How To Optimize Images For Visual Search? 

Visual search is a very old tool that was built into famous search engines and social media platforms such as Pinterest, Bing, Snapchat, Amazon, and, of course, the major contributor, Google to provide a better user experience.

Research by MIT proves that, “90% of information transmitted to the human brain is visual.”

So, the impact of multimedia in digital marketing was needed and therefore was performed all through the last few decades.

With the three major companies Google, Pinterest, and Microsoft fighting over this ingenious technology, visual search image today.

Marketers such as brands, retailers, and shopkeepers provide content to create an impact on their users while keeping them engaged too. This effectiveness is achieved with visual search much better.

This is done to gain high popularity among all kinds of generations and thus, every business and marketer optimize their website and its content accordingly which also includes images of the content.

Do you know that 62% of millennials and members of Gen Z want to use visual search over all other search types as per one report?

So, you need to seek visuals that speak for your brand alone and are relevant to the users in a personalized way.

With e-Commerce shops and marketing brands keeping user experience at the top of their priority list, this makes Visual search tools to become an asset for them.

Let’s learn what is visual search.

What Is Visual Search?

You must have searched product by image or seen it on a video review or it was shown to you by a friend that enhanced your curiosity.

See the image above, visual search is an artificial intelligence tool that uses real-life images such as photos, screenshots, and other visuals to identify objects in the visual and provide relevant information to the searcher as you are looking at the image above.

Being more complex than text-search, visual search image is a query of users on the online platform.

Even Ben Silbermann, the CEO of Pinterest states that “The future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords.”

This is because visual search image is a time-saving and convenience-providing technology that opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, one of which is in marketing, especially for eCommerce and retailers.

As many users are searching for clothes, jewelry, and other e-commerce objects that visual product search can find and the user could buy it from the online business that can provide them.

Let’s get to the most awaited part of visual lookup, Visual Search Optimization.

Optimize Images For Visual Search

Add Alt Text

The image Alt tag or attribute is an HTML element that is there to describe what’s on the image and function of the image. Shown on a webpage like this.

<img src=“image.jpg” alt=“image description”>

These tags or description helps the Google crawler as well as when the internet connection is at a halt.

For Google crawlers, the alt tags help in providing the context of the images, and during a lost internet connection, an alternative text takes place of the image. Today many search engines still heavily depend on alternative text.

The optimized visual search example of Alt text is that,

Take the example of the picture shown below:

This picture could be alt texted as “Our signature copper bottle laying on a tiled edge”. This Alt text includes a description of what the image shows.

Descriptive File Names & Titles

Today, almost every advertising platform allows you to provide picture descriptions such as Instagram, Facebook, and now, even YouTube provides the following features.

Mostly you might have seen visual search examples of an image such as IMG_21567 or “screencapture-google-search-2021-11-20-12_43_16” which are random numbers and words that your search engine is unable to understand.

Look at the image below that shows the platform YouTube provides space to give descriptions about the videos and their visual lookup within them.

As you can see in the image above, there is a place to add the description. You must name your files.

Also, WordPress also follows a content management system that allows you to do products description displayed below the image. This feature promotes your business’ visibility and can increase your ranking.

Read More: Tweaks For Page Title & Meta Description That’ll Boost Your SEO Traffic & CTR

Setting Image Data & Site Maps

Structured data is code on your website that summarises any content seen on its pages, particularly some of the most popular picture searches performed by users.

It draws attention to key elements of your website’s content that help search engines better understand it and you could get ranking while images search webpages.

Adding schema markup to photos and products also generates a sitemap for your website.

Sitemaps make search engines’ jobs easier which in return improves the ranking of searched products by image online, making them one of the greatest visual search examples for optimization.

Keep Proper Size & Format

High-quality images are an absolute must today, so it must balance this quality with the size of the file.

That is, if your file size is too large, it would slow your webpage or product page, this most probably would make your customer move onto another site.

“As users prefer page loading speed of 1-3 seconds.”

The solution to heavy files is to optimize them for your website by compressing the image, which compliments the quality of your work by loading faster which is accounted as the ranking metric by search engines.

Along with high-quality images you are also offering a great user experience that puts a positive impact on SEO.

Another thing is the file type: BMP, GIF JPEG, and PNG. Use these file types of your visual image search web constantly use it and Google Lens supports it.

Read More: Everything You Need To Know About Image Optimization

Set Keyword-Based Descriptions

When you are trying to reach a set of users keywords in your content helps you reach them. Making it important for SEO as well as Visual SEO.

The thing is keywords help you write a better description of your product, content, and services while helping your search engine to show these images at the right results.

In the image above, you can see how I have added the keyword in the description of the blog. This is exactly how you need to write keyword-based description.

Because putting keywords in your descriptions makes your Google crawler satisfied with the relevance of your product image and therefore, helps you rank over your competitors.

Though it is true that keyword research won’t be that much important with the growing search product by images. But until the content remains alive, we have to keep optimizing for it and descriptions of the images are content too.

Benefits Of Using Visual Search

Searches are expanding their usability among the search engines and most every business getting ready or at the edge of using Visual search tools to attract their customers of different generations and eras.

The thing is you do benefit by applying these optimization points for visual search as does 35% of marketers that are planning to do so.

The benefits of Google image search optimization are

1 You Attract Gen Z’s Attention, who are mostly exploring and engaging with the online market today.

2 You get to Establish a Relationship With some New Customers that may be interested in your products and services and are inquiring about them.

3 Your customers are now present online and the Faster Product Discovery can be done through the visual lookup that is some of the visual search examples, I have already provided.

4 Your products are optimized to Sell To Decision Making Customers who would follow your images search webpage.

5 You can Boost Your Income With Increased Conversions by providing users with a systematic way of dealing with them and proving them with a Visual search tool.

6 The Web Inventory, which is the collection of top images searched for your products and services Leads To the Branding of your business website.

Conclusion

In the blog, we went on defining what is visual search along with the optimization tips. The tips I have elaborated above are going to help you for sure if you apply them carefully. Visual search has been a very important element for SEO especially if you have an ecommerce business or website. So, you must know all these optimization techniques.

If you have any doubt or query, you can just comment down below and I’ll reply for sure.

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.

FAQs

1. How do I optimize my ecommerce site for visual search?

One of the best way to optimize your ecommerce site is to choose the image size according to the width of your website content. Along with that, use structured data and submit image sitemap to Google.

2. How do visual search engines work?

The type of search engine uses the image query like, the content, shape, texture and color of the image and compare these things with the information it has in its database and deliver the approximate results.

3. What are the best image search engine?

There are many image search engines like,

• Bing image search
• Pinterest visual search tool
• Picsearch
• Flicker
• Gettyimages

4. What are the advantages of visual search over text based search?

It improves the product discovery and delivers the results what text can’t. It also increases the conversion rates and decreases shopping cart abandonment.

5. What is visual search SEO?

If we were to define visual search optimization, it can be called Image Controlled Browsing and the goal is to provide the most accurate results from the database.