Jul 8, 2013
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Is it worth your time?
While everyone knows getting ranked on the first page of Google search results is a must to get traffic to your website, few SEO experts have talked about Google Image search. What does Google Images do for your business, and is it worth trying to get ranked in the top ten or twenty results? Do users use Google Image Search the same way the use Google search?
What is Google Image Search?
It’s just what it sounds—users can type in the kind of image the want to see—for example, funny cats—and Google will return a collection of images matching this search. Google finds these images through image alt text and the text surrounding these images on a webpage. It’s not always 100% accurate, of course, but then no web search of any kind is.
A fairly new addition to Google Images is the ability to upload an image to Google and search for similar images. Users can upload a picture of a celebrity, for example, and find other images of that person.
How Google Images Differs from Google Web Search
When users go to Google Images, they’re usually not looking for any real information on the subject. All they want is a simple image. In fact, even though Google does offer a link to the page the image appears on, most users won’t visit it. They don’t care about the page’s content—the image is the only thing they want.
What Can Google Images Do For a Business?
If few people are visiting the website where these images are located, what good does that do for a business? It truly depends on what the images are and why people are looking for them. If someone is looking for a particular type of shoe, they might look for images of that shoe and then visit the page in hopes that they might be able to purchase it from there. If they’re looking for celebrities, chances are they won’t even come upon a business’s page; after all, most businesses don’t post images of celebrities.
Those looking for images of products are more likely to visit the website where the image is located, so it is in your best interest to have images of every product you offer on your website. You should make certain these images are properly labeled and have alt text tags. That will help Google find and index them so that they will show up in an image search. While Google Images may not bring a huge amount of traffic to your website, it could bring some, so there’s no point in missing out on that business.