Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Starting from today my site gets a lot of visitors from Google image search. From your experience, do this type of visits convert into quality clicks or this is just a way to burn my bandwidth and get lots of untargeted cliks?
For now I'm not seeing a significant increase in number of clicks.
Thanks
They are unfortunately the only thing on my primary site that Google hasn't made "supplemental"... I'm thinking about blocking G from the images.
For me, visitors arriving via image search turn out to be merely window shoppers (just looking at the pictures) as opposed to potential customers.
My main site is a image/multimedia gallery, so I am pleased that the majority of my inbound traffic is from Google Image Search, and has been for so long as it (GIS) has existed.
I get reasonable conversions (about the same as from other sources, including AdWords and other paid sources), though low CTR compared to some sites. Note that I count a "sticky" user as a conversion.
Not loads of money but enough for me to expand my sites.
Rgds
Damon
Another client offers a consulting service in a manufacturing discipline. For them so far, image search never brought in a new client that we know of.
But like a lot of image galleries, the visitor may not be actually looking to buy anything. Sometimes they are actually looking for images, prints, posters, etc, none of which I sell.
But I do have ads on the site and a modest number of visitors click the ads on any given image page.
What has worked well for me is providing links to pages about stuff some percentage of visitors coming in through image searches might be interested in, and putting ads on those pages that they are more likely to click.
As a side note, because my images get "borrowed" at a fairly high rate, I decided to label most of them with my url. Those "borrowed" images appear to generate a pretty decent level of fairly targeted traffic. Basically I turned the images themselves into ads for my site.
That might be harder to do with an image that comes from a product description page, but it might be worth giving some thought as to how to make it work in that situation.
My site was basically built around a large photo gallery, so image search is important to me, and generates a big share of my traffic.
Likewise...we directly sell niche construction products in full container loads (FCL) and also have a directory site with all those images in it together with technical details etc.
This gives the international, national and the local supplier the chance to advertise on our sites their availability of those products.
It has also had the knock-on effect of trade FCL buyers of actually locating ourselves simply since we are 95% #1 in the SERPs and well represented in image searches.
On a personal note I'd rather see other sites using our professionally optimised images rather than some of the strange things they are doing at present!
So...
You want to look at my content, you come to my site.
You want to download my content, you come to my site.
You want to copy my content, you want to distribute it world-wide, please by all means but come to my site.
You want to search for my content, a text link with a description is the fastest loading, dynamic, interactive data I can provide. One click is all it takes, but for everything else you may need, you will need to visit my site.
If I am looking through pictures of large root vegatables, am I more likely to by some from a site I have never been to before because I like the look of the picture?
Personally in my market place I would say no, they dont convert well. If I were serious about byeing a carrot I would look for carrot shops not pictures of carrots.
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
This image is the number one source of hits to my site and while the landing page does produce some earnings there is a follow up page that produces quite a bit more. In fact this month it is the number one Adsense earnings producer for my site(s).
The topic is one that many worldwide would research and the image at the top of the SERPS is way better than having a number one ranking position. I'm sure the image is exactly what a person investigating this topic would be drawn to.
How or why Google chooses to display these sample images on top of the SERPs I still have not been able to detemine, but I keep trying to generate images that get hits for the many varied topics at my site(s). I think Google may actually have set these image samples up manually or perhaps it's keyed on the number of topical searches in both the text and image databases.
I just wish I could make more earnings from this topic!
The ctr on these 'photo-pages' is not as big as my content pages, but afterall this way more pages are indexed and generate visitors.
This way I do receive visitors over picture search and normal search becouse there are no pages with only a picture.
It depends very much on what the site offers. One of my clients offers "decor" products where visual appeal is almost 100% of the selling point. Their Google image traffic is an important source of revenue, and I get the sense that people intentionally use Google images to comparison shop.
Another client offers a consulting service in a manufacturing discipline. For them so far, image search never brought in a new client that we know of.
I agree wholeheartedly. The question should be converting what? If you are talking converting to cash, I doubt anybody looking for something to buy would be searching the G image db to find a product. It's not where I would go.
Converting to visitors? Definitely would work depending on the site. I have an image db of a hobby with thousands of photos sent in by other enthusiasts. I gets a lot of hits from the G image search. People will usually peruse many images on my site from that referral. It works for me.
Converting to members? Sometimes. Not as high as I would like. A few actually converting to members after perusing the image db.
I've paid close attention to the logs and the number of places they ended up on thanks to their viral nature is huge.
Sure, some will crop the URL out but the vast majority won't and that's free advertising. A bit hard to track the resulting type-ins, though.
For the right type of site, photos work :)
The question should be converting what? If you are talking converting to cash, I doubt anybody looking for something to buy would be searching the G image db to find a product. It's not where I would go.
Actually, one of our sites sells a product and thanks to the stats from analytics, the google images search users are actually converting to buyers looking for a particular product.
I wish I could get half the google image traffic you guys say you're blocking.
Thanks,
Carol
However, I gave this subject some careful thought and decided to:
1) Remove the Googlebot image gallery block from my robots.txt, once again allowing indexing.
2) Install the frame-buster on my gallery's header file.
Yes, I think this is a good solution guys, thanks for mentioning it.
The bit about installing a frame-buster has been referenced from the blackhat SEO side of things...
Whether it is a blackhat technique or not I can not say for sure, but I thought I better mention it so folks are at least aware of the fact that blackhats certainly are not afraid of using this technique themselves.
As for me, I'm keeping the frame buster. It doesn't interfere with google until someone clicks the link to see the image 'full' size, at which point I feel it is fair the visitor leave google and come see the image as it is hosted and where it is hosted, but that's just me.
Framing other folks sites seems like it could be more blackhat than using a frame buster to avoid having your site franmed by others.
Maybe that's just me.
It's still a pain for them to have to hit it twice to get back - but I agree, once they've opted to view OUR images in full size, they should become OUR visitor... Google is lucky to be able to even display small sized image previews - let alone frame our sites for the duration of the visit.
Not always, image search is also a major resource for people looking for images to link to, ie hotlinking.
