The most exciting development in visual search is how easily users can now comprehend the real environment as they see it in real time. Camera phones are no longer merely a passive observer, but rather a key source of information and insight in daily life.
Users use their own, original photos as search criteria to find content. In light of the fact that this extends to interactions with products, brand experiences, physical locations, and staff, SEO may and need to be taken into account in a variety of real-world scenarios, such as:
Implementation of sponsorship
Merchandising of brands
Personal brand encounters
Although SEOs have limited influence over the photographs that are taken, we can improve how our brand is presented to make sure that visual search tools can quickly find us. Businesses of all sizes can achieve success by prioritising the presence of high impact visual search components and integrating physical branding with online SEO.
Describe visual search.
Visual search, also known as search-what-you-see in the context of SEO, is the process of asking a search engine a question using an image rather than text. Search engines and digital platforms utilise AI and visual recognition technology to recognise components in the image and provide the user with pertinent information in order to surface results.
Even while Google's visual search capabilities are now receiving a lot of attention, there are other tech teams working on visual search as well. Since Pinterest has long led the way in this field, the following websites are currently using visual search:
Lens & Search by Google
Visual Search on Bing
LinkedIn Lens
Find it on eBay and Image Search on eBay
Kindle StyleSnap
Scan of Snapchat
Google has made much noise in the past year about its visual search capabilities, pinning a number of their search enhancements on Google Lens, and continuously introducing new capability. Because of this, there are now an estimated 8 billion Google Lens searches per month, a threefold increase in usage year over year.
We will focus on visual search on Google Lens and Search in this post, even if there are numerous lessons to be learnt from the diverse spectrum of visual search tools, each of which have their own data sets.
Are visual and picture searches used in SEO the same way?
No, visual search optimization and image search optimization are not the same thing. Visual search optimization includes image search optimization, although the two are not interchangeable.
SEO image search
When users type text-based queries for Image Search, you should give priority to assisting images in coming to the surface. Your photos should follow image SEO recommended practises such as:
newest file types
Alt text
Alt tags
names of relevant files
Markup schema
All of this enables Google to provide an image search result in response to a text-based inquiry, but one of the primary drawbacks of this method is that the user must be aware of the phrase they should type.
For instance, an image search for the term "dinosaur with horns" will get numerous results from various dinosaur topic filters. I would need to considerably filter and refine the query in order to find the best outcome.
SEO visual search
When using Google Lens to perform a visual search, the image serves as the query. This allows me to take a picture of a toy dinosaur with horns and then use Google to filter my search depending on what it can tell from the picture.
Because the image contains visual signals, the SERP for the visual search is a better match for the original image query when you compare the two search results. As a result, I can only get results for quadrupedal dinosaurs with horns that are only present on the face and not the frill.
This is fantastic from the user's point of view because I didn't have to input anything and I got a useful result. Additionally, from Google's point of view, this is more effective because they can evaluate the photo and choose which component to prioritise first in order to achieve the best SERP.
Standard image optimization techniques are one factor that Google takes into account when surfacing relevant results, but if you stop there, you don't get the whole picture.
Which content aspects lend themselves to visual search the most
Visual search technologies can recognise text, photos, and objects, but certain components are simpler to recognise than others. Google uses a variety of data sources to fulfil consumers' visual search requests.
In addition to the knowledge graph, Vision AI, Google Maps, and other sources, Google's tools include a few priority components that are combined to surface search results. When a photograph contains certain components, Google can classify, recognise, and/or visually match related content to produce results:
Local firms or business owners should use photography to show their location since landmarks are visually recognised but also tied to their actual locations on Google Maps.
Instead than being broken down into individual letters, logos are interpreted as a whole. Google can therefore interpret that swoop as meaning Nike even in the absence of any text. They should all line up because this information is derived from knowledge panels' logos, website structured data, Google Business Profile, Google Merchant, and other sources.
In order to classify and categorise photos, knowledge graph entities are used, and this has a big impact on what SERP is displayed for a visual search. Around 5 billion KGE are recognised by Google, therefore it is important to think about which ones are most important to your business and make sure they are visually reflected on your website.
Optical Character Recognition, which has certain limitations in that not all languages and backwards characters are recognised, is used to extract text from photographs. As a result, you should take readability of the fonts (or handwriting on specials boards) into consideration if your users frequently search photos of printed menus or other printed content.
Faces are analysed for emotion, but the number of faces is also taken into consideration, therefore organisations that cater to huge crowds, like cultural institutions or event sites, would do well to add pictures that illustrate this.
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