Alt Text on Shopify: SEO and Accessibility in Every Image

Every image on your Shopify store has an alt text field. Most stores leave it blank or fill it with the product title copied verbatim. Both approaches miss the point.

Alt text serves two audiences at once. For visually impaired users on screen readers, it describes what the image shows. For Google's image crawler, it's context, and it's one of the signals that decides whether that image ever shows up in Google Image Search.

Image search drives a meaningful slice of overall Google traffic, commonly cited at 20-30%. For product-heavy stores with decent photography, that's a real organic channel sitting mostly untouched, because almost nobody writes alt text well enough to earn it.

Here's how to write alt text that actually does both jobs, accessibility and SEO, across every image on a Shopify store.

What Good Alt Text Looks Like

Good alt text describes the image concisely and naturally. The test is simple: if someone couldn't see this image, what would they need to know?

The formula: subject + key descriptive details + context or setting if it's relevant.

Keep it under 125 characters. Screen readers typically cut off around there, so descriptive but concise wins over exhaustive.

Adding Alt Text in Shopify

Product images: go to Products, open a product, click any product image. There's a text field labeled "Alt text" or "Image alt text." Fill it in for every image, not just the first one.

Theme images: most image sections in the theme editor have their own alt text field in settings, headers, banners, about page images. Check each one individually; they don't inherit from anywhere.

Blog post images: when you insert an image into a post through the rich text editor, click the image and there's an alt text option right there.

Collection images: collections have a featured image. Open the collection, scroll to the image section, add alt text there too.

The bulk approach: for a catalog with hundreds of products, export the product CSV. There's an "Image Alt Text" column you can fill in bulk in a spreadsheet, then re-import.

Writing Alt Text for Different Image Types

Primary product image (front/main view): describe the product like you're telling someone what it looks like, product type, color, material if it's visible, and whatever makes it distinct.

• "Black leather crossbody bag with gold chain strap and quilted pattern"

Alternate product angles: name the angle or the detail being shown. That helps a screen reader user understand what's different about this particular image, and it helps Google index each angle separately instead of treating them as duplicates.

• "Side view of quilted leather crossbody bag showing width and strap length"
• "Interior of black crossbody bag showing three compartments and zip pocket"
• "Close-up of gold chain strap and clasp detail on crossbody bag"

Lifestyle/contextual images: describe the scene and how the product sits within it.

• "Woman in white sundress carrying quilted crossbody bag at outdoor cafe"
• "Flat lay of crossbody bag with sunglasses, phone, and lipstick arranged nearby"

Size and scale images: describe whatever is providing the scale reference.

• "Crossbody bag held against woman's hip showing size relative to body"
• "Bag dimensions shown next to standard smartphone for size comparison"

Decorative or brand images (hero banners, background textures): if the image is purely decorative and adds no information, you can leave the alt text empty, that's the correct choice, not a shortcut. But if it contains meaningful content, like a banner with text or a lifestyle shot doing real work for brand tone, describe it properly.

SEO Strategy for Alt Text

Google treats alt text as a primary signal for image search ranking. Here's how to use that without tipping into spam:

Include the target keyword naturally. If the product page is targeting "organic cotton t-shirt," the primary image's alt text should carry that phrase without forcing it. "Men's organic cotton t-shirt in forest green, relaxed fit" reads naturally and still does the job.

Don't repeat the same alt text across every image. Five product images all reading "organic cotton t-shirt" tells Google nothing new five times. Each image should describe something different about the product, vary the descriptions on purpose.

Use long-tail variations across a product's image set. Different images can chase different queries:

• Image 1: "organic cotton t-shirt in forest green", product plus color
• Image 2: "soft cotton t-shirt close-up showing fabric texture", texture and quality
• Image 3: "man wearing relaxed fit t-shirt with jeans", styling and use case
• Image 4: "organic cotton t-shirt size label showing care instructions", a practical detail

Now every image has a shot at ranking for a different search, instead of all of them competing for the same one.

Skip "Image of" or "Photo of" at the start. Screen readers already announce "Image" before reading the description, so leading with "Image of" is redundant. Just describe what's there.

Common Mistakes

Keyword stuffing. "Blue dress women's blue dress party dress cocktail dress blue party cocktail blue dress." It reads badly to a screen reader and Google recognizes the pattern too, it doesn't help rankings, it hurts them.

Using the filename. IMG_3847.jpg or product-photo-final-v2.jpg tells nobody anything. Always write something a human would actually say out loud.

The same alt text on every image. Pasting the product title into every image field on a product is the laziest version of "technically done," and it wastes the chance to describe what's actually unique about each shot.

Too long. A 300-character alt text is too much. One sentence, two at most for a genuinely complex image.

Ignoring collection and page images. Most stores get product images covered and stop there, collection hero images, about page photos, blog graphics, and trust badge images all get skipped. Every image on the store needs the same treatment.

Alt text on decorative spacers. Transparent spacer images or purely decorative dividers should get empty alt text (alt=""), which tells a screen reader to skip past them entirely rather than announcing something meaningless.

The Accessibility Case

Beyond SEO, this is a legal and ethical baseline, not an optional extra.

Something like 285 million people globally live with some form of visual impairment, and screen readers are how a lot of them navigate the web. When images have no alt text, what they get is a string of "Image. Image. Image." with no idea what's actually being shown.

Accessibility lawsuits against eCommerce sites are climbing. The ADA has been interpreted by courts to apply to websites, and WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard most of those rulings reference, requires alt text on all meaningful images.

This isn't only about avoiding a lawsuit. Roughly 15% of the global population has some form of disability, and a store that's actually accessible is a store with a bigger addressable market, full stop.

Auditing Current Alt Text

For a quick check: open your browser's developer tools, inspect an image element, and look at the alt attribute. Is it there? Is it actually descriptive, or just the product title again?

For a full audit, a crawler like Screaming Frog will pull every image on the site along with its alt text value. Sort by missing alt text to find the gaps, then sort for alt text that just matches the product title to find the lazy copies that need a rewrite.

Priority order for fixing it:

1. Product images, the biggest lever for both SEO and UX
2. Collection images, category-level SEO
3. Blog post images, content SEO
4. Page images, brand and trust
5. Decorative images, low priority, empty alt is often correct here anyway