‘Google Image Search’ – How does it influence your business?

by Prejushya Kalicharan - 1/28/2013 7502 Views

A glimpse into the future of Google’s image search

As you know by now how Google had revamped their Image search last week making it competent among its peers in the search world.

Google’s credit on the updated version

Unlike the older version of “Google image search”, where a double-click over the image would directly land us on the destination page, the newer version has an inline panel that displays the meta content as you see below.

Submitinme_image_search

Now you need not open each and every image that turn-out in your image search in different tabs or windows.

The data displayed near the image consists of title of the page hosting the image, the image size and the domain name. No access to the image’s source page in the background now.

They have also displayed two user-friendly buttons beneath the above content information.

“Visit Page” & “View Original Image”. “Visit Page” will lead you to the source page, which will increase your Click-Through-rate. CTR is directly proportional to page ranking. For those who are really interested in the image excluding the content, Google has set the “View Original Image”, which leads you to a blank page displaying only the image.

When you click over the image displayed in the inline panel, as per the old custom, it leads you to the source page.

image_search_google_submitinme

For Webmasters:

The new effort offers the following benefits for webmasters:
Easy Navigation pattern
Less Time consumption to reach the desired data
Lesser loading Time
Higher CTR
Improved User-experience
Increase website’s page-views
Google Bots can easily identify the purpose of image
Image search is faster than ever before
A brand new platform yet to open for ‘Image search’ competent to ‘Web search’
Great utility for e-commerce sites, photography, travel & drawing tutorial websites

Some compliments & concerns over the web

I came across a few positive & negative toned comments related to this image upgrade by Google which I wish to share:

Compliments:

“I like this Image Search update because update will increase CTR as well as better search experience.”

“Thanks google .. I waited for this feature for long time.”

“That's a great innovation. Google is something else. I like the way you put webmasters in mind while doing your thing. This serves a dual purpose, increases a website's pageviews and gives a users a better experience. Can't wait until it comes live. Hongyi thanks for sharing this.”

Concerns:

“This is completely terrible. It's only useful on a phone. I'm really tired of everything continually being dumbed down for smart phones. I'm already looking at a large thumbnail that clearly shows the image. It's just another annoying level I have to click through to get to see if the page is something I want to investigate further or not.”

“What Google is doing with the images on websites is simply a robbery, as is storing pictures that are on web sites, you can not only be presented and not send traffic to the product owner of the image.”

“If user can directly go to image hosted on my web server why s/he will land on my website? I create content for a photo-website so people can come and visit my web pages, however if they are now directly going to images by clicking on show images, this will be a disappointment.”

Why does your website need ‘Image Optimization’?

The Pros getting Images optimized in your website

Google_image_search

Images improve CTR, due to huge tendency to read content with images rather than plain text
Social sharing is heavily increased when images are input in your website
Websites without images will not turn-up when a person search for information in “Google image search”
Image conveys lot more than plain text and that is the secret behind Pinterest’s popularity
Ecommerce sites greatly advantage out of image search and end-up getting competitive conversion rates
Image could be labeled with data which can take forms of target keywords, increasing traffic
Alt tags with which you label your images, being keyword rich is double benefit for your site
For the time being image search optimization poses lesser competition
Writing a compelling title for your image makes your content go viral

The Bold Odds

There are a few problems with the traffic we gain out of image search.

Irrelevancy

When you search for the key word “The Grinch” in Google Image search, it turns out pictures of Jim Carrey dressed in form of “The Grinch”. But would you care to read my blog post that talks of “Jim Carrey – The classic comedian” who had rendered a scintillating performance as “The Grinch” in the movie – “Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas”?

Bounce-back

When the user discovers that he has landed a wrong place, there is no chance of them to turn out the next page that my site offers. He will just bounce away, increasing my bounce rate, indirectly exhibiting a grey shade over your website

They steal your cute pictures

I too do that. When we are in need of a very good image that in parallel reflects our views, & fortunately we come across such an image over Google’s image search, we tend to steal. That’s not real theft; we may represent it - ‘sharing’, since the source image also gets a link-back. What about the content from where we stole the image? Gone by wind.

Please mark your valuable comments on 'Image search' below!

Category :

Google

Tags :

Google image search, updated image search, pros & cons of image search, online images, SEO, search e

About Prejushya Kalicharan

SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author