Google has unveiled an update to Google Images that could greatly affect online retailers. The Google Lens feature is now available on Google Images for mobile devices in the US, with plans to expand to other regions and languages soon.
This update, first announced in September, is now live. It presents a new opportunity for increased traffic and sales.
### What is Google Lens?
Google Lens functions similarly to the Google Lens App available for Google Assistant and on Apple/Android devices. It allows users to select parts of an image that interest them, providing additional information about those items.
According to Google, “The dots will initially appear on products and other objects identified by Lens, and in the coming months, these dots will expand to include images like landmarks, animals, and plants.”
Google mentioned that Lens offers website owners an additional avenue to drive web traffic. While it could be assumed that Schema metadata helps identify image details, structured data may not be a major factor. Nonetheless, incorporating structured data is always beneficial.
This technology is closer to AI and Machine Learning. Google’s Vision technology quickly classifies images into categories, detects objects and faces, and reads printed words in images. It can recognize objects like flowers, animals, or vehicles, among thousands of other categories. Additionally, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) detects text within images and identifies languages automatically.
This animation demonstrates how Google Lens in Google Images allows shoppers to select a product from an image, leading them to similar products available from online retailers. This underscores the importance of hosting quality product images.
### What This Means for Publishers
The significance of this development for e-commerce is immense. Google Lens on Google Images provides e-commerce sites a fresh method of attracting shoppers. Retailers who invest in creating original and appealing product images are likely to benefit from Google Lens.
A frequent error in using images is treating them as mere decorations. Images should serve more than just aesthetic purposes. For instance, a stock photo of people with laptops doesn’t provide meaningful content for an article on business productivity trends.
This emphasizes the strategic use of images on web pages. Images should support and enhance the content, providing users with relevant visual feedback.
Consider your image as an accompaniment to a position zero snippet; it should align perfectly with the content. If the image is meaningful in itself, it may rank better in Google Images as it is contextualized by surrounding content.
### Structured Data and Google Images
It is advisable to review Google’s Image Publishing Guidelines to learn about image optimization. The guidelines highlight that Google Images supports structured data for specific types. Adhering to both general structured data guidelines and any type-specific ones is crucial. Failure to do so might make your structured data ineligible for rich result displays in Google Images. Each structured data type requires an image attribute to qualify for badges and rich results in Google Images.
This update is crucial for online merchants. It highlights the importance of optimizing image searches for both content ranking and driving traffic from Google Images.
### What if Images are Served by a CDN?
This should not pose an issue as long as you utilize an image sitemap and submit it to Google. Their Image Publishing Guidelines provide instructions for this: image sitemaps can include URLs from other domains, unlike regular sitemaps with cross-domain restrictions. This allows the use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to host images. It’s recommended to verify the CDN’s domain name in Search Console to be informed of any crawl errors detected.
Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author
Screenshots by Author, Modified by Author
