Resources / 5 min read
Nine photos, and why they’re worth more than your last $2,000 of ads
Two businesses come up next to each other. Same star rating, near enough. Same distance. One profile has a few older photos on it. The other has thirty-something, all recent: a face, the inside of the workshop, the team.
The one with the full, current profile gets the call, and it isn’t close.
That’s the whole case for this. Photos are the cheapest, fastest, most-ignored lever on your Google Business Profile, and almost every local business we look at is sitting on an empty one.
Why photos punch above their weight
Two reasons, and they stack.
They’re the only real evidence at the moment of choosing. Everything else on your listing is a claim. Your description is a claim. Your services are a claim. Even your star rating is other people’s claims. A photo of a finished job is the one piece of evidence a stranger can assess with their own eyes in half a second, and it’s the closest thing they get to seeing your work before they hand over money. For a nervous customer choosing between three names, that’s decisive.
They’re a signal you’re still trading. A profile with photos from 2021 reads as a business that’s slowed down, changed hands, or closed. Fresh photos say this outfit is busy right now. That matters to customers and it’s part of what activity signals do for where you show up in the first place.
And they cost nothing. That’s the bit that should sting slightly. You can spend $2,000 driving people to a listing that gives them nothing to look at, or spend a Tuesday afternoon giving them something to look at.
The nine
Take these on your phone. Today’s phone is more than good enough. Nobody wants a photoshoot.
1. Your face. Yours, or whoever turns up to the job. Not a logo. People hire people, and a face on a listing does more than most business owners believe. If you hate photos of yourself, everybody does, get someone to take it while you’re working and pick the least offensive one.
2. Your van, ute or shopfront. Branded, ideally. It’s how they’ll recognise you’re actually there when you turn up, and it quietly proves you’re a real operation with real gear.
3. A finished job. Your best recent one. The whole thing, well lit, from a sensible distance.
4. A before and after. The highest-performing photo type there is, across nearly every service. Deck, garden, bathroom, dog, teeth, spreadsheet, filing cabinet. The pair does something a single photo can’t: it shows the change, which is the actual thing they’re buying.
5. Work in progress. Halfway through. Slightly messy. This one feels unpolished and that’s precisely why it works, it looks like real work rather than marketing, and it shows how you operate on site.
6. Your team. Even if it’s two of you. Especially if it’s two of you.
7. Your workspace. Workshop, yard, clinic room, office. Tidy it first. It’s proof you exist somewhere physical, which is worth more than you’d think.
8. Detail work. Close up. The join, the weld, the finish, the trim. This one is for the small number of customers who actually care about quality, and they’re usually the ones with the bigger budgets.
9. Something with a person in it. You handing over the keys. You explaining something to a customer. A dog looking delighted. Photos with people in them get looked at longer than photos without, every time.
Doing it properly
Take them in daylight. Outside or near a window. Phone cameras are excellent in good light and terrible in bad light. This is 80% of it.
Landscape, mostly. It’s how they’ll be displayed.
Don’t filter them. Heavy editing reads as a stock photo, and stock photos are worse than no photos because they signal that you had nothing real to show.
Never use stock. The handshake. The generic smiling tradie. The suspiciously American kitchen. Everyone can spot them and they actively cost you trust.
Post regularly, not all at once. A steady trickle, a few a fortnight, looks like a working business. Thirty in one afternoon and then silence for a year looks like someone did a marketing push in 2024.
Geotagging isn’t the trick people claim. You’ll read advice about embedding location data in your images to rank in other suburbs. Don’t build your plan around it. Take photos in the places you actually work and let the rest of your area strategy do the work.
The habit that fixes this permanently
Here’s the system, and it’s one sentence.
Before you leave a job, take three photos.
Wide shot, detail shot, and one with a person in it if you can. Thirty seconds. Same moment you’re already asking for the review, so it attaches to a habit that already exists.
Do that for a year and you’ll have several hundred photos, a permanently fresh profile, endless material for your website and socials, and a visual record of your work that’s genuinely worth money when someone’s deciding between you and the other bloke.
Do it for a fortnight and you’ll already be ahead of most of your local market.
Right now
Open your Google Business Profile on your phone. Count your photos. Check the date on the most recent one.
If that number is under twenty, or that date is over three months ago, you’ve found something you can fix this week for free, and it’ll do more for your enquiries than the next thousand dollars you were about to spend.
Photos are the cheapest lever on your profile and the one almost everyone leaves alone. At Latetwenties we get local service businesses found online and chosen by the right customers. If you want to sort the rest of your profile while you’re in there, the full profile checklist is a good next step.