You spent real money on product photography. Professional shooter, good lighting, multiple angles, maybe even a lifestyle setup with props and models. Those photos look great on your product pages.
Then you uploaded them as IMG_4892.jpg with no alt text, and Google has basically no idea what it’s looking at.
This happens on almost every eCommerce store I’ve ever audited. The images are good. The alt text is either missing entirely, copy-pasted across every product, or something useless like “product image 1.” That’s a traffic problem hiding in plain sight.
About 74% of websites have images with zero descriptions. Three out of four stores. That means if you fix this, you’re already ahead of most of your competition before you’ve done anything complicated.
Let’s show you how to actually do it right.
Alt text is just a short description you attach to an image in the HTML. If the image doesn’t load, the text shows up instead. If someone is using a screen reader because they have a visual impairment, the screen reader reads the alt text aloud. And if Google’s crawler shows up to index your page, it reads the alt text to figure out what your image is showing.
It looks like this in the code:
<img src=”brown-leather-wallet.jpg” alt=”Men’s slim bifold leather wallet in tan brown with six card slots”>
That’s it. Not complicated. But for eCommerce specifically, those words you write carry a lot of weight.
Google Images is a real shopping channel. People use it to find specific products constantly. If someone searches “slim brown leather wallet” and your photo shows up in image results with a description that matches what they typed, you get the click. That person is already looking to buy something. You’re just showing up at the right moment.
Beyond traffic, Google uses alt text as a relevance signal for the broader page. A product page with five images, each described properly, is giving Google five more signals about what that page is about. Five images with no alt text give nothing.
I’ll give you a couple of real examples so this doesn’t sound theoretical.
HubSpot invested time into properly writing alt text for their images. Image search traffic went up 779%. That’s over 160,000 additional visits from a task that requires no tools, no budget, and no developer.
Foot Locker cleaned up their image indexing and started earning multi-image snippets in Google search results. Their organic traffic jumped 228%.
These aren’t edge cases. This is what consistently happens when you stop ignoring the alt text field.
One reason product pages respond so well to this is that each image is a separate opportunity. If you have five photos on a product page showing different angles and details, that’s five chances to match what a customer is searching for. A person looking for “women’s white Nike running shoe side view” is a very specific searcher. If your image is described exactly that way, you win that click.
There’s a basic formula that works well for product photos:
Brand + Product Type + Key Details (color, material, size) + Angle or View
A few real examples using that formula:
Running shoe, main image: alt=”Adidas Ultraboost 22 women’s running shoe in cloud white, side view”
Running shoe, sole detail: alt=”Adidas Ultraboost 22 Continental rubber outsole, bottom view”
Running shoe, lifestyle shot: alt=”Woman running on beach path wearing Adidas Ultraboost 22 white running shoes”
Each one covers something different. None of them repeat the same phrasing. They all describe what’s actually visible in the photo.
A few things to keep in mind while you write:
Describe what you can actually see. Not what the product is in general, what’s in this specific photo. Color, material, texture, angle. If the photo shows the back of a jacket, describe the back of the jacket, not the jacket overall.
Aim for 80 to 140 characters. Short enough to stay focused, long enough to include the details that matter. If you’re hitting 200+ characters, you’re probably over-explaining.
Use your keyword where it fits naturally. If your page targets “handmade ceramic coffee mug,” your main image alt text should include that phrase. Not shoved in awkwardly — just written into a real description of the image.
Don’t write the same thing for every image. If all five photos on your product page have the same alt text, you’re wasting four of them. Each image is a different signal. Treat them that way.
Skip “image of” and “photo of.” Screen readers already say it’s an image. Starting with those words just eats up characters and adds nothing.
Most stores aren’t doing anything wildly wrong. They’re just doing nothing, or doing the same thing wrong at scale. Here’s what I see most often:
The single most common issue. Shopify sometimes falls back to the product title if you leave it empty, which is better than nothing, but a product title is rarely a good alt text on its own. “Men’s Leather Bifold Wallet” as alt text is okay. But “Men’s slim genuine leather bifold wallet in cognac brown with RFID blocking, front view” is what actually gets found.
Writing alt=”leather wallet men’s wallet brown wallet slim wallet bifold” tells Google you’re gaming the system. It also makes zero sense to a screen reader user. Write for a person, not a crawler.
If you sell the same jacket in five colors and every image has alt=”men’s quilted jacket”, you’re missing the whole point. The blue one should say it’s blue. The olive one should say it’s olive.
This happens when someone fills in the alt text field with whatever the file is named. If your file is called product-123.jpg, your alt text should not also be “product 123.”
