Photos on Your Listing Are Doing Work

What people actually do with a listing

Watch somebody choose a local business and the sequence is consistent. They glance at the name, look at the star rating, and then look at the pictures.

Reading comes later, if at all. For a lot of decisions the photographs are the decision.

That is not superficiality. For a trade, pictures of finished work are the most direct evidence available of whether somebody is any good.

The comparison you are actually in

Not against an ideal listing. Against the two others in the map results.

If they have thirty photographs and you have three, the difference is visible before anybody reads a word. If theirs are dark phone snaps and yours are clear, the same works in your favour.

This is a competition with a low bar in most trades. A business willing to spend two hours photographing its own work is usually ahead of its neighbours within a fortnight.

What to photograph

• Finished work, the majority of what you upload.
• Work in progress, which shows competence and care.
• The premises, outside and in, if customers visit.
• The team, because people hire people.
• The van, which is what arrives at somebody's house.
• Equipment, where it demonstrates capability.

The fourth is skipped most often and matters more than expected. A customer letting somebody into their home is reassured by having seen a face.

What makes a photograph usable

A low bar, met surprisingly rarely.

Daylight, or plenty of light. Held steady. In focus. Taken after the tidying rather than before. Showing the thing the customer cares about rather than a detail only a tradesperson notices.

Horizontal generally works better than vertical, because the space it fills is wider.

And taken deliberately rather than pulled from a camera roll of progress records. Most trades have hundreds of photographs and few that were composed as pictures.

What to avoid

Some of this is guidelines and some is judgement.

Stock photography, which is against the spirit of the listing and recognisable anyway. Heavily edited images. Anything with text or a logo added across it, which is explicitly discouraged.

Photographs of somebody's home or property without asking, which is a privacy question rather than a rules one.

And anything misleading, such as a photograph of work that was not yours. That is a real risk if you have ever used images supplied by a manufacturer.

The photographs customers add

Worth knowing, because you do not control all of them.

Customers can add pictures to your listing, and those appear alongside yours. Sometimes they are excellent and sometimes they are a badly lit shot of a car park.

You cannot delete them simply for being unflattering. You can report ones that break the rules, and you can dilute poor ones by adding better pictures regularly.

Which is the practical answer: a steady supply of your own good photographs is the only reliable way to control what the listing looks like.

A worked example

A tiling contractor with four photographs on his listing, all taken in poor light in the same bathroom.

He spent one Saturday going back to three recent jobs, with permission, and taking about forty photographs. Wide shots showing the finished room, closer ones showing the edges and cuts, and a few of himself working.

Thirty went on the listing over the following weeks, a few at a time rather than all at once.

The enquiries changed in character before they changed in number. People started phoning having already decided he did good work, and asking about scheduling rather than about whether he could do the job.

The cost was one Saturday and asking three customers politely.

Adding them over time

Rather than uploading everything once and never returning.

A listing with recent photographs reads as an operating business. One where everything was added three years ago reads as dormant, whether or not it is.

The sustainable habit for a trade is taking two or three photographs at the end of each job and uploading a few each month. It takes minutes and it never becomes a project.

Set the expectation with yourself that most will not be used. Taking ten to get two good ones is the normal ratio.

Asking permission

Necessary, and easier than people expect.

Ask before you photograph, explain it is for your website and listing, and confirm nothing identifying will be included. Most customers agree readily and some are pleased.

Avoid anything showing house numbers, vehicle plates, or the interior in a way that identifies the property. For commercial clients, check whether they have a policy, because some do.

Where somebody says no, respect it without negotiating. The photograph is not worth the relationship.

The cover photograph and the logo

Two specific slots that behave differently from the rest.

The listing has a logo position and a cover position, and you can indicate a preference for each. What actually shows is not entirely under your control, since the platform selects what to display in different contexts.

Which means the sensible approach is to make sure every photograph you upload would be acceptable as the one shown, rather than uploading a mixture and hoping the good one is chosen.

The logo should be square, legible at small sizes, and the same one you use everywhere else. A logo that only works wide is worth having a square version of.

Remove anything you would be unhappy to see chosen. A single dark photograph in an otherwise good set is worth deleting rather than leaving to chance.

Using them elsewhere

The same afternoon's work has several homes.

Photographs taken for the listing are the same ones the website needs, the same ones a social post needs, and the same ones a quote document benefits from.

Which makes a deliberate photography habit one of the higher-return things a small trade can do, because the output is used in four places rather than one.

Keep the originals somewhere safe at full size. The versions uploaded to a listing are compressed and cannot be recovered at quality.

A folder per job, named by date and address, is enough organisation. The alternative is a camera roll of eleven thousand images nobody will ever search.

The rest of the listing setup is covered in claiming your Google My Business listing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.