Image search results used to give you the option to “view image” without having to navigate to the site the image was hosted on.
When it started in 2013, sites saw a 63% decline in organic traffic from image results.
Why?
Because there was no need to click through when the image could be viewed in full from within the search results.
And then everything changed
In February 2018, Google decided to remove the “view image” button. Now searchers must visit the site hosting that image directly, restoring image results to their former organic search driving power.
According to some recent studies, this change has increased organic image traffic a massive 37%[1].
Given image results’ return to value, marketers are asking themselves how they can make the most out of this search mechanism.
So what are some new ways we can leverage tools to better understand how to optimize images for ranking?
To explore this, I decided to see if Google’s Vision AI[2] could assist in unearthing hidden information about what matters to image ranking. Specifically, I wondered what Google’s image topic modeling would reveal about the images that rank for individual keyword searches, as well as groups of thematically related keywords aggregated around a specific topic or niche.
Here’s what I did — and what I found.
A deep dive on “hunting gear”
I began by pulling out 10 to 15 top keywords in our niche. For this article, we chose “hunting gear” as a category and pulled high-intent, high-value, high-volume keywords. The keywords we selected were:
- Bow hunting gear
- Cheap hunting gear
- Coyote hunting gear
- Dans hunting gear
- Deer hunting