Welcome back to another SEO Melbourne Podcast! For this episode, Merwin will be discussing the rapidly increasing popularity of Visual Search and how it affects how you optimise your websites and images!
This video will go through:
- What is visual Search
- How visual Search has advanced over the years as well as a bit of the history behind it
- How it can be used in our lives
- How it works using AI
- Video Search’s scope and abilities
- An example of how it is used
- The future of Visual Search
- What this means for SEO in terms of tagging images and content
- How to optimise images for Visual Search
In just five minutes, you can learn all this and more! Watch our Podcast today!
So what exactly is Visual Search? It’s the technology behind finding results based on what you search based on a photo you take or upload. It’s not exactly new, with reverse image search existing for over a decade now. However, visual search technology has improved drastically over the last few years and can be used in many aspects of our lives. Whether it be live translation, shopping or homework, I’m sure you’ve seen these features in an advertisement somewhere.
So how does visual search actually work? It uses AI and deep learning to find the best results with the highlighted or foreground image. And as AI and deep learning advance, so does visual search. Google Lens can currently identify 1 billion different objects, and that number grows as it continuously learns through its deep-learning system. One of the best features of visual search is that you don’t need to know the name or even have the exact product in your hand to find it. Just search for a related image, and you can find your way to what you were looking for.
Currently, some of the biggest software that utilises visual search are Google Lens, Bing Visual Search and Pinterest Lens. Let’s see how they work.Â
So clearly, the age of visual search is fully upon us, and it’s only going to grow from here. Since its inception, Google Lens has already been used a billion times, with that number growing fast. Pinterest Lens gets used 600 million times per month, with picture-savvy users curious to identify or find related images of objects in question.Â
And it’s not just Pinterest and Google lens users that are interested in visual search. In fact, 62% of young consumers from 18 to 34 want more visual search capabilities. Although currently, Visual Search is predominantly used in the fashion and decor industry, with the progressive improvement of the technology, as well as the growing hype around Augmented Reality, the possibilities are endless. With this demand, this trend of visual search is bound to grow.Â
What does this mean for SEO though? Visual Search will slowly change the way people search, meaning marketers will have to think about the different landscapes of SEO in terms of Image rankings as well.Â
Visual Search and the technology around it have created deep-tagging, using AI technology to identify the images we upload and tag them automatically. This change can make life easier for marketers as manually tagging images can slowly become less prevalent as this technology continues to grow more mainstream.Â
Another way Visual Search can affect SEO is that it creates a new avenue for people to visit the content you create or the products you sell. This in turn can help you rank higher through higher traffic if you have interesting and relevant images that correlate with the visual search.
How to optimise for visual search? Image SEO is often an aspect of SEO that is done as secondary work, simply adding alt-attributes to describe the image and calling it a day. Well, this isn’t going to be enough to capitalise on the changing climate of Visual Search. This is because Google actively looks at the ranking results of both the content, image and the website overall for its Image Search algorithm. So what can we do to optimise our images?
One of the first things you could do is to use unique photos. There is no way your image will be considered relevant or useful if you choose to use a stock image that has been previously used on 20 other websites. Take time to find a unique image, or better yet, take a high-quality photo by yourself to stand out against the crowd.
Remember the small details. Alt-attributes are still relevant to describe your image. Make sure your file name is also relevant to the topic at hand and isn’t a random set of letters and numbers. Place your images in locations where they can provide context or support the texts around them, and make sure you use captions when necessary.
We’ve made a whole video on how to optimise your images, if you want to learn more, check the description below for the link.
Alright, so we have come to an end, let’s recap what we have discussed quickly. Visual Search; it’s growing and it’s growing fast. To keep up with these changes, make sure your Image SEO game is up to par with the relevant, unique and high-quality images.Â
Make sure to like, comment and subscribe and leave any questions you have below. If you want to learn anything and everything else about SEO, make sure to check our SEO Company Melbourne‘s content. Thank you for your time!
