Image alt-text tags play a crucial role in making websites accessible to everyone. Representing roughly 15% of the world’s population, members of the various disability communities command more than $13 trillion in expendable income. For users who are visually impaired and rely on screen readers, alt-text provides a textual description of what the image conveys. Screen readers then convert this text into speech, allowing users to understand the content and context of the image alongside the surrounding text. This ensures everyone has an equal opportunity to access and comprehend the full meaning of a webpage, regardless of their visual abilities.

Beyond accessibility, alt-text tags also hold significant value for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines use alt-text to understand the content of images and their relevance to the surrounding webpage. By including relevant keywords in your alt-text descriptions, you can help search engines better understand your website's content and improve your ranking for those keywords in image search results. However, it's important to prioritize accurate descriptions over keyword stuffing, as search engines can penalize websites for misleading practices.

By following these practices, you can create effective alt-text tags that enhance accessibility, SEO, and the overall user experience of your website.

Plug In SEO can write this alt-text for you, so you don't have to go image by image.

1: Open Issue Fixes in the Plug In SEO menu.

2: Choose any of the Image Alt-Text issues listed:

3: Tick the pages you want to fix — you can work through several at once.

4: Click Generate suggestions. Plug In SEO writes alt-text built around your keywords and shows you why it chose it.

5: Click Review suggestions, pick one and click Apply. It writes straight to the page in Shopify.

Every suggestion is built around keywords. If a page you selected has no keyword research of its own, Plug In SEO tells you and offers two ways forward: run keyword research for that page, or carry on with your store-wide keywords.

Note: keyword research uses your plan's quota, so how much you can run depends on your plan.

Issue Fixes covers product and collection images only. For images on your blog posts, pages, home page, logo, buttons and icons, add the alt-text yourself using the steps below.

Full walkthrough: Issue Fixes: fix the issues your scan found, without leaving the app

If you're seeing notifications in your Plug In Useful SEO Shop Scan results, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to use additional keywords in your shop.
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Search engine crawl bots (known as "spiders" - because they crawl the web) cannot “see” the images on your page, only the code used to display them.

There are two ways to do this in Shopify, and either works:

From the product — open the product in your Shopify admin, scroll down to Media, click the image and add the alt text in the field provided.

From your media library — go to Content > Files, find the image and add the alt text there.

Open the collection in your Shopify admin, click the collection image and add the alt text in the field provided — or find the same image under Content > Files.

When placing images on your blog posts and pages, set a description for the image. This will become its alt tag, no template editing is required.
There are two places the image may be, an element on the page, or in line with your text.

For page media, here is how to add alt-text:

Scroll down to Media, double-click on the image and add alt text in the provided field.

For inline media located within the page description, double-click on the image and add alt-text in the provided field.
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If there are other pages on your site not driven by Products, Blogs or Pages, there will be a liquid template for it. Find the template, locate any IMG tags, and try to drive the alt from a liquid variable.

Adding an alt tag to these types of images is less important for SEO (except for your logo, which is worthwhile to do).

The process is different for every type of image, but in general, you find the appropriate template in your theme (say, theme.liquid for your logo), find the image and add the alt attribute to the image.

If the image is on your Home Page, you’ll need to go to your Theme editor to add alt-text to the image. This is shown in the video tutorial above.

If the image is on any other page, you need to go to that specific page to edit the alt-text.