Visual Search on Google - A fad, or the next big thing?

Lead Generation SEO
#1

Greetings everyone,

Google’s Visual Search - how important is it, really?

Personally this isn’t something I’ve spent a lot of time digging into just yet.

Some of the stats I found regarding Visual Search really surprised me - apparently Google Lens has been used over a billion times so far, and just under 40% of Americans have used Visual Search in one context or another.

Full disclosure, I’m not part of the 40% just yet.

But having researched some of the potential use cases, I see why it’s starting to catch on:

  • Nutritional information including recipes
  • Local business reviews
  • Identifying landmarks
  • Shopping (of course)
  • and more

The question I assume most of you are asking is “what does it mean for real estate?”

In terms of best practices, I know that the fundamentals are still important - image filenames, alt text, and a strong performing mobile website. As well, Google seems to like pull Google Lens image results from pages that have around 1,500 words of content.

With all of that being said, what’s your opinion on Google Lens and Visual Search results? Do you see it becoming the next big thing in search results?

I’d appreciate any insight you can provide.

Wes

#2

What is the real estate relevant use-case? You take a picture of a house and it matches it up to a picture online and returns content from that page?

This strikes me as applicable to commercial real estate mostly. Like you can see a number of building facades in a relatively small space. Residential/suburban buildings are of course harder, being more spread out and behind fences/trees.

#3

That’s a great point about commercial real estate, Aidan.

Especially with homes from a specific area each having their own “feel”, it might be difficult for Google to differentiate and serve the correct results. An example of this would be the “Vancouver special” style of home that I’m used to seeing where they all look like quite similar.