Google Business Profile posts and photos help a customer choose you.

Google Business Profile posts are short updates you publish on your listing, and photos are the images shown on it, both the ones you add and the ones customers add. Their job is to help a person who has already found you decide to call. I don’t treat either as a dependable way to move your map position.

What photos a home-service profile needs

A homeowner is deciding who to let into the house, so the pictures have to show that the company is real and show the work. I ask for branded vehicles and people in uniform, so the customer recognizes who arrives. Then finished jobs: the installed condenser, the new water heater, the completed roof section. Work in progress helps too, because drop cloths down and a tidy work area show how the crew treats a house. The shop or office goes in only if it’s a real place you operate from.

Ask before photographing inside a customer’s home, and keep faces out of the frame, along with house numbers and license plates. Google asks that photos show the real business, which rules out stock and manufacturer images.

Logo, cover photo and customer uploads

You can set a logo and choose a preferred cover photo, but Google decides which image it shows first for a given search. Customers can add their own photos too. An unflattering one stays, because the only route to removal is reporting a photo that breaks Google’s content rules. The practical response is to keep adding good photos of your own, so that one poor customer upload is one image among many.

What to post

Take a roofing company in Santee. Useful posts would be a short write-up of a recent repair with a photo, or a reminder to have flashing checked before the winter rain. A real offer works too, with its real terms and end date. The test is what a customer looking at your listing this week would want to know.

Google has offered a few post formats over the years, such as general updates, offers and events, and the set available has changed more than once. Google checks posts against its content policies and can reject them, so I keep them factual.

How often to post

Customers notice the date on the last post, so a schedule the office can sustain is better than a burst followed by silence. Post as often as you can keep up with honest material. The simplest source is the crew: a technician sends a photo and a line about the job from the driveway, and that becomes the post.

Where posts and photos sit in the order of work

The fields that decide whether you’re shown at all come first. If the hours available for the profile are limited, categories and services and a steady flow of real reviews through review management get them before posts and photos do. Those bear on map pack ranking, and photos mostly don’t. A profile audit sets that order for your listing.

How I measure whether they helped

Calls and clicks from the profile are the measure. Google’s performance report for a profile counts calls made with the call button and clicks through to the website, as well as requests for directions. The counts have limits: they miss the person who reads your number and dials it by hand. I record them before a change to your Google Business Profile and again about two weeks after.