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Photos for your Google listing that are worth taking

Getting found 5 min read

Which photographs of your premises, your work and yourself are worth taking on a phone, and which uploads do more harm than good.

The phone in your pocket takes better photographs than the camera that shot most of the brochures you grew up with. What you do not have is a spare ten minutes at the end of a job, which is exactly when the only photographs worth having can be taken.

So the question is which four or five are worth stopping for.

The one that answers "am I in the right place"

If customers come to you, the most useful photograph you will ever take is the front of the building from the direction people arrive, with the sign and the door both in the frame.

Then the awkward ones nobody thinks of. Where to park. The entrance, if it is round the side or up a flight of stairs. The shared doorway with four brass plates on it. A stranger sitting in a car is trying to match a photograph to a building, and failing to do that is how you lose somebody who had already chosen you.

Before and after, and why the before is the valuable half

For a trade, the before is the proof that somebody had a problem like theirs. The after on its own is a photograph of a wall.

Which means the habit has to be photographing the mess before you touch it, every time, because you cannot go back for it afterwards. One frame, wide enough to show what is going on, before the tools come out. It takes four seconds and half of them will come to nothing, which is fine.

A photograph of your actual face

Not a studio headshot. You, in your work clothes, beside the van or in the doorway, taken by somebody standing a few feet away in daylight.

Somebody is deciding whether to let a stranger into their house, or their mouth, or near their children. A face makes that decision easier in a way no amount of writing on a page does. If it is not you who turns up, photograph whoever does.

What the inside actually looks like

For a salon, a cafe, a gym or a practice, the room is the product. The chair, the treatment room, the equipment, the counter, photographed at a time of day when the place looks like itself.

Photograph it honestly. A room shot from a flattering angle with the clutter cropped out gets recognized as a lie about thirty seconds after somebody walks in, and that is a worse moment than never getting them through the door. Tidy first, then photograph what is there.

Photograph the work you want more of

Whatever fills your photographs is what people will call you about. Twenty pictures of water heater services and two of finished bathrooms will get you water heater services.

If you want a different mix of work, photograph the different work, even when it is the job you did least of this year. Two good frames from something you would like ten more of are worth more than a dozen from the work you are trying to grow out of.

Making a phone photograph usable

Wipe the lens. It lives in a pocket and it is smeared. Use daylight wherever there is any, and where there is not, put every light in the room on rather than firing the flash at a wall. Stand so you are not blocking the light you have got.

Get closer instead of zooming, because the zoom on a phone throws away most of what makes a photograph sharp. Hold still, take three, keep one. Shoot wide rather than tall for anything that might be a main image, since tall photographs get cropped in ways you did not choose. Leave the filters alone. The point is to look like the place, not like an advert for it.

Asking permission, and when it is not optional

If you are in somebody's home, ask before you photograph and ask again before it goes anywhere public. Most people say yes when it is clear the admiration is aimed at the work rather than at them.

If a person is identifiable, get it in writing and keep the note somewhere you could find it in two years. If you are a clinic or a dental practice, or anywhere else carrying a duty of confidentiality, a photograph of a treatment is a photograph about a person, and consent there is a formal thing rather than a nod in a corridor. Staff photographs are worth a written note as well, because staff leave.

What not to upload

Stock photographs of somebody else's building. Your logo as the main image, when the main image should be the place, the work or the face. Screenshots. Blurry ones. Anything with another company's branding in the corner of it. Photographs of a job that was not yours, which the trade will recognize and eventually mention.

Leave off the ones with text laid across them too. A listing is not a poster site, and somebody scrolling your photographs is looking for the room, the van and the face, not a headline.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

How many photographs should I upload

A dozen honest ones to begin with, covering the outside, the inside, the work and the face. After that, a few a month out of real jobs is plenty.

Do photographs help me show up higher

Nobody outside Google can promise you that. What is checkable is that a listing with no photographs asks a stranger to take more on trust than the listing next to it.

Should I pay a photographer

For most trades, no. If you have premises people walk into and the room is the thing you are selling, an afternoon with a photographer is defensible. For a plumber or a roofer, the phone is the right tool.

Do I need to add location data to my photographs

No. Putting coordinates into an image file is not a lever, and any tool sold to you on that basis is selling a rumor.

Can customers add their own photographs to my listing

Yes, and you cannot stop them. You can report ones that break the rules, and the better defense is enough recent photographs of your own that theirs are not the whole story.

What do I do with the photographs apart from the listing

Put them on your website beside the service they belong to, with one line saying what the job was. The same photograph does far more work with a sentence attached than it does on its own.

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