Bing Image Search just got another makeover. This is its second since September. This time, the company is telling webmasters it will be able to send them more traffic, and high quality traffic at that.
Do you think you’ll be able to get more traffic with Bing’s new image search experience? Let us know in the comments.
What’s it do?
Bing Image Search will now let users scroll or swipe up to get helpful information and/or info on where to buy an item. Where available, it will show users places to buy the product in the image, related searches based on the image, Pinterest collections with the image, more sizes of the image, and pages that have the image.
The product feature is in beta, but for some product images, it will show places the item can be bought. This should improve over time. Bing says it’s focused on more precisely detecting pages where products can be purchased.
It also says the PInterest feature will be expanded to additional sites beyond Pinterest. Bing Image Search has been utilizing Pinterest boards since 2013. This is a better integration.
When the user clicks on an image, they’ll get a redesigned view, which is cleaner than before, but still shows related searches, the source page, and image metadata, as well as the option to pin it to PInterest. You can also review results in a slideshow. Here’s the before and after:
The mobile experience is also being updated.
Images include a reminder to “use images responsibly,” and a link to more information on copyright.
Bing: Drive more “high quality” and “engaged” traffic to your site.
So what about that whole traffic thing?
Bing says in a blog post, “Images are pervasive in search; over 1 billion image searches are performed every month by over 100M users on Bing.com and its search partners. Relevant images are presented in many web searches and many billions of image results are presented across all devices and search partners every month. As a webmaster, increasing your exposure on Bing Image Search will drive more high quality traffic to your site.”
“Image search engagement has grown significantly over the past few years,” it says. “Users have discovered that image search is a powerful way to find more and do more. We’ve observed our customers wanting to complete tasks through image search such as purchasing a print of an image or the product in it, finding related items and learning more about it. We’ve evolved our image search experience to help our customers efficiently locate the best place to accomplish their search tasks. Rich metadata from the source site is prominently showcased to help our users and drive traffic to the content providers.”
What do I need to do?
Webmasters need to utilize structured data to increase their visibility and potentially drive more traffic. Bing says to use Schema.org and OpenGraph, but notes that Microdata, Microformats, and RDFa are also supported.
“When Bing crawlers fetch your page content, these schemas are utilized to understand your content along with the associated metadata to enrich our knowledge surrounding an image,” the Bing team explains . “The more metadata provided with an image, the more likely we will surface your content. Other than the typical popularity and descriptive elements, adding even more context such as if the image is related to a recipe or a product are especially useful. For a few examples of structured markup, please see below.”
It gives this example for a product image using Schema.org:
Webmasters can also use meta tags with content attributes and no visible text rendered to the user, Bing notes.
And here’s an example for OpenGraph:
Bing says to use its Markup Validator to verify that it can be parsed by its crawlers.
“We also support the mediaRSS and PubSubHubbub feed formats,” it says. “Direct feeds are preferred to allow us to have the most up-to-date and most comprehensive knowledge about your site. Bing Image Search can then surface your content in a relevant and effective manner. Please contact us directly using the email listed below to discuss logistics around sharing a feed.”
The new image search experience will be rolling out over the coming weeks across PCs, tablets, and smartphones (including iPhone and Android). There’s also a new Chrome extension that brings Bing Image Search info into webpages as you browse them.
Do you get a significant amount of traffic from image search? Do you expect Bing’s changes to help? Let us know what you think.
Images via Bing
