Getting Found Online
The Photos That Get You Chosen (and the Ones That Quietly Lose You Customers)
Three pins on a map, ten seconds, and a stranger picking one. Most of that decision is photos. Here’s which ones work, which ones hurt, and how to take a good set before lunch.
7 min readBy Mavlo
Picture the moment. Someone in Clarendon Park wants a haircut on Saturday, opens Maps, types "barber", and gets three pins. They are not going to read three descriptions. They tap the first one, look at the photos for about as long as it takes to sip a coffee, tap back, look at the next. Whichever set makes the place feel real, open and worth the walk wins. The other two never find out they were in the running.
That is the whole argument for taking photos seriously. It isn’t a design question. Photos are the thing people use to decide between businesses that look identical on paper: same rating, same distance, same category.
Three pins, ten seconds
Photos do a job words can’t. A stranger has questions they would never say out loud. Does this look clean. Does it look busy. Does it look like it’s still trading. Would I feel out of place. A photo of your shopfront with the lights on answers all four before the description has loaded.
BrightLocal looked at 45,000 Business Profiles and found the average listing had 11 photos, and that listings with only one image generated 65% fewer clicks than the average listing. Listings with over a hundred got twenty times the website clicks. You do not need a hundred. But one lonely photo reads as an afterthought, and people treat it as one.
The psychology of why is covered in Does a Photo Really Change Whether Someone Calls You? This is the practical half: which photos, how to take them, and what to stop doing.
What Google actually asks for
Google’s own guidance is short and unglamorous. Its photo guidelines for Business Profiles ask for JPG or PNG files between 10 KB and 5 MB, a recommended size of 720 by 720 pixels with a floor of 250 by 250, and photos that are "in focus and well lit, and have no significant alterations or excessive use of filters." Any phone made in the last five years clears the size bar without trying. Focus and lighting are where most listings fall down.
Its tips page for business photos lists the kinds it wants to see, exterior, interior, product, people at work and the team, and suggests at least three of each. Read that list again, because it is also a fair description of what a nervous first-time customer wants to know: where is it, what’s it like inside, what will I get, and who will I be dealing with.
The photos that do the work
- The door. One photo of your frontage from across the street, in daylight, sign readable, with enough of the neighbouring shops that someone walking down Queens Road can match it to what they’re looking at. This is the photo people check at the kerb on the day.
- Inside, from the doorway. Stand where a customer stands when they first walk in. Lights on, chairs pushed in. This is the "would I feel comfortable here" photo.
- The actual thing. The flat white, the finished fade, the boiler you fitted last Tuesday, the treatment room. Not a picture of the sign that says you do it. Solicitors and accountants find this hard; a tidy meeting room with a chair pulled out works better than you’d expect.
- The people. Whoever answers the phone, ideally doing the job, smiling in a way that looks like a Tuesday rather than a wedding. Strangers trust faces.
- Something recent. A photo from last month says you’re still trading. A set that hasn’t changed since 2021 says you might not be.
The ones that quietly hurt
Stock photos first. Everyone can tell. A dentist listing with a glossy model in a white towel doesn’t say "we’re professional", it says "we’ve never photographed our own surgery", and it makes a stranger wonder why. Same with a logo as the main image. A logo is not a photo of a place; it tells someone nothing about whether they’d want to be there, and from three metres away it looks like a placeholder.
Then the dark ones. Phone shots taken at closing time with half the lights off, or shot into a window so the whole room is a silhouette. The Wigston barber with a warm, bright interior photo beats the one with a nicer shop and a gloomy photo, every time, and nobody who chose the first will ever know what they missed.
Ten photos of the same thing is the subtle one. If your gallery is nine angles of the same cake counter, you’ve told people one thing nine times and nothing about the rest. Variety is how a stranger knows there is a whole business behind the door.
And the accidental ones: a screenshot of your website, a photo of a flyer, an event poster with a date that has passed. These end up on listings more often than you’d guess, usually because someone was in a hurry. Delete them.
One rule from Google worth keeping
Google’s tips for posting media to Maps say to keep media real. Small fixes like straightening or brightening are fine, but the page says to "avoid heavy filters" and to "avoid adding elements such as borders, text, or collaged images." So no Instagram presets, no OPEN NOW banner across the front, no four-photo grid. A plain, well-lit photo of the real thing is what the rules want and, happily, what customers want too.
The twenty-minute phone shoot
You don’t need a photographer. You need a clear morning, a clean lens and a little intention. Wipe the lens first. It is the single most effective step and almost nobody does it.
- Pick a bright day and go out mid-morning, when the sun is up but not glaring. Overcast is fine; it softens the shadows.
- Exterior: cross the road and shoot the whole frontage with the sign readable. Take three, stepping left and right between them.
- Inside: turn every light on, open the blinds, tidy whatever is in frame. Shoot from the doorway, then from the far corner looking back.
- Product or work: get close, one item, plain background. For a service business, photograph the job in progress, with the customer’s permission or from behind.
- People: one of the team, at eye level, in the space where they work. Ask them to look at the camera, then say something daft. Use the second frame.
- Hold the phone level, tap the screen to focus on the subject, and don’t zoom. Walk closer instead.
- Back inside, pick the best eight to twelve. Crop if you must, brighten slightly if you must, and leave it there.
Who picks your cover photo (not always you)
Here is the trap. You can set a cover photo, but Google’s guidance says plainly that this doesn’t guarantee it will show up as the first image, and that if your cover is low-quality "or if other sources suggest that it’s not the best photo to represent your business, a user-submitted photo may be selected instead." That is a polite way of saying that if your own photos are weak, Google will lead with whatever a customer happened to upload.
And customers upload a lot. Google’s page on photo updates from customers is blunt: "You can’t stop customers from posting photo updates, but you can report inappropriate photos." So a blurry half-eaten panini from 2023 can become the first thing Leicester sees of your café, and you can’t simply delete it. You can report it if it breaks the rules, and a bad photo usually doesn’t.
The defence isn’t a form. It’s outnumbering them with better material. A strong, current set of your own gives Google a reason to lead with yours and pushes the customer photos down the gallery where they do less harm. Open your listing as a stranger once a month and check what’s showing first.
Use the same set everywhere
Once you have eight to twelve photos you’re proud of, use them everywhere: your Google profile, your website, your directory listings. Two reasons. The first is recognition. Someone who sees your frontage on Maps, then on your site, then on a Mavlo listing while comparing three plumbers, starts to feel they already know the place. Different photos in each spot make one business look like three.
The second is that search engines look at the images on your website too. Google’s image best practices say "high-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear images", and ask for descriptive filenames and alt text, with the image placed near the words it relates to. So a file called leicester-cafe-front-queens-road.jpg, with alt text that says what it shows, sitting next to a paragraph about where you are, does more work than IMG_4471.jpg floating on its own.
The same set, kept current, is also most of what separates a thin listing from a finished one. If you’re wondering where the effort belongs first, Google Business Profile vs a directory is the honest comparison. The short version: both need the same photos, so take them once and use them twice.
Key takeaways
- People choose between three similar businesses on photos, in seconds, before they read a word.
- Five photos do most of the work: the door, the room, the actual product or job, the people, and something recent.
- Stock images, logos as covers, dark phone shots and repeats of the same thing quietly cost you the tap.
- If your own photos are weak, Google may lead with a customer’s. The fix is a better set of your own, used everywhere.
Give people a reason to choose you
A Mavlo listing puts your best photos in front of locals comparing options, and keeps them up to date.
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