provides an embed code for the tour, just like for a map.

Step by step

1. Claim your Google Business Profile. The tour is attached to your listing, so the business needs a verified profile. If you do not have one yet, create it first.
2. Book a Google Street View trusted photographer. Google publishes guidelines for 360° imagery; a trusted photographer knows them and has a track record of approved work. Panoramea is a Google Street View trusted photographer.
3. Plan the route. Together we decide which spaces to include - usually the entrance from the street, the main room or rooms, and anything special such as a terrace, private dining room or treatment rooms.
4. The photo shoot. Each panorama takes about ten minutes. The place should be tidy and ideally empty of customers, so early mornings or closing time work well.
5. Processing and connection. The panoramas are stitched, retouched, placed at the correct positions and connected with each other and with the street outside.
6. Publishing. The tour is published and linked to your Business Profile. Google processes new imagery before it appears on Maps, so allow some time for it to show up.
7. Share it. Add the embed code to your website, share the link on social media and in emails.

Google tour or a panoramea.co.uk tour?

They complement each other. The Google Street View tour lives on Google Maps and is ideal for people who find you through search. A tour hosted on panoramea.co.uk gives you more control over the presentation - room names, a menu of places, your logo, floor plans - and is designed to sit on your own website. Many clients choose both, photographed in one visit.

Good to know

• Faces and number plates that appear in the panoramas are blurred.
• If you refurbish, individual panoramas can be re-shot and updated.
• The tour shows your premises as they are on the day of the shoot, so plan it for a time when the place looks its best.

See the businesses we have photographed on Google Street View, or contact us to get your business on Google Maps.