What Belongs In Your Google Business Photos

Somebody taps your business on the map. Before they read your description, before they look at your hours, they swipe through the photos. It takes them about four seconds and it decides a lot.

Most local businesses have four photos on their listing, at least two of which came from Google's own street imagery, and the newest is from whenever they set the thing up. This is one of the cheapest fixable problems in local marketing, and it costs nothing but your phone and ten minutes a week.

01What people are actually looking for

They're not judging your photography. They're checking three things, mostly without noticing they're doing it.

Is this real? A listing with stock images and no photo of an actual premises or an actual job reads as either a franchise or a front. Neither is what someone wants when they're about to let you into their house.

Is this recent? Photos date themselves, the phone quality, the vehicles in the background, the way the sign looks. An entire gallery from three years ago suggests either a business that's slowed down or a listing nobody maintains, and those look identical from outside.

Is this the kind of job I have? Somebody with a leaking water heater is looking for a photo of a water heater. Somebody choosing a studio is looking at the room. If every photo is the van, you've told them you own a van.

02What to take

Finished work, lots of it. The single most valuable category and the one most underused. The repipe, the finished bathroom, the cleared lot, the installed unit. Take the photo when you're packing up, every time, and you'll never run short.

Before and after, as two separate photos. Don't make a side-by-side collage with an arrow: it looks like an advert. Two photos in sequence does the same job and looks like evidence.

The premises, if people come to you. The front of the building from the angle someone arrives at, so they recognise it. The parking. What reception actually looks like. People genuinely use these to work out whether they've got the right place.

The people. You, the crew, actually working rather than posed in a line. This is the one that makes a business feel like a business rather than a listing, and it's the one people skip because it feels self-indulgent. It isn't.

The van or truck, once. Once. It's useful for recognition when you pull up. It is not a gallery.

The tools or the setup, if the work is specialised enough that the equipment says something. A cage with the machine in it. A lift. A specific rig. Otherwise skip it.

03What to leave out

Stock photography, in every form. The handshake, the smiling family, the generic tool on a white background. Everyone has seen them, everyone knows what they mean, and one of them undoes several real photos.

Anything with a phone number written across it. Your number is on the listing. A photo with text plastered over it reads as an advert, and people swipe past adverts.

Screenshots of your website. Nobody has ever wanted this.

Certificates and badges as photos. Fine on the site. As a photo in a gallery someone's swiping through in four seconds, it's a wasted slot.

Anything you don't have permission to show. Inside someone's house, faces of customers, anything with an address or a plate visible. Ask, or frame it out.

04The practical routine

Ten minutes a week, and you never think about it again.

Take two or three photos at the end of a job. Not a shoot: just the finished thing, in normal light, from a couple of angles. Once a week, upload them. Recency counts for something in itself, so a steady trickle is better than fifty in one afternoon and nothing for a year.

Shoot in landscape most of the time. Wipe the lens; it's usually the whole difference. Don't edit them into something they aren't: slightly plain and real beats polished and generic, every time.

Slightly plain and real beats polished and generic, every time.

05Why this is worth more than it sounds

It's free, it takes ten minutes, and it's on the thing people actually tap rather than the thing they might eventually visit. The map block gets looked at before your website does, and completeness is one of the three things it weighs.

It also does a second job. The same photos are what your website needs: for a trade, photos of your own work are most of what makes the site credible, and it's the material I'm most often short of when I build one. Gathering them for the listing means you've already gathered them for everything else, which is why it's near the top of the list of things to have ready.

06The one caveat

Photos won't rescue a listing that's otherwise empty. If your hours are wrong and your category is a guess and you have four reviews, start there: the photos are the polish on a listing that's already right.

But if the listing is in decent shape and the gallery is four images from 2023, this is the highest return on ten minutes available to you this week. You don't need me for it, which is rather the point of writing it down. When you do want the whole thing handled together, that's what the packages are for.