What photos should I put on my Google Business Profile?

Photos are the part of a Google Business Profile that customers actually look at. The categories and services do the ranking work, but once your profile is on the screen, the photos decide whether someone taps it. Most profiles have either three blurry shots from 2019 or forty near-identical ones uploaded in a single afternoon. Here is what to put up, where, and at what size.

The slots, and what goes in each

Google gives you several distinct places for images, and they behave differently.

Two things catch people out. The logo is displayed round, so a wide wordmark becomes unreadable; use a square mark or your initials. And the cover is only a suggestion. Google chooses what to show as your main image based on what it thinks best represents the business, which is why the next section matters.

The photos every profile should have

In rough order of how much customers use them:

1. The outside, from the street. Signage visible, taken in daylight. This is the photo people use to find your door, and Google often picks it as the main image.
2. The inside. Two or three shots that show what it feels like to be there. Tidy, well lit, with people in them if you can.
3. You and your team. Faces build trust faster than anything else on the profile. One good shot of the owner and one of the team.
4. The work. Finished jobs, before and afters, dishes, products on the shelf, a job in progress. This is what sells the service. Add new ones as you do new work.
5. The practical answers. The car park, the entrance, the accessible ramp, the waiting room. Each one saves a phone call.

If you travel to customers and have no shopfront, replace the exterior with your van or ute with signage, your tools laid out, and you on a job. Google still wants to see that the business is real.

Aim for a logo, a cover and six to ten of the above to start with. Then add two or three new photos a month. Google gives recent photos a visible boost in the gallery for a few weeks, so steady beats bulk.

What not to upload

• Stock photos. Customers recognise them instantly, and Google may remove them. A slightly imperfect real photo beats a perfect fake one.
• Graphics with lots of text, promotional banners, price lists as images. Google deprioritises these in the main gallery. Put them in Posts, where they belong.
• Screenshots of your website or social media.
• Dark, blurry or sideways phone shots. If it would embarrass you on a menu, leave it off.
• Twenty photos of the same thing. Three good angles of the shop beat twenty.

Taking them well on a phone

You do not need a photographer, though for a hospitality venue one is worth the money. For everything else:

• Shoot in daylight, ideally in the morning, with the lights on inside.
• Wipe the lens. It sounds silly and it fixes half of all bad phone photos.
• Hold the phone level and shoot landscape for the cover and exterior, and either way for the rest.
• Step back rather than zooming. Phone zoom is just cropping.
• No filters. Google and customers both prefer true colours.
• Tidy the frame first. Bins, cables and the stack of boxes in the corner all count against you.

How Google chooses what shows

You cannot set the order of your gallery or force a main image. Google picks the main photo, usually the exterior or the most engaged-with shot, and mixes customer photos in with yours. In the map pack, the thumbnail is a square cut from the centre of the image, so a photo with the subject off to one side can end up showing a wall. Keep subjects central.

You can remove your own photos any time. You can report a customer's photo if it is wrong or inappropriate, but you cannot delete it directly, which is another reason to keep uploading good ones: they push the weak ones down.

Keeping it going

Put a recurring reminder in your calendar for the first of each month: three photos to Google. New work, a seasonal change, a new staff member, the shop in the morning light. It takes ten minutes and keeps the profile looking alive, which Google's ranking rewards and customers notice. If you post updates, give each one a proper image at 1200 by 900 rather than reusing a gallery shot.

How this fits with the rest

Photos make people choose you once you are on screen. Getting on screen in the first place is the ranking work we cover in How do I rank in the Google map pack? The same real photos belong on your website, where they do the same trust-building job; a site full of stock imagery is one of the red flags that make customers leave. When we build a site, we usually sort the Google Business Profile alongside it, photos included, so the two match. If you would like that done, start here.