Take the right pictures, then take more pictures. This is the overall gist of this post.
Take a look at this picture.
And this picture.
These are pictures taken from my own camera that appeared briefly in the Localmn Google Places page. Why?
If you don’t proactively include logos and pictures to your Google Places profile, Google can and will algorithmically include random pictures from your own site and/or blog.
In this case, it involved visiting my sister in Iowa City in 2009 for her son’s baptism. The day before, I stayed in Cedar Rapids and made a blog post about a running tour of the well-known flood sites from the year before.
The above pictures include a boarded-up downtown business because of the flood and one of many porta-potties on neighborhood corners for residencies who no longer had water. It’s a sad story.
Once noting these pictures in the Google Places profile, it has been updated with a Search Engine Strategies event and a search/social event presented from my sister and myself.
Others examples of Google Places pictures who could be more proactive can be found from the fabulous town of Northfield, where I made my holiday purchases. Thanks again, Northfield, I will be back.
Tips for including pictures to your Google Places Profile:
- Compress your pictures to your best abililty
- Try to make them close to square – 200 pixels wide to 200 pixels long
Don’t necessarily worry if your potential logo within your Places account looks compressed like this:
It may come out on Google Places looking like this:
It’s trial and error and just go with the flow. Again, take pictures, then make more pictures. More to come on how taking pictures can not just help your local presence, but your social presence as well.
A good point, Paul! The problem is – even if you fill in all the 10 photos you are allowed to maximum have, Google could still pick images both from your website and from third-party sources and associate them with your business’ Place page. Sometimes the outcome is not that nice and taking a third-party/your own business website’s picture out of your Google Places profile is definitely not an easy task.
The problem now is that photos on Google Places are once again important. And now they are more important than ever. If you remember the timeline of changes, it was something like this:
- beginning of this year – SERP with the Google Places results having the leading listing’s photo next to them
- middle of the year – the pictures were completely gone from the SERPs
- about 2-3 weeks ago – completely new layout with pictures mattering a lot more (up to 5 pictures showing up in the (secondary) SERP)
At least now Google provides some relatively good way to report problems and get them fixed in a faster pace (before it was taking weeks and even months) – the new troubleshooter (http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1386120).
I think you need a photoshoot of some punk girls holding a banner with your logo for your owner-supplied photos, Pope-Man.
@Nyagoslav, thanks for chiming in. I think I now have another blog to follow.
Up until a few weeks ago, to my experience I’ve only seen manual images show up in Google Places accounts. Your point of algorithmic images showing up even if you include ten photos is definitely worth taking notice. Thanks for the heads up.
@Joolie, you might be on to something although I don’t know many punk girls and don’t have a printed-out localmn banner.
Paul, I will try to look for some examples.
Regarding the blog, you can always RSS or email subscribe to it
I’m writing mostly on local search related topics.
Paul,
Check a couple of examples:
http://g.co/maps/j859m
http://g.co/maps/pm428
Google is indeed a tricky creature… You can’t always control what it’s going to do, and people have tried! But yes just having as many pictures as you can up there and making sure they are the right size and everything is a good start, thanks for the tip!