Just recall, the last time you made a purchase. It pretty much sure it was solely based on written description on an item. Where you may not may always have a look at picture and make a purchase. Just imagine, you need a haircut with latest fashion, would you like to try explaining him verbally or show him a picture of it. You will realize picture was much better and effective in communicating what you need. while it is not easy to explain things as there may always be gap between what you said and what you understood.
It works better because our brain is better at processing and understanding visual information. Images can get people`s attention more easily, invoke better emotion response and improve comprehensive retention of information.
You might be interested in our earlier blog post Ecommerce trends for 2018
Internet users already prefer visual content and it is already apparent in many online surveys. For example , fastest growing social network instagram is becoming popular while Pintrest has also huge number of users. Whenever you use image on twitter it gets re tweeted 150% more times than the picture that has no image.
Visual content is even now starting to infiltrate in traditional text based search, especially where it is about online shopping. A recent study conducted by eMarketer suggests at least 72% of the U.S Internet users search visual content before making any purchase. This image search helps them to view picture of the product. As this trend is growing, major search engines like Google, and Bing have already started working that and introducing new visual search for products.
Normally, a search engine works by the text string that you enter in the bar. For example if you want to search the image of computer, you will enter a search query that will return all the picture with the name “computer”.
However, Google has recently developed an artificial intelligence based visual search tool that with the help of machine learning has the capability to analyze picture. that you take and give you information that are relevant to picture. For example you have taken a photo of restaurant, Google Lense tool will identify the restaurant and will return you with image of its opening hours or menu.
You may be familiar with Pinterst , that is using Google Lens visual search application. According to the a research, the users who are using this application for visual search have doubled in last six months. That means people are now doing more than 600 million visual searches every day with lens.
Pintrest users take a photo, and then lense can isolate individual items from that photo. This allows users to search those objects separately. Just imagine, you liked an item, took its picture and wants to search internet for it. You can easily search it without describing it while it will generate even more accurate and better results.
Similar to that Bing`s visual search also allow users to search images with in images. However unlike Pintrest, those only return results from within its own database, bing will search entire web for it. You can simply select a photo, tap a magnifying glass , zoom it on specific object in image and then that`s it bing will return similar results for that image.
We now know how visual search works, and it is becoming popular as well. If you have website, or going get website designed for your company, or already have ecommerce based website, you would like to know how you can make it visual search friendly. One thing is to note that visual search is the future of online shopping. therefore you must never ignore optimizing it for search engine. All search engine show results with the links to the website.
If your website use products images then you must make sure they are optimized for visual search with descriptions available in filenames, alt-tags, schema markup and metadata information. Every element will help in visual search engine to identify relevant photos while increasing your visual search engine ranking.
Another thing is to note that visual search is not replacing text search as yet. however optimizing your website for better shopping experience, and to increase traffic, drive and conversions, you must put everything in a great position to take advantage of emerging search trends.
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