Pull up a competitor's Business Profile and look at the photos. If the first thing you see is a blurry logo and a picture of a storefront from 2019, you have found a business that has stopped paying attention to the profile. Customers notice the same thing about yours.
Photos are one of the few profile elements that customers actually browse. They are also a signal of an active, real business. Here is what to upload, in what mix, and what to avoid.
The core set
Every service business profile should have, at minimum:
A logo, square, clean, on a plain background. This is what appears next to your name across Google.
A cover photo that represents the business well: a crew with a truck, a finished job, the team. Google chooses which image shows first and does not always pick the cover, but it is worth setting.
Team photos. The people who show up at the customer's door. Real, in uniform, in daylight. These matter more than almost anything else for a business that goes into homes.
Vehicle photos. Lettered trucks, clean, in your area. The customer will recognize the truck when it arrives.
Work photos. Before and after, finished jobs, technicians mid-task. This is the ongoing category; everything else is set once and updated occasionally.
Exterior and interior, if you have a location customers visit. If you do not, skip these; a photo of your house is not what Google or the customer wants.
The same shooting habits that produce a good website photo library produce these, and it is the same library.
Cadence
Google rewards active profiles, and customers read a recent photo as a sign the business is operating. A few new work photos each month is a reasonable target. Batch them: shoot through the month, pick the best, upload in one session.
Do not upload everything. Ten strong photos beat a hundred weak ones, and Google shows a limited set anyway.
What gets photos removed or ignored
Stock images. Google's policy prohibits photos that do not represent the actual business. Stock photos get removed and, repeated, can draw attention to the profile.
Heavy text overlays, logos stamped across work photos, and promotional graphics. The photo section is for photos. Marketing images with prices, slogans, or "call now" get flagged.
Screenshots, collages, and images with borders.
Photos of other people's work. Only your jobs.
Anything with identifying customer information: house numbers, license plates, faces without permission.
Low quality. Blurry, dark, tiny, or stretched images make the whole profile look worse. Skip them.
The technical side
Upload at a good resolution and let Google handle sizing. Landscape orientation works best for cover and work photos; square for the logo. Take photos with the phone's location on if you are comfortable with it, though Google does not use embedded location data for ranking purposes as far as anyone has demonstrated. What matters is that the photos are real and recent.
Name the files descriptively before uploading. It costs nothing.
Customer photos
Customers can add photos to your profile, and you cannot remove them unless they violate policy. Encourage the good ones by asking customers who leave a review to add a photo of the finished work. A customer photo of a completed job is proof of a kind your own photos cannot provide, and it is one of the strongest pieces of social proof a local business can have.
If a customer photo is inappropriate or not of your business, you can flag it for review.
Video
Short videos (Google accepts clips up to a limited length) are allowed and underused. A thirty-second walkthrough of a finished job or a technician explaining what they did works well. Same rules: real, recent, no promotional overlays.
Check what customers see
Search your business on a phone, open the profile, and tap the photos. What comes first is what a customer sees. If it is an old or weak image, upload stronger ones; Google tends to surface the most engaged-with and most recent.
A profile with strong, current photos, the right categories and service area, and a steady flow of reviews is doing most of what local SEO can do for a service business. The photos are the part you can improve this afternoon.
Profile photos are one of the checklist items in every local SEO engagement we run; the home services page covers the rest of the profile work.
Frequently asked questions
How many photos should a profile have?
Enough to show the team, the trucks, and a range of work. Dozens over time is normal. The count matters less than the quality and the recency.
Should I geotag the photos?
It does no harm and there is no demonstrated ranking benefit. Do not pay anyone for a geotagging service.
Can I upload the same photos to the website and the profile?
Yes. Same library, different placement.
A competitor uploaded a bad photo to my profile. What do I do?
Flag it through the profile's photo reporting option. Google reviews policy violations and removes them.