As an eCommerce store owner, you are keenly aware that product images are a crucial component of your online store. They help customers visualize what they’re buying, and multiple, high quality images can significantly influence their purchasing decisions. However, there’s a critical element often overlooked by many store owners: alt tags. In this article, we’ll explore what alt tags are, why they’re essential for your store, and how you can make sure none of your product images are missing them using our Missing Data Finder tool.
What are Alt Tags and How are they Used?
Alt tags, short for alternative text, are text descriptions of images used on websites. They serve as a way to describe the content of an image when it cannot be displayed. Alt tags are not just a technical requirement—they play a role in making your store accessible and optimizing it for search engines.
Alt tags are important for several reasons:
- Accessibility: For visually impaired users who rely on screen readers, alt tags provide a description of the image, making your store inclusive and user-friendly. Simply put, alt text is essential for ensuring content accessibility.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Search engines like Google use alt tags to understand the content of images. Well-written alt tags can improve your store’s visibility in image search results and overall SEO performance, as noted by HubSpot.
- User Experience: If an image fails to load due to slow internet or technical issues, alt tags provide a textual description, making sure users still understand what the image represents.
Best Practices for Writing Alt Tags
Crafting effective alt tags requires attention to detail. Here are some best practices all store owners should follow:
- Be Descriptive: Clearly describe the image, including its subject and context. For example, instead of “red dress,” use “woman wearing a red evening dress with lace accents.”
- Keep It Concise: Alt text should be under 125 characters, as screen readers may cut off longer descriptions.
- Avoid Redundancy: Don’t start with phrases like “picture of” or “image of,” as screen readers already announce that it’s an image.
- Use Keywords Wisely: Include relevant keywords if they fit naturally, but avoid the much hated keyword stuffing cheat. For example, if your product is a “wireless noise-canceling headphone,” you might use “wireless noise-canceling headphone with built-in mic.”
- Skip Decorative Images: For purely decorative images that don’t add meaning, use an empty alt attribute (alt=””).
- Check for Errors: Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical mistakes, as this can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
The Consequences of Not Having Alt Tags on Product Images
Failing to include alt tags on your product images can lead to significant issues:
- Reduced Accessibility: Visually impaired users won’t be able to understand your product images, potentially driving them away from your store. Without alt tags, screen readers may read irrelevant file names, confusing users.
- Negative SEO Impact: Search engines may not properly index or rank your images, reducing your store’s visibility in image searches and potentially harming overall SEO.
- Product Feed Errors: Platforms like Google Shopping often require complete product data, including alt tags. Missing alt tags can cause errors in your product feeds, preventing your products from being listed properly.
Unfortunately, when new items are added to your store or existing ones are updated with new images, alt tags are often overlooked. This can lead to a portion of your product images lacking alt tags, which in turn can harm your store’s accessibility, SEO, and overall performance.
At Your Store Wizards, we understand the challenges of managing a growing eCommerce store – we’ve all been store owners at some point! That’s why we’ve developed our Missing Data Finder tool, available for both Shopify and BigCommerce platforms. This tool is part of our Your Store Tools suite and is designed to help you identify and fix missing data, including alt tags, across your product images.
How our Missing Data Finder Works
- Scan Your Products: The Missing Data Finder scans all, or select, products in your store to identify those with images that are missing alt tags (plus many more fields!)
- Generate a Report: You’ll receive a detailed report listing all products with missing alt tags, making it easy to pinpoint the issues.
- Fix the Issues: Use the report to quickly add alt tags to the identified images, ensuring your store is optimized for accessibility and SEO.
Don’t let missing alt tags hold your store back. Take action today and ensure your product images are fully optimized for accessibility and SEO with the Missing Data Finder tool from Your Store Tools.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.