Multimodal SEO: How to Optimize Images for Google Lens and Visual Search

A customer spots a chair in a café and takes a photo to find something similar. Another saves a screenshot of a kitchen and searches for the pendant lights above the counter.

Neither customer needs to know the product name to start looking.

Visual search gives businesses another way to reach people who recognise what they want but cannot easily describe it. For your website, that makes product photography and other useful images part of how customers discover your content.

Multimodal SEO brings those images together with the information on your pages. The aim is to make the subject clear and give visitors enough detail to decide whether they have found the right result.

What Is Multimodal SEO?

Multimodal SEO is the practice of improving content for searches that combine different forms of input, such as an image and a written question.

Someone might photograph a dining table, then add:

Something smaller in black.

The image provides the starting point, while the text refines the request.

For a business, this means thinking about how photographs, descriptions and product details work together.

A photo can show the shape of a table. The accompanying page can explain its dimensions, finish, seating capacity and available variations.

Image SEO provides much of the foundation. Multimodal SEO extends that thinking to the questions people ask around what they see.

Choose Images That Help People Evaluate the Subject

Start by looking at your images from the customer’s perspective.

What can they learn from each one?

For a dining table, a useful set might include:

• A full view showing its shape and base
• A close-up of the surface and finish
• A side view showing the leg arrangement
• A room photograph showing its proportions beside other furniture

Each photograph should answer a different question.

Several nearly identical angles add less value than a smaller set that shows the details customers actually need.

Keep the main product easy to identify. A clean product shot helps people inspect the item, while a room photograph helps them imagine using it. Both have a role.

For service businesses, apply the same principle to project photography.

An interior designer could show the completed room alongside details of storage, lighting and materials. A renovation company could document different stages of a kitchen project. A landscaping business might show both the completed garden and close-up details of planting or materials.

These images give prospective customers something concrete to evaluate.

Make Important Images Accessible to Search Engines

Good photography has limited search value if search engines cannot reliably access the image.

Google recommends using standard HTML image elements for images you want it to discover. Google can find image URLs referenced through the src attribute of an <img> element, while CSS background images are not indexed in the same way.

An image sitemap can also help Google discover image assets that might otherwise be difficult to find.

Review important pages and check that:

• Main images load correctly
• Image URLs are accessible
• Important images are not blocked by robots.txt
• Pages are not unintentionally set to noindex
• Images remain available without requiring a login
• Galleries work properly on mobile
• Important images are not hidden behind technical implementations that prevent discovery

Pay particular attention to ecommerce galleries and interactive components.

Treat accessibility as an early technical check. Improving a photograph’s description has limited value if the underlying image cannot be discovered.

Write Descriptions That Fit the Image

Google uses alt text and surrounding page content to help understand images. It also notes that filenames can provide light clues about image subject matter.

Keep both descriptive and relevant.

For a photograph of a chair, useful alt text might be:

Beige upholstered armchair with a curved back and wooden legs.

A close-up of the same chair needs a different description:

Close-up of the armchair’s beige woven fabric.

The wording should reflect what that particular image communicates.

Avoid copying the same product title into every image or adding promotional keywords that do not describe what is visible.

For example:

best furniture Malaysia cheap chair online modern chair

does not make the image more useful.

Use similarly straightforward filenames:

beige-armchair-front.jpg

beige-armchair-fabric-detail.jpg

The purpose is clarity, not fitting as many keywords as possible into the file.

Put Product Facts in the Page Copy

An image can communicate appearance, but customers still need information that is difficult to judge visually.

Consider a page titled:

Dining Table DT102

Even with excellent photography, a customer may still have to guess its size, material and suitability for their home.

A more useful introduction would be:

A 100 cm round dining table with an oak veneer top and solid wood legs, designed to seat four people.

The rest of the page can explain:

• Available finishes
• Dimensions
• Materials
• Care requirements
• Delivery information
• Available sizes or variations

Be precise.

“Solid oak” and “oak veneer” describe different constructions even when the products look similar in a photograph.

Keep variations consistent with the visual content as well. If a customer selects a black finish, the gallery should make it easy to see what that version looks like.

The image and the written information should describe the same product accurately.

Build Pages Around the Questions Behind the Image

Someone searching with an image may have very different goals.

A photograph of a sofa could mean:

What style is this?

or:

Find something similar in cream.

or:

Will something like this fit my apartment?

or simply:

Where can I buy this?

Use these questions to review whether the page provides enough information.

Customer Question	Useful Page Content
What style is this?	Clear description of the design and distinctive features
Does it come in another colour?	Labelled variations with matching photographs
Will it fit my room?	Measurements and a dimension diagram
What does the material look like?	Detail photography and an accurate material description
Can I order it?	Current availability and purchasing information

This is also a useful way to plan photography.

