Image Search Optimization: How To Take Advantage For Your Business

Some sources say that up to 20% of searches may already be visual searches, where users use their camera to search for an image or object.

I've been taking a critical look at Google Lens in Chrome and on mobile, and how it makes it easy to search anything you see on your screen, within a video you're watching, a slide in a live stream, or an image on a webpage.

How should SEOs (search engine optimizers) optimize their content, images and visual objects to show up for these forms of query?

Let's Try To Understand How The Google Lens works

According to Google, Lens compares objects in your picture to other images and ranks those images based on their similarity and relevance to the objects in the original picture.

Lens uses its understanding of objects in your picture to find other relevant results from the web.

Lens may also use other helpful signals, such as words, language, and other metadata on the image’s host site, to determine ranking and relevance.

For example, if an image contains a specific product - like jeans or sneakers - Lens may return results providing more information about that product, or shopping results for the product.

If Lens recognizes a barcode or text in an image (for example, a product name or a book title), Lens may return a Google Search results page for the object.

This clearly shows that visual search tools like Google Lens rely heavily on AI and machine learning (ML) to function.

For more details, read the full blog post here

5 Steps To Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Visual Search

1. Use Descriptive File Names

Rename your image files with descriptive, keyword-rich names before uploading them. For example, instead of IMG1234.jpg, use blue-running-shoes.jpg.

2. Optimize Alt Text

Write detailed and relevant alt text for each image, describing what the image depicts and including keywords naturally.

Alt text helps search engines understand the content of the image and improves accessibility.

3. Choose the Right File Format

Use appropriate file formats like JPEG for photos, PNG for images with transparent backgrounds, and SVG for icons or logos. WebP is another format that offers high-quality images with smaller file sizes.

4. Compress Images for Faster Load Times

Compress your images to reduce file size without sacrificing quality. Tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim can help you achieve this. Faster-loading images improve user experience and SEO.

5. Create an Image Sitemap

Include your images in an XML sitemap or create a dedicated image sitemap. This helps search engines discover and index your images more efficiently.

Access the 8 detailed techniques for optimizing images for search and when to really focus on image optimization here

Conclusion

While image search is a good source of traffic and optimization strategies such as encouraging social sharing of your images by adding share buttons can help them gain more visibility and improve their ranking in image search, it's important to double-check if image search optimization is extremely valuable to your brand.

Lazy loading to ensure that images load only when they come into the user’s viewport, and using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check how your images affect your site's load time can also contribute to their discovery during visual search.

Note:

This is a truncated version of the full blog post. To gain access to the full article, go here.