Google’s New Image Search Could Wound Search Engine Marketing Efforts in 2016

Google revamped their Google Image Search for mobile and tablet in 2015, and the simplified experience was such a big hit that they are bringing it to their desktop Image Search.

This however is not all together good news for search engine marketing as this could make life a whole lot harder when it comes to driving web traffic to company websites.

When Google launched their new Penguin update, which showed preference to sites with multimedia content such as images and video by bringing up these results in normal searches, many digital marketers rejoiced as their search engine marketing efforts appeared to become a whole lot easier.

They got to work on implementing organic SEO tactics based around the multimedia shift, adding and optimising images and video with meta data to their websites.

Now however all that effort could be in vain, as the change to the new Google Image search format implies that the sites hosting the images may see a large reduction in visits, as the new search function allows people to browse and download the images without actually accessing the host site?

Google have counteracted these worries by saying that the change has actually added more new ways to reach the host site which will according to them increase traffic to the site.

The changes they believe will help increase traffic include making the domain name clickable and adding a new button which allows the searcher to visit the site that hosts the image.

This brings the amount of clickable targets for the host site up to four, where as with the old image search there were only two possible ways to access the host’s site.

Google also believe that by no longer loading the website with the image, they will no longer be creating “phantom” visits for websites, something that was one of the most common complaints from websites about the old Google Image search.

“That was causing problems for some webmasters, and so we thought we can do away with that. That’s gone now,” said Google webmaster trend analyst Pierre Far.

There is an option for search engine marketers who do not believe Google’s new image search will help their campaigns, they can block Google from indexing any images on their website.

There is also the option of boosting results through paid search engine marketing and pay per click advertising, as well as plenty of other SEO tactics such as the growing trend of using social media.

And of course, Google may be the world’s biggest search engine in terms of revenue, but from a search engine marketer’s point of view there are always its large scale competitors, Bing, who have yet to cause uproar in the online marketing world.

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