Most contractors treat the photo section of their Google Business Profile as a chore. Upload the logo, add a truck, maybe a job from three years ago, done. Meanwhile the profile is doing more work than the website — it is often the only thing a homeowner looks at before deciding who to call.
Two separate jobs
Photos on a business profile do two things at once, and it helps to think about them separately.
The first is ranking. Profile activity is a signal, and profiles that are actively maintained — photos added regularly, categories accurate, hours current, questions answered — tend to hold position better than dormant ones. This is not a lever you pull once.
The second, and larger, is conversion. Two contractors sitting next to each other in the map pack are being compared on almost nothing: a star rating, a review count, and a strip of images. If one has real photographs of finished work and the other has a stock image of a stranger holding a wrench, the comparison is already over.
What to actually shoot
- Finished work, properly lit, from the angle a homeowner would stand at — not the angle that shows off the technical detail.
- Before-and-after pairs. These outperform everything else in trades where the change is visible.
- The crew. Real faces, real names, in your actual uniforms. This is the single biggest trust lever for work that happens inside someone's home.
- The trucks and the signage, clean and identifiable, so a homeowner recognises you when you pull up.
- The premises, if you have one worth showing. It answers the “are these people real” question that every homeowner asks silently.
What actively hurts
- Stock photography of any kind. It is recognisable, and recognising it is the moment trust drops.
- Dark, tilted phone snaps taken at the end of a long day. Worse than no photo, because it signals how much care you take.
- Images with a competitor's product branding or another company's van in frame.
- The same four photos from four years ago. A dormant profile reads as a dormant business.
A workable habit
The contractors who do this well are not running photo shoots every month. They have a standing rule that a completed job does not get closed out until someone has taken three usable photos, and a job-photo app that makes it a ten-second task rather than a chore.
One proper session a year for crew, trucks and premises. A steady trickle of real job photos in between. That is the whole programme, and it outperforms most things you could spend the equivalent money on.
Want this running in your business?
Thirty minutes on the phone. We’ll find where the work is leaking and what it would cost to fix — or tell you it isn’t worth it yet.
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