How marketers can use visual search

How marketers can use visual search

Visual searches are nothing new – they’ve been around for a decade – but it’s only now that they’re increasing in volume. As search engines get better at recognising images and therefore returning more relevant and reliable results, consumers are increasingly using imagery as a search term (as opposed to keywords) to discover more about a product or find similar images.

So how can you leverage this for your website SEO? Let’s take a look.

The basics

The growing trend means that your SEO marketing should now not only focus on keywords, but also on image optimisation. Until recently, imagery has been something of an afterthought for those providing SEO services – a case of popping in some alt tags and focusing on the words. Now, it’s important to ensure relevant schema markup is applied to your images and check the URLs in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. These steps will help to get your images ranking in the search engines.

Personalised shopping

Visual search is particularly advantageous for retail and ecommerce sites. When customers have a picture of something they want, they can search for matching products using that image. For retailers, this presents two opportunities: in the first instance, they can provide the customer with the chance to click and buy a product directly from the search results.

In the second, they can create personalised shopping experiences while the customer is in the browsing phase. Visual attributes of an image can be analysed – such as pattern, shape and colour – to deliver products that are more aligned to the customer’s preferences, thus giving them a better experience.

Extending your target market

If social media has shown us anything, it’s that products and brands get used in ways their creators could never have imagined. Take the Roomba Robot Vacuum, which gained publicity when cat owners started putting videos of their cats sitting on the vacuum cleaner on YouTube. Suddenly the opportunity to target a new audience was on the table.

By incorporating visual search into your social listening, you can gain more insight into how your products are being consumed, and thus uncover unique marketing opportunities.

Finding influencers

Influencer marketing has been rising in popularity for several years too, but searching for relevant and high quality influencers has always been tricky and time consuming. This is because it has to be done manually, often with hashtags and is based on their reach. With visual search, it gets easier. Image recognition can be used to gain insight into the things potential influencers care about and their level of real-time engagement. In some cases, it also uncovers people you may not have considered.

This takes some of the graft out of finding influencers and some of the risk away as you’re more likely to choose someone who is a good fit.

If you’re not familiar with visual search marketing, Digital Carrera is here to help. Contact us to find out more about visual search or any of the other SEO marketing services we can offer you.

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