If customers repeatedly ask how large a product is, consider whether the page needs a dimension diagram or an image showing scale.

If they frequently ask about material, a close-up may communicate more than another full-product photograph.

The questions people ask can reveal what the existing images fail to show.

Keep Images Clear Without Making Pages Slow

Image quality matters because the visual itself contains information.

A handbag’s stitching may look clear in the original photograph but disappear after excessive compression. A fabric texture may become difficult to distinguish. A detailed room photograph may become muddy on a small screen.

At the same time, uploading unnecessarily large image files can slow the page.

Google recommends using high-quality, responsive images while considering how image size and delivery affect page performance.

Practical steps include:

• Resize images for their intended display size
• Compress files appropriately
• Use suitable modern image formats
• Implement responsive images
• Avoid unnecessarily large originals
• Lazy-load suitable off-screen images

Then inspect the finished page on a phone.

Can customers still see the material texture?

Can they read a dimension diagram?

Can they move through the gallery comfortably?

Review the delivered website as carefully as the original image files.

Use Visuals Where They Explain Something Better

Multimodal SEO is not limited to ecommerce product photography.

Useful visual content can include:

• Diagrams
• Screenshots
• Charts
• Maps
• Before-and-after photographs
• Process illustrations
• Floor plans
• Comparison graphics
• Step-by-step images

A renovation company writing about kitchen layouts could create diagrams showing the differences between L-shaped, U-shaped and galley kitchens.

A software business could use screenshots to explain how to complete a task.

A hotel could combine room photography with floor plans to help guests understand the difference between room types.

An article explaining furniture dimensions might use a diagram to show the clearance required around a dining table.

Choose the visual format around the information being communicated.

A useful test is:

Would removing this visual make the page harder to understand?

If the answer is yes, the image is probably doing meaningful work.

Measure Visual Discovery in Search Console

Multimodal optimization is becoming more measurable.

Google introduced web multimodal search reporting in Search Console in September 2026. It provides visibility into image-based search journeys across experiences such as Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads to Google Search and Chrome’s Search this image feature.

This is an important distinction:

Multimodal search does not simply mean someone clicked an image in Google Images.

It refers to search journeys where an image is used as part of the search input.

For a furniture retailer, someone might photograph a chair and search for similar products.

For a fashion store, a customer might use a screenshot of a dress to explore similar styles.

For a home décor business, someone might circle a lamp within a room photograph and search for products that resemble it.

Use Search Console to investigate questions such as:

• Which pages receive multimodal impressions?
• Which pages generate clicks?
• What queries are associated with those pages?
• Are product or informational pages receiving more visibility?
• Did performance change after improving important imagery?

Keep a record of significant website changes so that you have context when reviewing trends.

If you add original product photography in September and multimodal visibility increases in October, that is worth investigating.

It does not automatically prove that the new photography caused the increase.

Connect Visual Visibility With What Happens Next

Search visibility is only part of the customer journey.

A product page might receive increasing multimodal impressions and clicks, but visitors could still leave because they cannot find dimensions, delivery information or the variation shown in the image.

Review on-site behaviour and conversions alongside Search Console data.

For an ecommerce business, useful actions might include:

• Product views
• Viewing another variation
• Add-to-cart actions
• Checkout activity
• Purchases

For a service business:

• Project-page visits
• Contact form submissions
• Calls
• WhatsApp enquiries
• Quote requests
• Bookings

Multimodal performance can therefore become one part of a wider approach to tracking AI search visibility, alongside citations, referral traffic and other forms of search discovery.

The aim is to understand whether increased visual discovery is helping the right people reach useful pages and take meaningful actions.

Where to Start

You do not need to optimize every image on the website at once.

Choose a small group of important product, service or article pages and review them together.

For each page, ask:

• Can search engines access the important images?
• Is the main subject easy to identify?
• Does each image add useful information?
• Does the page explain details that cannot be understood from the image alone?
• Are important variations represented accurately?
• Does the page work well on mobile?
• Can visitors easily take the next step?

For a furniture retailer, the first improvement might be adding dimension diagrams and material close-ups to popular products.

For an interior designer, it could mean replacing an unexplained gallery with project photographs supported by concise descriptions of the work, materials and design decisions.

For an ecommerce store, it might mean reviewing whether colour and size variations are properly represented in both the images and product information.

Start with pages that already matter to the business, improve the information they provide and then watch how their search performance develops.

The practical goal is to help someone move from:

“I like the look of this.”

to:

“This is what I was looking for.”

Clear images make the product, service or idea easier to recognise. Useful page content gives people the information they need to understand it.

Together, they create a stronger foundation for visual and multimodal search.