Adding Google Maps Photos by Chad Kimball

One aspect of optimizing your Google Maps listing is adding photos. I want to talk to you about the strategies that you want to think about when you’re adding photos. And, when you are uploading images directly to your Google Maps listing, through your dashboard, the thing you want to be thinking about is what of these photos are going to be showing where.

This is the overview of the Photos section of my dashboard for managing my Google Maps listing. And this interface might change, but you still want to take a look in here and get an idea of what options are they giving you. So, this is all the images that I have here. But, they have split these into three different categories. At Work, just general images of the business. Now, for me that’s images of my designs, but for different business that’s going to be images of the business itself. And, I would just recommend you make sure that these images are attractive because they’re going to be showing up in various places online. I don’t have an image of myself in here, but the Team…obviously, if you have nice employee photos, you can add images in there of the team. These are my Identity photos. You can see it gives me the option to have a cover photo, a profile photo, and a logo. And depending on where the listing is seen, these different images are going to be showing. So, let me give you some examples.

This is the view of my business listing from actually Google+, from plus.google.com. And you can see that here’s this big cover photo here. You can see there’s my little profile photo. So, this is showing it correctly. On the other hand, if I look at a search in Google Maps for web designers, you can see that it’s not showing my cover photo. It’s actually chosen just one of the sort of random At Work images that I have in there. So, which image shows here, you’re not always going to be able to be sure. And you want to think about when you’re adding photos, how does this photo look very small? Does it look nice? Is it going to be readable? Are people even going to be able to tell what it is? You want to think about that when you’re adding photos. And then if you actually click on my listing, you can see at the top here it has chosen that photo and that’s fine, it’s okay, but if I could choose I would try to use a different photo, I think. But, you want to just bear in mind where these photos are going to show, and those are some places that your photos are going to be showing. So, as you’re adding photos to your listing, bear in mind, these are going to show at some different sizes on some different places on the web. You may want to look at some competitors and see what kinda photos have they uploaded and where are those photos showing to try to make sure that the photos you add are going to be looking nice in whatever view it may be.

I also want to talk to you about adding photos through the Google My Business app. And this is actually using photos as a ranking signal. The Google My Business app is available for iPhone and for Android, and the idea is it’s specifically an app for managing your Google Maps listing. And you can download it on your phone, you sign in with the Google account associated with your Maps listing. And then I recommend that the photos you take and upload for your business, you do so with the Google My Business app. And the reason is that the My Business app will know where the photo is being taken, thanks to the GPS information on your phone. And so it adds a lot of trust for Google to your Maps listing, if the images you’re uploading are uploaded through the Google My Business app, and the information on the photos and the information in the app show that the photos were taken right at your business, right at the GPS coordinates where Google locates your business. And so use your phone to take those photos, use the Google My Business app to take those photos and upload those photos to your listing. And that’s going to actually help your ranking.

If you can, it’s also good to have user photos. Now this is related also to ranking. This is an image for One-Eyed Betty’s which is a bar in Ferndale. And restaurants have it easy because people so often like to take photos of their food. But you can see that many, many of the photos down here, this one included, are actually from Google users, and they are taking these images and then uploading them through their Google account and then those images are getting associated with the listing itself. And this also can add trust because Google is noting through the GPS coordinates associated with the photo that this image was actually taken at the location. And that can also increase a lot of trust. So, if you’re not a restaurant, this might be difficult for you to do, but you want to try to think of ways to get users, if you can, to take photos with their own phones and upload those to their Google accounts so that they get associated with your business. That is going to also help your business’ ranking in Google Maps and in Google web search.