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Digital Marketing

Top 4 Visual Search Best Practices to Follow in 2022

Apr 22, 2022

3 minutes read

Visual search is transforming web search.

So much so that 72% of US consumers rely on visual content to make a purchase decision.

This indicates that the future of search is visual. Thus, in order to stay ahead of your competitors, it’s crucial to optimize the images that you use on your website as per Google’s visual search algorithm.

In this blog post, we’ll uncover what visual search is and how it is beneficial for your business. We’ll also talk about the best practices that you can follow to incorporate this growing trend into your business strategy in 2022.

Let’s begin!

What is Visual Search?

Visual search uses images as the search query.

Visual search technology is powered by computer vision and machine learning. Also, it uses artificial intelligence to understand the context of the images and return relevant results.

Simply put, the visual search turns the phone’s camera into a search engine. Users can take pictures or point to an object, and get related search results.

Google Lens, Bing, Snapchat Camera Search, Pinterest Lens, and Amazon StyleSnap are the major visual search engines today.

What are the Benefits of Visual Search?

1. Visual search facilitates product discovery because it allows users to search for items via images instead of random keywords. Thus, users receive the visually closest results.

2. A study predicts that about 62% of millennials and Generation Z would rather use visual search than any other technology. Therefore, by incorporating visual search into your website, you can also serve millennials or Generation Z.

3. Visual search optimization can help you improve your conversion rate. According to some reports, image-based Pinterest ads have a conversion rate of 8.5%. Other advertising websites like Bing and Google also returned the highest conversion rates for visual search.

To Take a Look at the Top SEO Trends Emerging in 2022, Click Here!

Top 4 Best Practices for Visual Search Optimization

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Use Structured Data

Google uses structured data to understand what your website is about. If you use structured data for images, Google Images can display your images as rich results with a prominent badge that helps drive targeted traffic to your website.

However, make sure you follow the general structured data guidelines to ensure your structured data is eligible for rich result display in Google Images.

Make Use of Alt Tags

Alt tags are an important SEO ranking factor. These are alternative descriptions for images. So, if your image fails to load properly, search engines display ‘alt text’ instead.

Alt tags provide the context of what the image is about, notify search engine crawlers and allow them to index the image correctly.

Therefore, make sure you add alt text for your images. But avoid lengthy descriptions, and keyword stuffing and simply explain what the image is displaying.

Alt tags make your website accessible, improve user experience, and optimize images. Thus, reinforcing your SEO strategy.

Optimize Images for Better Performance

In order to ensure that your website is optimized for visual search, optimize your images for better performance.

Large image files can increase the loading speed of your website, thus, ruining the customer experience, and increasing the bounce rate.

Reduce your image’s file size to improve the performance of your website. However, make sure the images don’t appear distorted.

TinyPNG, CompressNow, and Optimizilla are great sites for compressing images. This will even allow you to add high-resolution photos and minimize their loading time.

Include Captions

Even if you think the image is self-explanatory, always support it with a descriptive caption so that your users won’t have to spend time deciphering the context.

Captions are fruitful as they add value to your images and help your audience easily process what the image is about. Moreover, you can explain the image in detail, and use relevant keywords. Captions add more context to the images, and thus, help your users process the images easily.

Adding captions can help search engines identify the images right away. Even if you’re using the same image in different places, you can add a different caption targeting relevant SEO keywords to boost rankings.

Key Takeaway

Visual search is powerful and not going away anytime soon. In fact, it is predicted to soon become the crux of Pinterest’s offering to advertisers.

Optimize your website for visual search and reach out to a wider market.

Want To Optimize Your Website for Visual Search? Contact Us!

Grazitti has a team of digital marketing experts working tirelessly to help their clients with organic search optimization, analytics, and paid marketing services. Learn in great detail how visual search marketing can help your business grow in 2022. Should you want to know more, drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.