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Question about Geotagging images
Posted by on July 27, 2021 at 12:59 amRookie question: An HVAC company services a 100 mile radius from their main office. It was decided to use geotagging in the image metadata as part of their SEO strategy. Picture a 5×4 image grid, showing 20 images of the cities and towns they service.
Should the location coordinates in the image metadata be their main office location, or the different location of each town?
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2 Replies
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I’m just a curious dabbler, so take this with a grain of salt. However:
Geotagging is the new hot topic for local SEO, so while it may be considered whitehat, it’s fundamentally still seeking to game the algo to an extent. Google knows HVAC is a mobile business and can read images well enough to tell that they’ll be of different areas, so I think it would be unwise to have them all geotagged for the office, or for any single location.
I also think that the idea of geotagging being incorporated into the algo, would have come from the fact that it’s naturally present in the Exif data from the camera. Before/after shots taken on an iphone, would have locations services turned on and it could be assumed that those images would be geotagged.
If you’re taking an image on a Fuji X-E1 which doesn’t have any way to tell where it is, why would that image be geotagged? It would look unnatural.
Logically, the next step would be to remove the Exif data to not show the camera model. But, that would look even more unnatural and possibly even manipulative to have scrubbed Exif except for location.I’m going to guess that geotagging will become like alt tags. Everyone started using them for keywords so their importance went way down. Having an identical string of keywords for every alt tag would be worse than having none, and I’m assuming geotagging will be the same.
I would geotag photos from the field/job sites with the actual location they were taken from and leave everything else untagged. Honest and natural is going to be the best long term play.
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Like I said I’m no expert. But, I can’t see how Google wouldn’t adopt that same view.
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You should definitely tag the pictures and put keywords in the meta and file names.
If you are going to create a local page for each city in that 100 mile radius, then make sure the tags and info match ( or are relevant to ) that city.
If they are all on the same page then just geo tag them around the major hubs.
Don’t overthink it.
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