How Will Google’s New ‘Similar Items’ Feature Affect Optimization

Google has announced that the “Similar items” feature is now available across the world in image search for mobile and in its Android app.

Similar items will show users related products based on their search queries and how they interact with the image results.

The feature will initially only show similar items for shoes, sunglasses, and handbags. Google expects to incorporate ‘similar items’ into a much wider range of products over the course of this year, beginning with furniture, home-ware, and possibly some additional clothing categories.

How will this affect marketers?

It will be advantageous for retailers to look out for this and start to plan for how to properly optimize for Similar items in the future.

An important step will be to add Products Schema to all of items you want to use with this feature. Google has provided some very clear guidelines for this.

Of course you could always choose to opt out of this completely if you want to avoid having your images appear in Similar items.

Outside of these details on the technical side of things, optimizing for this new feature brings up new questions for people in retail and marketing.

Products can be recognized as being ‘similar’ to other products in a variety of different ways including shape, style, colour, or any one of a number of factors.

Although it isn’t normally the main focus of search marketing, it will be important to put a lot of consideration into the selection of imagery for your client’s websites to take advantage of the opportunity to appear in these new results.

Interestingly, Google’s announcement of the new ‘similar items’ feature concluded with:

“We’re excited to help users find your products on the web by showcasing buyable items. Thanks for partnering with us to make the web more shoppable!”

It appears that the goal in the long run will be to provide new methods for advertisers to target their potential customers by basing their advertising on other items their current or prospective clients have been looking at.

With this being the case, we can definitely expect a whole host of new and interesting options for advertisers this year from Google.