GUEST BLOG: How strong headshots will boost your Google rankings

By Alex Lagarejos, photographer

Expertise, authority, trustworthiness: these three words are the bedrock of Google’s algorithms when it comes to rankings – and killer headshots are essential.

No matter the field of business you are in and whether your company is large or small, if you are not up to date with how Google’s rankings are changing then your business will undoubtedly loose out.

You have the website and you have the talent and skill to provide the service which means you’ve covered the expertise and the authority. The most key factor however and the one which companies often overlook, but which Google definitely doesn’t, is trustworthiness.

WIN GOOGLE’S TRUST

The key to improving your trustworthiness is the transparency of your organisation. It’s time to beef up that ‘About me/us’ page. Gone are the days when a brief bio of your department heads would suffice!

Your new updated ‘Meet the team’ page should include a rich, detailed paragraph about your members of staff – but that’s not all. It’s all about the visual presence and so killer headshots are essential. Providing engaging headshots of your staff will make clients feel at ease and really enhance the human element of your company, irrespective of the services you provide.

Over the past six months Google have even rolled out penalties for sites without the transparency of professional photographs and quality bios

Corporate headshots may have received a bad rep (thanks mainly to the ‘80s!) but their impact today should not be underestimated; there’s a big difference between a team page with consistently strong images from the same photographer and a miss-matched lot of selfies and profile pictures when it comes to a through-line in branding.

AVOID GOOGLE’S NEW PENALTIES

Over the past six months Google have even rolled out penalties for sites without the transparency of professional photographs and quality bios. Google’s algorithm has become so advanced that it can check against a database of known stock images and penalise a site riddled with stock photography.

From Google’s point of view it makes perfect sense, they are not in the business of promoting your website, they are in the business of providing the very best search results for their users.

We’ve all seen those websites that make us feel uneasy with their generic text, fake images and little real detail – but think about your company’s website and how Google will view it, more importantly, how will their algorithm view it?

Google now only want to serve search results that are rich in content and detail so you have to think objectively about the information you present.

Can you afford to fall down in the search engine results page (SERP)?

Google now only want to serve search results that are rich in content and detail so you have to think objectively about the information you present

THE HUMAN TOUCH

Google is moving away from the search engine optimisation (SEO) practices of backlinks providing the strongest signals for SERPs, which we probably all know about by now.

Moving forward, you will need to know more about how SEO scores are being determined – engagement, content and transparency are now top of the list.

So what are you waiting for? If you don’t want to lose out to your competition and slip down the SERPs then you need to be working on producing a visual brand with openness and engagement.

It’s not only about search rankings, with the right kind of photography your business’ click to client ratio can increase by up to 28%, purely because a potential client can see into your company before they’ve even interacted with you.

It brings a sense of trust and connection with potential clients that a sterile website will never produce. People want to see the human element now more than ever when they become involved with a company; our collective corporate fatigue has made wary consumers out of us all – it’s time to reintroduce the human face of your company.