Forget About EXIF, This Is How You Can Geotag Images

There are business owners out there right now who still aren't sure whether Google accounts for EXIF data (geotagging) in embedded photos on their business websites. It's nothing to be ashamed of: Sussing out Google's system is a learning process that should frankly become a college course in and of itself. You have search engine optimization (SEO), popularity rankings, page load times, phrasing and other specifics that would catch you off guard just when you thought you knew it all. Here's a bit of good and bad news. The good news is that Google has given a point-blank response on multiple occasions whether EXIF data is accounted for in SEO. The bad news is that no, they don't account for it, so there's no point focusing on it at any point before or after the upload. Some have indicated that it's not accounted for because Google wipes out the EXIF data when you initially upload the photos, which can be remedied by manually reinputting the EXIF data after they're uploaded; however, the tech giant itself has more than once stated that at no point is EXIF factored into your SEO ranking. At best, you can expect nominal results if only because Google's crawlers could notice aspects of the EXIF data and maybe apply it to your ranking. It will either be totally ineffective or minimal at best, and you may as well take Google's word for it that they don't intentionally account for geotagging. Now for more good news: There are alternatives to geotagging that do work, and these have been pointed out by Google before. Here's a neat little list of what to try instead:1. Caption the photos with the geographical details; city and state are ideal. 2. Encourage your visitors to leave their comments and reviews with the city and state that they were serviced in.3. Upload the site photos through Google Maps on an account that has been verified within the area that your business works out of. We will point out that there's a great deal of potential advancement in the future of SEO that could tap into metadata more seriously down the road, and taking the extra time to organize your image metadata, including EXIF, won't hurt but in fact could help with any changes that Google makes. We fully expect that support for EXIF data will become a reality at some point, so if you're more comfortable with future-proofing your site for the extra effort, far be it from us to tell you not to. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/b314cl/geotaggingimagesforgooglemybusinessfor/.