What’s Coming To Google Image Search That Matter To SEOs

For the past several months both John Mueller and Gary Illyes from Google have been telling webmasters and SEOs that image search is something they should be paying more attention to. Well, now we know why – not just the 3D images but Google announced support for higher resolution images and also swipe up from an image to an AMP story from image search.

I covered this in detail at Search Engine Land but here is the summary. First, you can watch this starting at the 25 minute mark into the State Of Search session given by John Mueller and Martin Splitt yesterday at I/O. This embed below jumps you to where it all starts:

Higher Resolution Images

You’ll be able to feed Google a higher resolution image via special markup that they can then use to serve in places like image search, AMP, Google Discover and other places where searchers may appreciate a much higher quality image. It will be an opt in only feature – of course the question is, if you do not opt in, what traffic are you missing out on?

Here are those two slides with the announcement and the potential markup to be used – not it is not like yet, so don’t do anything:

Swipe Up To Navigate

We actually saw this feature back in March – Google was testing from Google Images the ability to swipe up to see the article associated with it. You need AMP for this. Google hasn’t announced exactly how this will work, what markup you need, but the information will be “coming soon.”

3D Images in Search

Okay, this we covered yesterday – in short, the ability to see 3D images in search, then use AR to place them into locations through your phones camera. But here is the potential markup you will be able to use to implement this:

Pretty cool stuff!

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Bit more on if this is related to the hints they dropped earlier: