What moves a person more – Images or Words? There’s a reason the saying is “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Images that can evoke an emotion can affect a person’s behavior and decision making. Words that try to evoke a similar emotion tend to fall flat. People relate more to images.
Photos you choose to represent your business also must be real. This means no stock images. Hiring a photographer to create custom images for your business has three major effects: more people will view the images, you establish more trust with your brand, and they convert better. That’s right, using high quality images that are only for your business will help you get more business. Case in point, AirBNB used to crowd source photos for their listings. They made a switch to using only professionally shot photographs and they saw a near immediate 17% increase in demand on listings that had higher quality photography.
So, how can we use this to make a Google Business Profile shine? Simple. We optimize images for success. Google has been utilizing artificial intelligence to learn more about photos that are being uploaded to its services. This has allowed Google to match photos with search intent to serve more visually based SERPs. The ultimate goal for Google is every part of the SERP becoming visually captivating
Let’s say you’re a jeweler and you’re not using GBP’s Products feature or uploading images to your listing. This will actually negatively affect your rankings. A user searching for engagement rings might search for “engagement rings near me”. When they search that and a jeweler has properly loaded products into their listing or uploaded images of engagement rings, Google will now showcase a photo of engagement rings that the business has uploaded. What moves people more than just text? Seeing an actual image.
Optimizing your GBP with photos should be meticulous – you want to upload high quality images that showcase points of interest, humanization, brand strategic photos, and highly keyword oriented photos. It’s best to slow drip these photos and not just upload all of them at once. However, it should be noted that Google will swap out and change the order of photos that it shows for your listing at will (and there is nothing you can do to force it to do otherwise). You never know what photos Google will choose to show, so you should only use high quality imagery.
The bottom line is simple. Higher quality photographs on your Google Business Profile has a direct effect on conversions on the local level. When using higher quality images, there are significant gains in actions on a business’ GBP.