Did you know there’s one simple thing you can do right now to boost your search engine ranking? One underrated yet effective SEO strategy you can do right now is to apply image alt text on your product photos. In fact, even Instagram built a feature allowing users to create Instagram alt tags.

There’s just one problem. 

Although it’s simple to add image alt text to your photos, it can be a very time-consuming process. 

Let’s face it, spending hours adding alt text to your product photos is not a good use of your time. This is why we built a Shopify app – Auto Alt Text – to help you add and optimize your alt text faster. 

It’s the most cost-effective way of doing SEO while you focus on more important things to your business. Best of all, you can try the Auto Alt Text app for free!

Why you need alt text

If you have been following our blog, you know how much we stress the importance of having great imagery for your ecommerce store and marketing materials. At the end of the day, images are the closest thing your customers can get to have a ‘feel’ for your products. 

But here’s the catch – search engines and web crawlers can’t interpret images.

If you upload an image to your store without alt text, search engines will only know that there’s an image on your website. It won’t know what the image is or what the image shows. 

No matter how much time and money you spend creating good product images, it doesn’t equate to sales if you don’t get traffic to your store.

That’s where alt text comes in. 

Alternative text – a.k.a. alt tag, alt description, or alt attribute – is an HTML attribute added as tags to images. It gives your photos alternative text (hence the name) so that search engines and web crawlers can identify what that image is. 

Sure, you might have spent time working on other SEO aspects. But, since your product photos are already on your site, why not add alt text to improve your search ranking? 

How to format alt text to gain more traffic

Google recommends using useful and easy-to-understand alt text. 

When choosing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

If your product image is showing a black dress, for example, you can use “Black Casual Dress for Women” as your alternative tag. 

Ideally, your alt text should provide context about your product image while using the right keyword for SEO. But realistically, doing this for all the photos in your store will eat up most of your time. 

Adding alt text on your Shopify store

There are two ways you can add alt text to your Shopify store. 

The first method requires you to go through your products and collections individually and add the alt text per image. Here’s how you can do this. If you have a lot of images on your Shopify store, you might want to use the excel method. Here’s how.

While the second method is faster, it will still take a lot of time to write all those alt texts per image. This is why we built  Auto Alt Text. To save you time and money while helping your store get more traffic. 

A glance at Auto Alt Text by Pixc 

Optimizing your product photos with alt text is now easier and faster with Auto Alt Text. Here’s how the app works: 

1. Analyze store images – After installing the app, click the Analyze button. Our app will analyze all the images in your store to check which images require alt text.
2. Review and configure – After analyzing your store, you’ll be provided with an overview of the results. You can then configure the image alt text on your images and set the format that works best for you.
3. Optimize – Click the Optimize button and let’s handle the rest for you.

You can change the alt text format or restore the original state of your alt text on the Settings page.

How Auto Alt Text by Pixc can help you

Auto Alt Text by Pixc can help you optimize your product images by adding or updating your image alt text in just a few clicks.

• It’s automatic! – We built Auto Alt Text so you don’t have to worry about your product image alt text ever again. Just choose the format of your alt text, and everything’s automated.
• Intuitive interface – Our Auto Alt Text is built on Shopify’s design guidelines (Shopify Polaris) to give you a better experience when using our app.
• Processes everything in the background – Our app can run in the background. As soon as you set your alt text format, it will update and add alt text to your images in the background so you don’t have to wait.
• Time-saving – Save yourself hours by not having to go through your image list and adding alt text. You can divert your attention to what matters to your business. 
• Google AI – We use Google’s AI to detect the color of your products. You can choose this as part of the alt text format on your store. 

Get all these benefits and start optimizing your image SEO using Auto Alt Text by Pixc. We offer a 7-day free trial. 

Share on social: