A client meets your face before they meet you, and often three times. In a Search ad if you run one. On the map listing. On your website, on the page that describes what you do. Google keeps a number on each of those places. Most firms keep one photograph, taken years ago for a different purpose, and send it to all three.
Statistics Canada asked Canadians with a serious legal problem how they looked for help. Among those who did not go through the formal justice system, 51 percent searched the internet. One in three contacted a legal professional. The gap between those two numbers is where people are looking at faces.
What image assets do in a Search ad
Image assets are photographs Google shows beside a text ad on the results page. You upload them, Google reviews them, and the auction decides when they appear. Google’s help documentation puts the average effect at a 6 percent increase in click through rate when an image shows with a Search ad, measured on global data from April 2 to 29, 2023.
That average covers every industry, so read it as a floor. In July 2020 Merkle reported click through rates about 15 percent higher with image extensions than without, in retail accounts during the beta. Metric Theory wrote in 2021 that images chosen by hand beat the ones Google pulls from a landing page, and that the lift was larger on campaigns targeting practice terms than on campaigns targeting the firm’s own name.
Google’s rules decide whether your photographs can run at all. Square is required and landscape is recommended. Google asks for four unique images per campaign and rejects any image with added text, a logo or a graphic overlay. The account needs 60 days of clean policy history. Law firms are eligible.
A phone photo taken against a boardroom wall will pass review and do very little. Google now offers an editor that crops your image and swaps the background to whatever performs in your industry, which is Google telling you the format rewards a photograph made for it. Shoot the square and the landscape on purpose, with the subject centred and filling 80 percent of the frame, and make the asset exist before the campaign does.
Why your Business Profile has seven photos
The map listing is often the first face a client sees, because the map sits above the organic results for most local legal searches. BrightLocal studied 45,264 Business Profiles in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia between September 2017 and December 2018. The 2,548 legal businesses in the sample had a median of 7 photos. The median across all 36 industries was 11. Those legal profiles recorded a median of 3 direction requests, 8 calls and 16 website clicks a month.
Clients photograph restaurants and hotels and upload the pictures themselves. Clients do not photograph their lawyer’s reception. If your profile is going to have photographs, you will be the one taking them.
Google used to say on its own support pages that businesses with photos received 42 percent more direction requests and 35 percent more website clicks. Google no longer publishes the claim and did not date it. BrightLocal’s numbers are a correlation, as the study says itself. Read together, they show that the profiles getting clicks have photographs and most legal profiles do not.
Put up the lawyers who take the call, the entrance a nervous client will look for, and the room where the meeting happens.
Visitors read the portrait before the bio
Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group published eyetracking research on web photographs in 2010, and the group reviewed it again in August 2026. On one company’s team page, a visitor spent 10 percent more time on the portrait photographs than on the biographies, which took 316 percent more space. The same visitors skipped stock photographs of generic people and decorative images.
On a law firm site the portrait gets read before the bio under it, and a courthouse column or a stock handshake gets skipped. If the portrait is five years old, or lit unlike the rest of the team, that is what the visitor weighs while deciding whether to keep scrolling.
One shoot, three sets
Shoot all three on the same day, in the same light, from a brief that says who the client is.
- Ads: a square at 1200 by 1200 and a landscape at 1200 by 628 for each lawyer or practice group, subject centred, nothing added afterwards. Four per campaign.
- Profile: the lawyers, the entrance and the meeting room, as one consistent set that replaces what is there now.
- Website: a portrait per lawyer in the same light and setting, so the team page reads as one firm.
A headshot session asks you to stand in front of a backdrop and smile. A directed shoot starts with a brief about your practice, your client’s state of mind, and where each image will be used. Veritas runs that brief with the photographer, the stylist and a creative director. The Services page describes the work under brand experience.
A ten-minute check
Search your name and practice area on your phone, then your firm and your city. Look at the ad if you run one, the map listing and your bio page. Decide whether the same person appears in all three at the same standard, and whether you would hire that person with a hearing next week.
