Episode 2: Google Business Profile — the free listing that books photographers

Transcript

NATHAN: Welcome back to The Photography Marketing Podcast — the show about the business side of photography. I'm Nathan Cole.

LAURA: And I'm Laura Bishop. Today: the single highest-return piece of marketing most photographers are ignoring. It's free, it takes about fifteen minutes a week, and it's probably responsible for more local enquiries than Instagram ever will be. Google Business Profile.

NATHAN: That's the listing that shows up in Google Maps and in that map box at the top of local searches — when someone types "family photographer near me" or "wedding photographer in Austin". And the key thing to understand is that the map box and the normal blue links are two separate competitions. You can rank nowhere in the blue links and still win the map box — and for local services, the map box gets a huge share of the clicks.

LAURA: So why are most photographers invisible in it? Because their profile is half set up. Claimed years ago, never touched since. So let's walk the setup properly. First: categories. Your primary category should be the thing you most want to be found for — "Wedding photographer" if that's your bread and butter, not just "Photographer". You can add secondary categories for the rest. This one field has an outsized effect on which searches you show up for.

NATHAN: Second: your service area and address settings. If you work from home or a studio clients don't visit, you can hide the address and set service areas instead — the towns and counties you'll travel to. Fill them in properly; don't just name your home city if you'll happily shoot an hour away. Third: the description. Seven hundred and fifty characters to say what you shoot, where, and what makes you worth booking. Plain words, the phrases clients actually type.

LAURA: Fourth — and this is the one almost nobody does — photos. Not ten. Fifty, a hundred, added over time. Google's own data says listings with more photos get significantly more clicks and direction requests. And for a photographer there's no excuse: you're the one business type with an unlimited supply of professional photos. Upload your best recent work, name the files descriptively before uploading — "austin-texas-wedding-ceremony.jpg", not "DSC underscore 4471" — and add new ones every month. It signals an active, current business.

NATHAN: Now the engine room: reviews. Reviews do three jobs at once. They rank you — review count, score and recency are core map-box ranking factors. They convert you — a photographer with sixty recent five-star reviews beats a slightly better photographer with eleven old ones, every time. And they're the raw material AI search tools quote when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI overview "who's a good newborn photographer in Denver?" More on that next episode.

LAURA: So how do you actually get reviews without being weird about it? Build it into the job. The natural moment is right after delivery, when the client's just seen the gallery and loves it — for weddings, that's gallery week; for family shoots, same thing. Send the direct review link — you can generate it from your profile dashboard — with one warm sentence: "It was a genuine pleasure shooting your day — if you've got two minutes, a Google review helps other couples find me." That's it. No incentives, no discounts for reviews — that breaches Google's rules and can get the lot wiped.

NATHAN: And reply to every review. Every single one, good or bad. It takes thirty seconds each, it shows the next reader you care, and responses are another activity signal. If you get a bad one — and everyone eventually does — reply once, calmly, professionally, take it offline, and never get into a public argument. The reply isn't for the reviewer; it's for the three hundred people who'll read it later.

LAURA: Let's talk about the weekly fifteen minutes, because consistency beats intensity here. Once a week: upload two or three fresh photos. Once a week: check for new reviews and reply. Once a month: post an update — yes, the profile has posts, almost nobody uses them, which is exactly why they help. A recent shoot, a seasonal offer, last-minute availability for a date that's opened up. And once a quarter: audit your hours, categories and service areas to make sure nothing's drifted.

NATHAN: One warning, because it catches people out: don't stuff your business name field with keywords. Changing your listing from "Jane Smith Photography" to "Jane Smith Photography — Best Wedding Photographer Austin" can get your profile suspended, and getting reinstated is a miserable, slow process. The ranking gains come from categories, reviews, photos and activity — not from jamming keywords into the name.

LAURA: And a note on who we are. This show is produced by the team behind Top Rated Photographers — the independent directory of genuinely top-rated photographers, listed niche by niche, city by city. When we review photographers for the directory, Google reviews are one of the biggest inputs — exactly the signals we talked about today: count, score, recency, and whether the photographer bothers to reply. So the fifteen minutes a week you put into your profile also builds your case for a listing.

NATHAN: This week's homework, and it's an easy one. First: check your primary category — is it the specific thing you want to be booked for? Second: count your photos; if it's under thirty, schedule a monthly upload habit. Third: send the review link to your three most recent happy clients, today, while you're thinking about it.

LAURA: Next time: AI search — how photographers get cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overview for a recommendation, and why this is about to matter a lot more than most people think. See you then.

NATHAN: The Photography Marketing Podcast is a production of Top Rated Photographers. Show notes, links and the full transcript are at photographymarketingpodcast dot com. Follow the show, and if this one earned it, leave us a review — we'd practice what we preach.