How to optimize your Ecommerce for Google Images and Visual Search

How to optimize your Ecommerce for Google Images and Visual Search
In this guide, I will present you why and how to optimize your images for obtaining the most from both the Google Images Search vertical and Images Box in Universal Search, Rich Results with images, other Google SERPs’ features and from the more and more pervasive presence of Google Lens in every Google Search environment for your Ecommerce websites.

Images and Visual Search is a topic I talk about and write about since when Google started experimenting with the Images Search tags almost 4 years ago, a time when the majority of the SEOs were dismissing them saying it was just Images SEO, hence something that did not need to be prioritized.

Dismissing Images and Visual Search as a secondary SEO task would be deeply myopic now as it was before.

The worldwide status of crisis and suspended activity for practically any kind of physical shop makes it even more urgent that Ecommerce owners and businesses focus all the attention and efforts on visual shopping.

This guide is a humble attempt to guide you and offer you ideas and ways to optimize your category and product pages for it.

Contents [hide]

1 Why Visual is so important?
1.1 Ok, but why Visual Search is important for SEO?
2 Images and Search now
2.1 The Images Search vertical
2.2 Google Lens and the opportunities of Visual Search
2.3 The potential of Collections
2.3.1 How do Collections work?
2.4 From searching inspiration to buying in a few taps
3 Images in Universal Search
4 Rich Results, Images, and Structured data
4.1 What must we consider when doing Images SEO specifically for structured data and Rich Result?
4.1.1 Images XML Sitemap
4.1.2 Images specification for Rich Results
4.1.3 The Image License Metadata
5 How to do SEO for Google Images Search?
5.1 Alt text
5.2 Descriptive file names
5.3 Captions
5.4 The text surrounding the image
5.5 Correct image sizes, formats, and file types
5.6 How to have high-quality images and a good PageSpeed at the same time?
6 How to do SEO for Google Visual Search?
6.1 Images SEO
6.2 Using structured data and correct images specifications
6.3 Using high-quality images and photos
6.4 Avoiding mess
6.5 Trying not using stock photos or…
6.6 Letting your images to be used by others
7 Conclusions
Why Visual is so important?
Amazon once gave the perfect answer to this same question:

Visual Search is perfect for shoppers who face two common dilemmas:

I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it;
I know what I want, but I don’t know what it’s called.