SEO for Images: See What You’re Missing in Your Visual Search Strategy

The visual aspect of communication and marketing has become increasingly important.

But why is SEO for images – and the general concept of visual search – still considered a little more than a marketing nice-to-have?

In his SEJ eSummit session, Gianluca Fiorelli detailed all the visual search opportunities you might be missing out on that can increase your organic traffic through the correct usage and optimization of images.

He also talked about how to get more and better organic traffic using Google Search, Images Search, Google Lens, Photo and Assistant.

Many SEO professionals underestimate the power of images and visual search.

What they don’t realize is that they’re missing out on a growing opportunity that has the potential to drive significant organic traffic and conversions.

The Most Natural Way of Searching

Using images and visuals is the most natural way of searching for things and this SEO Company India do the same.

As Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder at Instagram, puts it: 

“People have always been visual; our brains are wired for images. Writing was a hack, a detour. Pictorial languages are how we all started to communicate; we are coming full circle.

Even Amazon promotes visual search.

Amazon knows that visual search is perfect for shoppers who face two common dilemmas:

  • “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
  • “I know what I want, but I don’t know what it’s called.”

However, when it comes to visual search, we should be aware that it’s harder for a machine to recognize images than voice.

Clay Bavor, VP, Virtual & Augmented Reality at Google, summed up this challenge: 

“In the English language there’s something like 180,000 words, and we only use 3,000 to 5,000 of them. If you’re trying to do voice recognition, there’s a really small set of things you actually need to be able to recognize […] So the problem of search in vision is just vastly larger than what we’ve seen with text or even with voice.”

That said, advances in technology have made machines so much better at recognizing images – and more users are now relying on image search for a variety of purposes.

Various studies show how much visual search is being adopted by younger generations and how essential it is in most users’ digital shopping experience.

Visual search is especially important for ecommerce brands right now.

Who Is Investing in Visual Search?

As expected, big brands are investing heavily in visual search.

Fashion brands are already ahead of the curve, but they are not the only ones looking to leverage the channel.

Some of them include:

  • Forever 21
  • Wayfair
  • Walmart
  • Tommy Hilfiger
  • Ikea
  • Conforama
  • Idealista
  • Macy’s

If you think of visual search as a feature to offer to your users, the market has plenty of opportunities to start creating products like these.


Search engines, marketplaces, and visual social networks – such as Google, Bing, Amazon, and Pinterest – are also investing a lot on visual and image search as it creates a new space for researches based on visual associations.

It can also lead to conversions with just one click from the image to the cart, eliminating passages that can, instead, cause the conversions to be lost.

Out of all these platforms, Google is the place where marketers can find more opportunities.

Google & Visual Search

In the past, Google was just about images search.

Soon, visual search is going to be part of a bigger concept of conversational search, where visual, voice and traditional textual search will all work together on a multi-device ecosystem.

Google Images

In recent years, Google Images has become a big source of clicks and traffic to websites from SERPs.

Sparktoro projects that Google Images holds around 20% of search engine market share.

Tags (Related Entities)

The first thing we see at the top of each page are tags which are entities related to the query.

Tags have a behavior similar to People Also Ask boxes.

If we click on a tag and then go back with the back button of the browser, new tags will appear in the queue that are related to the tag opened and closed previously.

You can substantially create and obtain a very large list of related entities for your search.

Organic Shopping (Desktop)

In Google desktop, you can see images that are labeled with an icon.

When you click on that, there will be a preview that shows:

  1. The title tag.
  2. Relevant text taken from the product description.
  3. Structured data – Product schema (if available).

Organic Shopping (Mobile)

In mobile, this is more evident.

If we have labeled our product pages with schema.org/Product, then Google will show the product label in the image, plus other information if available (“in stock”).

On mobile, Google also allows users to create Collections where you are able to search, save, and then recover all the products (or photos) that you want to investigate more.

People can reach their collections easily through an icon at the bottom right of the user’s screen when they are in Google Images mobile.

Both from Google Images and from Collection, the extensive search results is the same as seen on desktop – the only difference is that it is in full screen.

Google Images is designed especially for mobile searches.

How to Identify Image Search Opportunities

Use a tool that tracks search features (such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz).

‘Images’ Is Not Only About Google Images

Remember, image is not only about Google Images.

Images are key in rich results, including:

  • News AMP (required).
  • News non AMP (recommended).
  • Event (recommended).
  • How To (recommended).
  • Live Streaming (required).
  • Local Business / Restaurants (required).
  • Logo (required).
  • Film (required).
  • Product (required).
  • Recipe (required).
  • Video (required).

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