<aside> 💡 Alt image text (alternative text) is the information behind a photo that helps search engines interpret what they are looking at. This type of text also is available to visually impaired customers, for screen reader users, and appears if an image doesn’t load properly.
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If people can understand what you’re selling them, they are more likely to feel cared for, know if they want the product, and commit to a purchase. A search engine can’t see photos on its own, so if the technology can understand these images through alt text, the product is more likely to appear in a search.
Set yourself apart from competitors, support your customers, and boost your SEO with one simple addition to your eCommerce platform: alt image text.
On Amazon, alt text is called image keywords. Check out this article for more information about how to write maximize this Amazon SEO opportunity.
The latest wave of post-apocalyptic movies where AI rules the world with an electronic fist has left us believing or fearing that computers can do anything. This is far from true. Computers and programs still need us to tell them exactly what an image contains so they know how to index it and how to describe it correctly to people with screen readers. Because they can’t see images for themselves, search engines analyze the alt text behind your photos and rank image searches based on the data you provide.
Golden Nugget: Alt image text is the perfect place to include keywords for search engines to gobble up.
Next we'll discover how alt tags best practices can help increase your ranking performance and visibility.
Research shows that the first SERP contains images 25% of the time. Search engines can’t identify your images on their own and won’t populate them in the absence of alt text that indicates the contents. Here are a few more surprising facts to keep in mind:
Give your product or service images the best chance to populate first with alt image text.
Here is a little search engine results test: