The one-hour before-and-after photo checklist for a pressure washing company
A one-hour checklist to turn the before-and-after photos on your phone into Google profile posts, website proof and ad creative for pressure washing jobs.
You have hundreds of driveway photos on your phone and almost none of them are doing any work. They sit in the camera roll between a receipt and a picture of your kid, while your Google profile shows the same six images it had last year. Before-and-after photos are the best sales tool in this trade, and most companies never get them in front of customers.
This checklist takes about an hour. Set a timer, sit somewhere with Wi-Fi, and work top to bottom.
Minutes 0 to 10: pull the best pairs
- Open your camera roll and search for the last six months of jobs. Most phones let you search "driveway" or "house" and find them.
- Pick 12 pairs where the before and after are taken from the same spot, same angle. Matching angles are what make the difference obvious. A before from the street and an after from the porch does not read.
- Favor variety: driveways, house washes, roofs if you soft wash, decks, fences, commercial sidewalks. One of each beats ten driveways.
- Skip any photo with a readable house number, license plate or a person's face. Crop it or drop it.
- Put the 12 pairs in one album called "Marketing."
Minutes 10 to 20: make them usable
- For each pair, make a side-by-side image. Free phone collage apps do this in seconds. Before on the left, after on the right, every time.
- No filters and no heavy brightness edits. People can tell, and an edited after photo looks like a lie.
- Rename each file with the service and town: "concrete-cleaning-mesa-az.jpg." It costs nothing and helps your website.
- Write one plain line for each pair: what it was, where, and anything notable. "Oil-stained driveway in Mesa, surface cleaner plus post-treatment, about two hours."
Minutes 20 to 35: load the Google profile
- Upload all 12 to the Photos section of your Google Business Profile.
- Turn four of them into Posts, each with its one-line description and a "Call now" button. Schedule a reminder to post one more every week until the album runs out.
- Check your cover photo. If it is your logo or a truck, swap it for your strongest before-and-after.
- While you are in there, check your hours. 63.4% of pressure washing profiles in our data list none, and a profile without hours looks closed.
Photos are one place most of the field already does fine: 95.3% of profiles have at least one. What separates a profile is recent, real job photos, not just having a picture. The Google Business Profile guide covers what else to fill in.
Minutes 35 to 45: put them on the website
- Add your best three pairs to the top half of your homepage, under the headline, not buried on a gallery page.
- Put one pair on each service page that matches the service. Driveway photos on the driveway page, roof photos on the roof page.
- Add the town name to the caption. Someone in that town sees a job near them and trusts it more.
If you do not have a website yet, you are in the 31.7% of companies in our data without one. Companies with a site carry a median of 17 reviews against 2 for those without. The website essentials guide lists what the site needs.
Minutes 45 to 55: save ad and social versions
- Make a vertical version of your three best pairs, before on top, after on the bottom. That is the shape Facebook and Instagram stories use.
- Shoot nothing new today, but note which jobs next week would make a good 15-second video: the surface cleaner pass on a dark driveway is the kind of clip people stop scrolling for.
- Save these to a folder named "Ads" so they are ready when you run a campaign. The Facebook and Instagram ads guide covers how to use them.
Minutes 55 to 60: fix the habit
- Make a rule for every crew: one before and one after, same angle, on every job, before the hose comes out and after it is rolled up.
- Have crews drop them in a shared album the same day, labeled with the town.
- Put a recurring 15-minute block on your calendar every Monday to post one pair to Google and one to social.
That last step is what turns a one-hour cleanup into a steady stream of proof. A profile that adds a new real job photo every week looks active to homeowners, and the photos you take this fall become the ads you run in spring.
If you want the profile posts, website gallery and ad creative handled for you, any service is available as a free 14-day trial, no card. Text or call (801) 590-3890.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, pressure washing companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor