STOCK PHOTOS ARE QUIETLY HURTING YOUR SEO
Had a conversation in a one on one recently that stuck with me. Turns out search engines can actually tell when you're using stock photography. Not guess. Tell.
That same smiling person in a blazer on your homepage? They're on a few thousand other websites too. Google knows it, and treats your site accordingly. A page full of generic images reads as low effort to the systems ranking your site, one more signal separating a real local business from a thrown together landing page.
There's also the image search angle most business owners never think about. That polished stock photo can't show up for YOUR business in Google Images, since the search engine already knows it belongs to a stock library sitting on hundreds of other sites.
This hits certain industries hardest. Law firms, CPAs, financial advisors, basically anywhere that defaults to "professional but boring" and reaches for a stock photo folder instead of real photography. These are also the businesses where trust matters most. Nobody's picking a financial advisor off vibes and a stock photo of a handshake.
The fix is simpler than it sounds: original photography of your actual team, your actual office, your actual work. A solid headshot session, a few shots of your space, your team doing what they actually do. That's it.
It solves the SEO problem since there's nothing generic to flag. It solves the trust problem since visitors see the real people they'd work with. If your site's still running on stock photos, might be worth a conversation about what a session would look like for your team.
