Anyone who tries to picture the future of search will indeed see quite a lot of images, according to Anne Kennedy. At SES Chicago, Kennedy talked to Abby Johnson about how, in the next three to five years, online searches should become a much more visual affair.

Kennedy, who’s the founder and managing partner of Beyond Ink and the founding partner and director of marketing at Joblr.net, noted, “We’re a visual species.” She then continued, “People tend to respond better to visual information . . .” In fact, in a study, Microsoft recently measured a 28 percent better response to visual data than text data.

So pics and videos will show up more and more following standard searches. Thanks to the trend started by the iPhone, videos will become more common in the mobile environment, too.

As a result, Kennedy said, “As marketers, we need to pay close attention to how we can provide visual information, whether in videos or in images, and have those optimized.” Creating a YouTube channel is one option, since the cost of entry is so low.

Then there are just a couple of things to remember about producing videos that are actually good: attempt to make them both well-written and well-lit.

Correction: Google actually had 9 billion queries in August instead of the 9 million referenced in the above video.