Google Business Profile Photos – 6 Tips for Optimizing Your Listing

We've all heard the saying a thousand times over, a picture is worth a thousand words. Well when it comes to your Google Business Profile, a carefully-curated photo gallery is worth a whole lot more! According to Google, businesses with photos receive 35% more click-throughs to their websites than businesses that don't have photos. And more traffic equals more new clients for your business. Google Business Profile photos mean more to your business than you ever imagined.

No doubt, a well-written business description and stellar reviews are essential, but photos allow potential customers to visually familiarize themselves with your business, helping them in the decision making process. A well-thought out Google Business Profile photo portfolio invites visitors to virtually tour your offices, meet your staff, and gain a better understanding of what your organization is all about.

So we can all agree that including photos in your listing is a great method to attract and inform potential customers. But hang on just a shutter second! Before you go gangbusters uploading photos, we're sharing 6 tips you should know before uploading a single photo to your Google Business Profile.

Choose the Right Photos

Not just any old photos will do. When selecting photos for your GMB listing, set out to showcase your overall company, including place, products, and people. Stay away from stock photography, or photos that are overly styled and unrealistic, as this may make your brand seem less authentic.

It goes without saying, use only high-quality and well-lit photos. Not only will poor quality photos not help you, they can actually harm your online reputation in the long run.

To create your photo gallery, hiring a professional photographer is ideal, but let's face it, this is not always feasible for small business owners. Thankfully, smartphones have stepped up their camera quality, and there is no shame in using this everyday tool to get the job done. Use different angles, good lighting and well-planned shots to create engaging photos that tell your brand story.

Follow Google Business Profile Photo Guidelines

Making sure your photos are the correct size and format is just as important as choosing the right photos. Incorrectly sized photos may appear distorted, grainy, or oversized. Best bet is to start with the right resolution, image size, and format from the get-go.

Google Business Profile Photo Ratio – The photo ratio is the relation of the image height to width. Google Business Profile photos are square, so for the image to display correctly, size your photo using a 1:1 ratio. In other words, the height and width of the photo are equal.

Google Business Profile Photo Size – Between 10 KB and 5 MB

Google Business Profile Photo Resolution – In a perfect world your Google Business Profile photos should be 720 px tall by 720 px wide. This enables optimal display of the image on all viewing devices. Using this recommended resolution will also ensure consistency across your entire photo portfolio. If the recommended resolution is not attainable, the minimum resolution requirement is 250 px tall by 250 px wide.

Google Business Profile Photo Format – Google Business allows both JPEG and PNG file formats. Be sure to save your images in either of these two formats before uploading to your profile.

Google Business Profile Cover Photo Specs – The ideal recommended Google Business Profile cover photo size is 1024 px tall x 576 px wide. Google used to require that cover photos adhere to a 16:9 ratio, a minimum of 480 x 270 pixels, and maximum of 2120 x 1192 pixels.

This requirement no longer applies, but it's still a good rule of thumb.

Optimize Your Google Business Profile Photos

An often overlooked SEO practice is the optimization of image information, also known as EXIF data. Start out by naming your Google Business Profile photos with relevant keywords prior to uploading to Google. Also, include tags and descriptions to your images. Avoid uploading photos with generic file names such as IMG_002, and choose more SEO-friendly names such as Salt Lake City CPA.

Geotagging your photos is another effective SEO tactic. This process adds a location to your photo using the exact longitude and latitude coordinates. After all, your Google Business Profile is based on a physical location within the Google Maps platform. Geotagging directly links your photo to your business location, and helps improve your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) position. We recommend using GeoImgr or similar geotagging tool.

Taking these photo optimization steps will play right into the arms of Google's algorithm and help you rank higher than your competitors in Google search results.

Leverage Photo Categories

Google allows you to organize your photo uploads into categories as follows:

Logo – Upload a high quality logo. Including your logo in your profile helps customers easily recognize your firm on Google. Remember to choose a version of your logo that works well within a square format.

Cover Photo – The cover photo is featured at the forefront of your Google Business Profile. Be sure to choose a photo which best represents your organization.

In addition to your business logo and cover photo, we recommend uploading at least three photos for each Google photo category as follows:

Interior Photos – Include photos of the lobby, reception area, conference room, signage and offices. These photos should serve as a virtual tour of your office space and capture the atmosphere of your business.

Exterior Photos – Snap photos from each direction and at different times of the day. Also include a shot of the front entrance and exterior signage.

At Work – Capture candid photos of your team at their work stations or interacting with co-workers and/or clients.

Team – Snap group photos of your management team and employees. Humanize your business with less formal shots.

Video – Consider adding a video to your listing. Be sure to follow video guidelines; up to 30 seconds in duration, file size up to 75MB, 720px resolution or higher

Once your images go live, you can keep an eye on how many views your photos are getting indicated by the “eye” symbol in the lower left hand corner.

Add Images Regularly

So you just uploaded a bunch of great-looking, high quality images to your Google Business Profile photos, and you think you are done. Think again!

As we all know, Google has a clever little algorithm to select which businesses stay in the coveted top search results. And it just so happens, they always prefer the business listings that consistently update their Google Business Profile.

We know this is daunting, but if you want to stay one step ahead, you should continue to add photos on a regular basis.

Review Public Images

In case you didn't know, Google does allow the general public to add photos to your business listing. This is great, right? Well maybe not so great if the photo happens to be unflattering, or not related to your business.

It would be simple if you could just delete unwanted images, but you can't. If you want to remove a photo that doesn't represent your brand and violates Google's content guidelines, you are required to flag the photo for removal. If the photo removal is approved by Google, the photo will be deleted.

So there you have it, you are well on your way to optimizing your Google Business Profile! And if the task is too tall, Build Your Firm may be able to help. Contact us at 888-999.9800, ext 1, or email us at info@buildyourfirm.com to learn more about our websites and marketing services for accountants.