Visual search is the new trend of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). It will change the way on how consumers find and buy products.

Also, it will change the SEO for businesses and marketers.

Many people like the ability to visually search over any other new technology. Google, Amazon, Pinterest, and Bing have already developed new capabilities in this area.

Many reports show that “The future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords,” It’s no surprise that visual search promises to be the new digital marketing trend of 2019.

Visual Search Stats

Images are returned for 19% of search queries on Google
There are over 600 million visual searches on Pinterest each month. Image-based Pinterest Ads have an 8.5% conversion rate, and Pinterest is projected to clear $1 billion a year in ad revenue by 2020
The image recognition market is expected to grow to $25.65 billion by 2019
By 2021, early adopter brands which redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.

How Does Visual Search Work?

The human brain is extremely visual – 90% of all information received by the brain is visual.

Visual search is a natural evolution in enhancing how the technology works best for us – however, a human brain is very different from AI. When we look at a picture, we don’t see a set of points and dotted lines.

Instead, we can identify patterns and shapes immediately. The theory behind the visual search is to teach machines to do the same.

When presented with an image, a visual search identifies objects within it and then searches for images related to those objects. For example, based on an image of a chair, a visual search would enable you to shop for an identical or similar chair.

Current technology can identify multiple shapes and outlines contained within a single image to allow users to match to different objects.

Visual search engines rely on neural networks which utilize machine learning technology, so the systems are constantly learning and expanding their field of experience.

Companies with a lot of information – such as Google – benefit most, as their visual search application (Google Lens) has an enormous amount of data from which to improve its search functionality.

Because of this, Google Lens can not only identify objects in an image, but also match them to local retailers, provide customers reviews, and sort listings.

Visual Search and SEO

Focus on boosting organic image visibility

Schema markup and metadata are particularly important for SEO in visual search. With minimal text expected in the future of visual search, this data may be one of the only sources of textual information for search engines to crawl.

Metadata strengthens your ability to drive traffic not only to your website but also to specific products on your site.

Advertise on Pinterest

Pinterest’s enormous market impact and its well-developed visual search abilities make it an increasingly smart bet for the future. If it’s a good fit for your target audience, consider advertising your products alongside similar items for maximum impact.

Submit images to your sitemaps

It’s important that your images are displayed clearly, and are free of clutter so that visual applications have an easier time processing them. Optimize your images for ideal size, ideal file type, and have carefully chosen titles.

Adding images to your existing sitemaps is also simple – for each URL you list in your sitemap, you can add additional information about important images that exist on that page. You don’t need to create a new sitemap, you can simply add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.

visual search technology promises much for the future. Planning for this growing market is a must for brands wishing to stay visible – while a visual search isn’t expected to replace keywords and text-based search entirely any time soon, it will inevitably disrupt the SEO industry significantly in the years to come.