Why Is Geotagging Important for SEO? The Evidence
Why is geotagging important for SEO? Far more narrowly than the industry claims. The popular version claims that adding coordinates to your photos makes your Google Business Profile climb the local results. That claim has now been tested, and it did not hold up. Where photo location genuinely earns its place is in proving where an image was made, and in the images you host yourself, where nothing strips the data back out.
That is the short answer. Here is the evidence behind it, including the one metric that did improve, and if you have never looked at what a geotag actually is, you can open a photo and read its location fields in about ten seconds.
What the only controlled test of this found
In March 2025, Jake Hundley of Evergrow Marketing published a 10-week study across 27 lawn care businesses. The design was straightforward: five weeks of normal photo posting with the location data stripped out to establish a baseline, then five weeks of the same posting schedule with coordinates added, targeting two towns per business. Seven ranking metrics were tracked throughout.
| Outcome | Metrics | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Improved | 1 | "Near me" searches, in the specific towns that were tagged |
| No improvement | 6 | Adding coordinates changed nothing measurable |
| Got worse | 4 of those 6 | Rankings fell during the period when photos were tagged |
The author's summary of his own result: "Although it helps the 'near me' queries in those targeted areas, it hurts everywhere you don't add geotagged images." His conclusion was blunter still: "For these reasons, our agency won't geotag our clients' GBP images."
One agency's test on one industry is not the last word, and it should not be read as one. It is, however, the only controlled experiment on the question that anyone has published, and it points the opposite way to the advice built on top of it.
What Google says decides local ranking
Google publishes the factors behind local results, and there are three of them. Relevance is "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for". Distance is "how far each business is from the customer who's searching". Prominence is "how well-known a business is".
Read the middle one closely, because it is the one the myth leans on. Distance is measured from the person searching to the business, not from a photograph's coordinates to anything. Nothing on Google's local ranking page mentions EXIF, photo metadata or geotagging, and the page adds that "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."
The same silence runs through the rest of the documentation. Google's photo guidelines for Business Profiles specify format, file size, resolution and quality: JPG or PNG, between 10 KB and 5 MB. They never mention location data at all.
So why is geotagging important for SEO?
Because it does a different job than the one it is sold for. Strip out the ranking promise and what remains is still worth having, particularly if you publish photos on your own site.
A geotagged photo is a verifiable record that an image was made at a particular place. For a contractor documenting a job, an inspector filing a report, an estate agent with hundreds of listing photos, or anyone whose photographs are evidence of work done, that record is the entire point. It survives in your own archive, it makes a library searchable by place years later, and it does not depend on any platform choosing to read it.
It is also the honest answer to a question business owners keep being sold the wrong way round: the location in your photos is for you, not for the algorithm.
What actually helps an image get found
Google is specific about what it uses from an image, and none of it is in the GPS fields. Its image guidance names three things:
- Alt text: which Google calls "the most important attribute" for giving an image more metadata. It also carries the accessibility benefit, which is reason enough on its own.
- Filenames: "use filenames that are short, but descriptive", with the example that
my-new-black-kitten.jpgbeatsIMG00023.JPG. - Placement: "make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter".
Those three are documented, free, and take less time than geotagging a folder. If a page about your work in a particular neighbourhood needs to signal where it is about, the words on the page do that job, and pages built around a specific trade and location do it more reliably than any field inside a file.
Why the location often never arrives
There is a mechanical reason the ranking theory struggles: the data frequently does not survive the trip. A location lives inside the image file, so it only travels as far as that file travels unchanged, and plenty of services re-encode what you upload.
When the IPTC, the standards body for photo metadata, tested sixteen services, it found Instagram and Twitter stripping metadata entirely, while Dropbox and OneDrive preserved the original file intact. That round dates from 2019 and IPTC has not published a newer one, so treat it as the shape of the problem rather than a current scoreboard. The principle stands: a field you cannot verify arrived is a poor foundation for a strategy.
You can settle it for any individual file in about ten seconds: upload it somewhere, download it back, and read the location fields of the copy that comes back.
A workflow that holds up
Geotag the photos you control, and stop expecting the tag to do work on platforms that never promised to read it. In practice that means the images on your own website, your own archive, and any file you hand to a client as a record.
Keep the geotagged original, publish with real alt text and a descriptive filename, and when a photo needs a location written into it before it goes into your library you can set the coordinates on the file directly. If the underlying mechanics are new to you, start with what geotagging actually writes into a photo, then the step-by-step process.
