5 expert tips for good photo rankings in Google My Business
Not surprisingly, the digital world is an extremely fast-moving and highly competitive market for businesses these days.
This is also true for rather small and local companies and businesses, freelancers, and even solo self-employed people.
Fortunately, there are effective search engine optimization (SEO for short) strategies and techniques that can help your business compete very well for potential customers in your region or city and even increase your market share.
You may already know that optimizing your Google My Business listing will significantly boost your business's local visibility.
Relevance of good photos for Google My Business
Not only are they important, but they are critical to your Google My Business success (i.e. your conversions).
Google has released data showing that businesses with photos get 42% more web description requests and 35% more clicks to their websites.
This leads to more customers for your business, which leads to more sales and profits for you. And that’s just by adding photos.
You can find suitable solutions to make your business more visible locally at Heyooo.
Now you know how important it is to have photos in your listing.
Five pro tips for good photos
If you really want to compete with other businesses, you need to make sure that you are now adding the right photos to your listing, optimizing them, and also updating them regularly.
To help you with this, here are 5 expert tips and tricks compiled to help you stay ahead of your competition with your photos in Google My Business:
1. Create high-quality, engaging images to showcase yourself.
This sounds pretty obvious, but it’s actually something that many businesses don’t do.
On the one hand, you want to make sure that while you add images to your Google Business profile quickly so that you can attract customers. But on the other hand, if these images are not of high quality or appealing, this will not help you in the long run.
It makes sense to use a professional camera or hire a photographer to really showcase your business. You can hire a trusted and professional photographer to come to your location and create a thorough virtual view of your space or store.
If it is absolutely not possible for you to hire a photographer, the latest smartphones now offer excellent camera quality. So make use of what you already have.
It is important to make sure that the photos are interesting and appealing by using different angles, good lighting, and well-designed shots.
Also, pay attention to formats and dimensions!
You should also make sure that your images are uploaded in the right format (JPG or PNG), size (between 10 KB and 5 MB), and resolution (at least 720 x 720 pixels).
For the types of photos, you should include clear images of the exterior of your building, multiple interior views of the store, your products or services, your employees, and your team at work. The more, the better!
2. Add new images regularly
This tip is overlooked by so many businesses when creating their Google My Business profile.
Many people assume that once you add information and photos to your listing, you’re done. However, that’s not true.
Google has an algorithm that determines which businesses end up at the top of the search results, meaning they rank well. Also, Google prefers business listings where the profile is constantly updated and kept alive. Yes, this is time-consuming, but it is crucial if you want to stay ahead in the search results list.
Once you’ve added your basic photos, you should add new photos every 7 days if you can. This doesn’t mean uploading dozens of new photos every week, but just one or two recent images of your latest products, service projects, employees, or events.
Think like your customers: When you’re looking for a new business online, you want to be as familiar as possible with the company, the building, and the products or services. Updating your photos regularly is the best way to do this.
3. Optimize your image information
A crucial benefit for successful search engine optimization (SEO) is the optimization of image information, i.e. so-called EXIF data.
To do this, you should always rename each image with the correct keywords (i.e. keywords) before uploading it to Google My Business.
You should also add tags and descriptions to your images if possible.
If you haven’t already done so, you should geotag all your photos, which adds a location with exact coordinates to your image. This is crucial for Google My Business, as your entire listing will be based on your location and Google Maps.
This will link your photo directly to your business location, immensely boosting your SERP position or ranking in search results.
For this purpose, we recommend using Adobe Bridge. However, there are many other software solutions that can help you with this.
4. Check the pictures added by your customers.
If you’re new to Google My Business, you may not know that your customers can also add photos to your business.
This is Google’s way of ensuring that anyone who visits your page gets a true impression of your business and can view images of both the owner and actual customers.
Of course, this can have its drawbacks if customers upload photos that aren’t particularly flattering, or if someone uploads a photo that has no relation to your business.
Unfortunately, you can’t simply delete a customer photo if you don’t like it. If you want a photo removed, you have to report it to Google and request that it be deleted. For this reason, you want to make sure that you are constantly reviewing customer photos to ensure that you avoid these negative photos as much as possible and take care of any issues immediately.
5. Avoid irrelevant photos
This point is especially important if Google automatically generated your business listing before you claimed or activated it yourself. Google retrieves images that are assumed to be related to your business, and often these images are not ideally suited or beneficial.
So add lots of new, updated photos to make sure your own photos are at the top and shown to your potential customers first.
You want to control and determine for yourself which images your profile visitors get to see first. And these should be your own and hand-picked images, not the ones picked out by Google by machine.
You may also have good quality photos from a few years ago with items or services that you no longer offer or where, for example, your service has changed in the meantime.
Even if they are fantastic photos, you should not upload these images so that you do not disappoint customers who get to see them.
The same goes for uploading photos of an old location, your business has recently moved.
Also, make sure that the overall impression and message of an image is appropriate. Don’t take photos of your building in bad weather, and don’t upload images that are poorly cropped. If you’re not sure about a photo, ask yourself, “Would I be willing to use this photo in an ad?”
You should only upload photos that you are proud of and that positively showcase your business.
Conclusion
It’s simple and you can also see that optimizing your images on GMB is worth it.
If you are willing to invest time and effort in optimizing your photos on your Google My Business listing, Google will reward you with better rankings in search results and you will regularly land more often in the desirable “Top 3”, i.e. in the Local Pack in organic search.
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