If your product page has a subtle background texture or a separator line, those don’t need alt text. Use an empty alt attribute (alt=””) so screen readers skip them entirely.
Here’s something most guides gloss over. Your product page probably has multiple types of photos, and each type serves a different purpose. Your alt text should reflect that.
Main product image. This one matters most. Include brand, product name, primary color or material, and view angle. This is likely what Google indexes first and what shows in rich results. Don’t be lazy here.
Close-up or detailed shots. Focus specifically on what’s being shown. Stitching, zippers, logo embossing, sole pattern, describe the exact feature that’s in the frame. alt=”double stitched reinforced seam on premium canvas tote bag” is genuinely useful.
Lifestyle or in-use shots. These are great for matching intent-based searches. Someone searching “grey throw blanket on couch” is probably shopping, not just browsing. alt=”grey herringbone wool throw blanket draped over white linen sofa” will catch that search.
Scale or size comparison photos. If you show the product next to something familiar, include that in the description. alt=”Small crossbody leather bag next to standard iPhone for size reference” tells both Google and shoppers exactly what they’re looking at.
Color and variant photos. Each variant image should have its own distinct alt text. If someone is specifically searching for the navy version of your product, you want that specific image to be findable.
Alt text doesn’t exist in isolation. Google looks at the filename, the alt text, the surrounding text on the page, and the page URL together.
If your file is named DSC0089.jpg, you’ve already made things harder. Google uses filenames as a supporting signal. A file named nike-ultraboost-22-womens-white-side.jpg starts the conversation before your alt text even gets read.
Rename your files before uploading. Use hyphens to separate words (not underscores, Google reads underscores differently). Include the main keyword. Keep it descriptive but not a paragraph. And delete those camera-default filenames from your workflow entirely.
Shopify puts the alt text field directly in the product editor. Click on any product image and you’ll see the field. You can also go through the Files section and update images in bulk.
If you have hundreds or thousands of products, there are Shopify apps built for bulk alt text editing. Worth using, but don’t set it and forget it. Go through your top products by hand first.
WooCommerce stores alt text in the WordPress media library. When you upload an image, the Attachment Details panel has an “Alternative Text” field.
If you’re using a page builder plugin on top of WooCommerce, double check that it’s actually pulling from the media library field rather than generating its own placeholder text. Some builders do weird things with this.
One thing that trips people up on both platforms: the file name and the alt text are separate fields that do separate things. Optimize both. They shouldn’t be identical copies of each other.
If you have 300 products with 6 images each, that’s 1,800 alt texts. You’re not writing each one from scratch, that’s unrealistic and unnecessary.
What actually works:
Build a formula per product category. For shoes: [Brand] [Model Name] [Gender] [Shoe Type] in [Color]- [View]. For bags: [Brand] [Bag Type] in [Color/Material]- [Angle]. Apply the formula via a spreadsheet, then import it through your platform’s bulk edit or CSV upload.
Prioritize your best pages. Your top 25 to 50 products by traffic or revenue deserve manually written alt text. The rest can use the formula approach. Start where it’ll actually move numbers.
If you use an AI tool to generate alt text in bulk, review it. These tools are genuinely useful for large catalogs but they make mistakes, wrong colors, wrong product types, occasionally wrong products entirely. Trust them for drafts, not final copy.
This is worth mentioning because a lot of store owners don’t think about it until there’s a problem.
The European Accessibility Act became enforceable in June 2025, covering digital products including eCommerce stores that sell into the EU. WCAG 2.2 in the US makes descriptive alt text a requirement under accessibility standards that are increasingly being cited in lawsuits.
Beyond the legal side, there are real people shopping at your store who use screen readers. When your product images have no alt text or alt text that just says “image1,” those customers can’t get the same product information as everyone else. That’s bad for them and bad for your conversion rate.
Alt text fixes both the legal risk and the experience gap at the same time.
This is the quick sanity check I’d run on any product page before it goes live:
Eight questions. Two minutes per product page. That’s genuinely all it takes to be better than most of your competition on this.
Don’t try to fix your entire catalog at once. That’s how this task gets abandoned.
Pull a report of your top 20 products by traffic or revenue. Open each one. Check every image. Write real alt text for anything that’s blank, vague, or duplicated. Then move to the next tier of products.
Once you’ve done it manually a few times, you’ll have a feel for how the formula works and you can hand it off or build a process around it.
Alt text won’t transform your store overnight. But it’s one of those SEO tasks where the gap between stores that do it and stores that don’t is surprisingly wide. Most of your competitors haven’t touched this. That’s exactly why it’s worth doing.
Your product photos are already doing the visual work. Let the alt text do the SEO work.
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