We analyzed 65,388 Google Lens search results to better understand how visual search works.
Specifically, we looked at potential ranking factors that Google may use in its Lens algorithm, including:
- Alt text
- Domain Authority
- URLs
- Title tags
- Responsive design
And in this post I’m going to share what we discovered.
A Summary of Our Most Interesting Findings is As Follows:
1. 32.5% of all Google Lens results have a “matching” keyword in the page’s title tag. Therefore, keyword-optimized title tags may help a page rank in Google Lens.
2. A high proportion of Google Lens results are pulled from images high up on a page. In fact, approximately 1/3rd of all Google Lens image results appear in the top 25% of a web page.
3. 11.4% of all Google Lens result images contain alt text terms that match the keyword someone just searched for.
4. Authoritative pages and websites appear to have a ranking advantage in Google Lens. Google Lens results have an average Moz Page Authority of 35.2 and a Domain Authority of 64.4.
5. Google Lens may confer a ranking advantage to sites that work well on mobile devices. 90.6% of all Google Lens results come from mobile-friendly websites.
6. Google Lens results come from relatively slow-loading pages. In fact, the average First Contentful Paint load time for a Google Lens result is 3,186ms.
7. Pinterest and Amazon are the two top-performing websites in Google Lens. 7.2% of all Google Lens results come from Pinterest, while 4.1% are from Amazon.
8. Keyword-rich URLs correlate with Google Lens rankings. 29.9% of the Google Lens results in our analysis had an associated keyword in the page’s URL.
9. Responsive images don’t appear to confer a major ranking advantage in Google Lens. Only 13.1% of Google Lens images are responsive.
10. Images with filenames that “match” a Google Lens search appear to rank more often than images with a missing or irrelevant filename. We found that 22.6% of Google Lens result images had a filename that matched the Google Lens search.
11. Websites that rank seem to have an edge in Google Lens. We discovered that 15% of all Google Lens results also rank on the first page of Google organic for the same search term.
12. The average visual search result page contains 1,631 words. Considering that Google uses text around an image to understand an image’s content and context, this finding makes sense.
Keyword-Rich Title Tags and URLs Correlate With Google Lens Rankings
With Google Lens, the image that you search with is your “keyword”.
We used the Google Vision API to turn those visual searches into text-based keywords.
This allowed us to analyze visual search terms as text-based entities (using labels from Google themselves).
For example, take this Google Lens “keyword”:
The Google Vision API turned that image into a “best guess label”: “cat”.
We then looked at whether that text-based label correlated with potential Google Lens ranking factors.
In fact, that’s how we were able to correlate title tag keywords and Google Lens rankings.
We found 32.5% of pages that rank in Google Lens have a keyword in their title tag that matches the search image’s Google Vision label.
For example, here is one of the visual searches from our dataset.
Sure enough, Google Vision’s label (“tesla cybertruck”), appears in the title tag for that page.
Google has previously stated that they use a page’s title tag to rank Google Images results.
It would make sense that they’d also use keywords in a page’s title tag for Google Lens rankings.
In other words, Google may prefer images on pages “about” that image vs. pages that have a matching image in the middle of an otherwise irrelevant page.
Indeed, that’s what our data showed.
Key Takeaway: Pages with titles and URLs that “match” a Google Lens search term may have a rankings advantage over those that don’t. With visual search, the image that you search with is your “keyword”.
33% of Google Lens Result Images Appear Towards The Top of a Page
We found that 33.1% Google Lens results are from images from the top 25% of a webpage.
https://backlinko.com/visual-search-ranking-factors
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