This article has been contributed by Chandan Bagwe, Founder and Managing Director, C Com Digital.
There is a huge change happening in the Indian digital marketing world. As marketers chase traditional SEO KPIs, a revolution is quietly changing how people shop: visual search mixed with advanced technical SEO. The harsh truth? If brands don’t pay attention to this, they’ll become obsolete.
The Visual Search Boom in India
India’s economy, which is based on mobile devices, is excellent for visual search to take off. Google has more than 99% of the market for mobile search in India, and retail mobile commerce is expanding by more than 28% every year. This means that the foundation for visual search to take over is already in place.
The stats tell a strong story: Indian users spend an average of three hours online daily, mostly looking at pictures and videos. But most brands are still stuck in text-based optimisation tactics, which are quickly becoming useless.
Fashion E-commerce Revolution: A Case Study
Myntra is a great example of how visual search may work in India’s complicated fashion world. Their visual search lets consumers quickly upload pictures of clothes and identify comparable items. What are the results? People who use visual search are three times more likely to interact with your site and forty per cent more likely to buy something than people who use regular search.
It’s not only about technology; it’s also about understanding how Indian consumers act. In a market where cultural and regional differences make word searches useless, visual search fills the gap between finding inspiration and making a buy.
Technical SEO: The Secret Base
Visual search gets people’s attention, but technical SEO is the hidden base that decides whether a site will succeed. Technical SEO has changed since 2025. It now includes AI-readiness and optimising visual material, in addition to traditional optimisation.
Technical performance is now a make-or-break aspect because of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Websites that fulfil these standards have 24% more mobile conversions, 15% longer sessions, and 12% fewer people who leave the site immediately.
Problems in the Indian Market
There are certain special problems that technical SEO in India has to deal with:
- Network Variability: Making the most of connection speeds from 2G to 5G.
- Device Diversity: Making sure that all cellphones, from affordable to high-end, work well.
- Multilingual Complexity: Keeping technological performance up while supporting 22 official languages.
The Strategy for Convergence
BigBasket shows how visual search and technical SEO may work together. Their implementation includes thorough image schema markup, visual search for supermarket products, and advanced technological optimisation for various devices.
The results: organic exposure went up by 35%, visual search traffic by 45%, and mobile conversion rates by 28%.
Framework for Implementation
- Optimising Visual Content
- Using the WebP format makes pages load 30% faster.
- Optimising responsive images for performance on specific devices
- Advanced schema markup for all visual content
- High-resolution pictures of products from different angles
- Updating Technical SEO
- Optimising Core Web Vitals for Indian network conditions
- Setting up a CDN with edge locations in India
- Building Progressive Web Apps for app-like experiences
- Optimising voice search for questions in more than one language.
Nykaa’s Omnichannel Excellence: A Success Story
Nykaa’s all-around approach shows how powerful convergence may be:
- Visual Search: AR-powered “try-on” features that let you search visually
- Technical Foundation: 99.9% uptime, loading speeds of less than 2 seconds, and PWA implementation
Results: organic traffic grew by 200%, and visual search conversions grew by 150%.
Strategies for Adapting to Different Regions
In North India
Festival-specific optimisation (for Diwali and Holi), visual search for winter clothes, and colour preferences by location.
The South of India
Recognising traditional attire, regional food, and classical design patterns
The West India
Business formal dress optimisation, modern lifestyle items, and solutions for urban spaces
East India
Recognition of handloom crafts, cultural artefacts, and the use of regional art
The Reality Check for 2025
Because of how people’s behaviour changes, brands are at a critical decision point; you can’t live without visual search capabilities anymore.
Important Performance Metrics
- Conversion rates for visual search: 4.5% for clothes and 6.2% for home decor. Sessions for visual search last 2.5 times longer than those for text search.
- Technical SEO effect: 95% of Core Web Vitals must be met
What you need to invest
- Visual search technology costs ₹15–50 lakhs a year for business solutions.
- Technical SEO tools cost between ₹2 and ₹8 lakhs a year.
- Expected ROI time frame: 12–18 months for results that can be measured
The Competition
Amazon India is the market leader, handling over 100,000 visual search requests daily. The camera search on Flipkart gets 40% more clicks. Reliance Retail connects visual search in more than 12,000 outlets.
SME Opportunities: cheap SaaS solutions, making Google Lens work better, integrating social media, and participating in local marketplaces.
The Strategic Need
Visual search and technical SEO are more than just fads; they are the future of how people in India will find things online. The combination of more digital infrastructure, more smartphones, and changing customer behaviour presents opportunities that have never existed before.
To succeed, you need to change how you think about search, discovery, and user experience. Companies that excel at this convergence will not only be able to compete in today’s market but also shape the future of digital commerce.
The Indian market is the best place to test these new ideas because it is big, diverse, and has a high digital penetration rate. To do well here, businesses need to devise plans for expanding around the world and maintaining their competitive edge.
Conclusion: The End of the Road
Visual search and technical SEO will distinguish the market leaders from the followers as we move into 2025. It’s not a matter of whether to invest; it’s a matter of how quickly you can use these tools to take advantage of the huge opportunity ahead.
Businesses that use visual search SEO today will rule the search environment of the future. People who don’t will become increasingly irrelevant in a digital future driven by AI and focused on visuals.
The revolution is unfolding right now. You can choose.
About the Writer: He is a digital marketing expert who focuses on new search technologies, visual search implementations, and digital and AI. He has been in digital marketing for over 20 years and has attentively watched it change.
Sources of Data:
Statista: India’s share of the Google Mobile Search Market
Shipments of smartphones to India
Statista: Online shopping in India
Mobile Commerce Stats for 2024
Leave a Reply