Image Alt Text: The 5-Minute Shopify SEO Win Most Stores Skip

Alt text is the description a screen reader announces and a search engine reads when it cannot see an image. It is one of the few SEO tasks that is quick, cheap, and genuinely helps real people — and most Shopify stores still leave it blank.

Why it matters

• Image search: Google Images is a real traffic source for products. No alt text, no ranking there.
• Accessibility: Shoppers using screen readers rely on it. It is also a legal requirement in many markets.
• Context: Alt text helps search engines understand what a page is about, especially on image-heavy product pages.

What good alt text looks like

Describe the image accurately and specifically, as if to someone who cannot see it. Include the product and its key visual details.

• Weak: "shirt"
• Good: "Navy band-collar linen shirt, front view, worn open over a white tee"

Keep it under about 125 characters, do not stuff keywords, and do not start with "image of" — screen readers already announce that it is an image.

Doing it at scale

Adding alt text to five products is easy. Adding it to 300 products with four photos each is where stores give up. That is exactly the kind of repetitive, catalog-wide task worth automating.

The shortcut

SEO Bison's store audit flags every image missing alt text, then writes and applies accurate alt text across your catalog in the background — so you clear hundreds of gaps without editing images one by one.