3 logo photos and a 50 mile radius

Open your own profile and look at the photo count. If it is under 10 and most of what is there is a logo on a white background, this is the setup. It is not unusual. It is close to standard.

There are 2 settings doing most of the damage, and both were filled in once during setup by somebody trying to finish rather than trying to compete.

Photos: what they are actually for

Start with the motive, because that is where people go wrong. Photos are not a ranking hack. Google has never published a photo count that gets you into the map pack, and anybody selling you a number is guessing.

What photos decide is which of the 3 map results gets called. A homeowner with a dead system or a wet ceiling taps all 3 listings and gives each about 10 seconds. Your photos are most of what they see in those 10 seconds. A gallery of 3 logo files tells them nothing except that nobody has touched this in years.

What to upload, roughly in order of how much work each one does:

• Real jobs in progress. A tech at a condenser, a crew on a tear off, a new unit set on a pad, a deck dried in before dark. Shot on a phone by the person doing the work.
• Before and after pairs from the same job, uploaded together. This is the most persuasive thing you can put on a contractor profile and almost nobody does it.
• Your trucks and your people. A face with a name and a lettered truck is what tells a homeowner that the stranger arriving at their house is not a risk.
• The shop or office exterior, if it is somewhere a customer can actually turn up.
• The logo. Once, in the logo slot, which is a separate field. It is not a gallery item.

Practical notes on the files. Google’s help documentation asks for JPG or PNG and recommends images of at least 720 by 720 pixels. Shoot landscape where you can, because the listing crops to landscape. Do not add a watermark, a border, a phone number or a price banner: heavily edited images get rejected, and a promotional overlay reads as an advert rather than as a photo of a job.

Cadence beats volume. A few photos every week, uploaded off the phone that took them, does more than 40 dumped in on one Tuesday and then nothing for a year. Tie it to a step in the job the same way you tie the review request to a step in the job: last thing before the truck leaves, 2 photos go up.

One thing you do not control is that customers can add photos too, and theirs sit in the same profile. The only real defence is having enough good ones of your own that a bad customer photo is not the first thing anybody sees.

Geotagging does not work, so stop paying for it

There is a persistent piece of advice that you should write GPS coordinates into the EXIF metadata of a photo before uploading it, so that Google associates your business with a location. There are tools and services sold specifically to do this.

It does not work, for a mechanical reason: Google strips and re-encodes image metadata when a photo is processed for a profile, so the coordinates are gone before anything could read them. Google has never listed photo EXIF data as a local ranking factor in its own documentation, and the public tests people have run on this keep finding nothing.

You can verify the stripping part yourself in 5 minutes. Upload a geotagged photo to your profile, download it back out of the listing, and open its metadata. The coordinates are not there.

Naming the file wilmington-ac-repair.jpg is harmless and costs no extra time, so do it if you like. Do not pay anybody for it, and do not let it become the thing you do instead of the 20 minutes on categories below, which is the part that actually moves.

The service area: a radius is not a strategy

The service area field has 2 modes. You can draw a radius around your address, or you can list named places: cities, counties, ZIP codes. Contractors almost always take the radius and drag it as far as it will go.

A 50 mile radius does 2 unhelpful things.

It does not make you rank 50 miles away. Distance in the local algorithm is measured from where the searcher is standing to where your business actually is, and a wide service area does not move your business. The map pack post goes through how that works.

And it makes your profile vaguer. A circle covering 3 counties, 2 of which you have never taken a job in, says less about where you belong than a list of 8 towns you drive to every week.

Set it as named places instead, and build the list off your own invoices:

• Export the last 12 months of completed jobs with the service address on each.
• Sort by town and count jobs per town.
• Keep every town you did real work in and would happily drive to tomorrow.
• Drop anywhere you went once, 2 years ago, as a favour for a friend.
• Add a town only if you intend to actively work it, not because it would be nice.

For a Wilmington based contractor that list is usually New Hanover plus the near edges of Brunswick and Pender: Leland, Belville, Castle Hayne, Ogden, Porters Neck, Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach, Hampstead. Google caps how many areas you can list, and the cap sits below the number of towns most contractors want to type in, which turns out to be a useful forcing function.

The address question

A related setting people flip without thinking. If you hide your street address you become a service area business and the address stops showing. That is correct for a roofer working out of a yard or a home office, and Google requires it when customers cannot come to you.

It is usually wrong for an HVAC company with a real counter, a parts window or a showroom. A visible address is a more specific signal and it gets you a pin rather than a region. If a customer can walk in during business hours, show the address and set real hours.

The fields most contractors leave blank

Photos and the service area are the visible half. The fields below are where the relevance comes from, and they are empty on most profiles I open. The whole profile, field by field, is here. This is the short version for these 2 trades.

• Primary category. The heaviest single relevance lever on the profile, and a 2 minute change. Contractor is not a category you can compete with. HVAC companies should be looking at HVAC contractor, Air conditioning repair service, Heating contractor, Furnace repair service, Air conditioning contractor. Roofers should be looking at Roofing contractor plus whatever genuinely applies, such as Gutter cleaning service or Siding contractor. Do not guess at the wording: type the word into the category box and read back the list Google offers, because only the entries in that list exist.
• Additional categories. You get up to 9 beyond the primary. Use the ones you really sell. Adding categories you do not service is how you end up fielding calls you have to turn down, which has its own cost.
• Services. Almost always blank. Every service can be its own entry with a short written description. It is the largest block of text about your business that you are allowed to write and that most people never write.
• Business description. 750 characters, and most profiles use 0 of them.
• Hours, including holiday hours. An HVAC company that answers at 9pm and publishes hours ending at 5 is turning away the calls it most wants.
• Attributes. Small, fast, and they show as labels on the listing: on site services, appointment required, veteran owned, which payment methods you take.
• Products, for the equipment brands you carry. Worth 10 minutes for an HVAC dealer.

The part worth remembering

All of this is free and all of it is inside a control panel you already own, which is what makes it the work to do before you spend anything on ads. The profile is where the ad clicks and the map searches both land, and on most contractors it is about 40 percent filled in.

Change the radius first, because it is the setting that feels the most productive and does the least. Listing 50 miles of towns does not put you in front of anybody who is 50 miles away.

Written by Matt Pulliam, Southern Standard Systems. Wilmington, NC.