Somewhere in your website editor there's a little field labeled "alt text," and if you're like most business owners, you've either left it blank or filled it with something like `image1` because a tutorial told you it "helps SEO."
Let's fix the framing, because that little field is doing three jobs at once, and only one of them involves Google.
Job one: it's how some of your customers see at all
Alt text exists, first and originally, for people. Visitors using screen readers, because they're blind, have low vision, or process pages by audio, experience your website as spoken text. When the screen reader reaches an image, it reads the alt text aloud.
Blank alt text gets announced as, literally, "image." Imagine shopping in a store where every product is wrapped in brown paper and the shopkeeper just says "item" when you ask what's inside. That's your website, for that customer, right now.
This isn't a niche concern dressed up as virtue. Visual impairment affects a meaningful slice of every market, those visitors have money and needs like everyone else, and they're extraordinarily loyal to businesses whose websites actually work for them, because so few do. Writing real descriptions is the cheapest customer-acquisition channel you've never considered.
Job two: it's how search engines rank your images
Everything we covered in why your product photos are invisible to Google applies here, search engines read text, not pixels, and alt text is the single most direct description an image carries. Empty field, invisible image, absent from the image-search grid where visual buyers start.
But notice something: the alt text that serves a blind customer well, specific, honest, naturally worded, is exactly what ranks well. Google has spent two decades learning to reward text written for humans and punish text written at robots. The two jobs converge on one skill: describe the picture truthfully.
Job three: it's becoming how AI understands your business
The newest job, and the one almost nobody's positioned for. When AI assistants assemble answers, increasingly with images attached, they lean on the same textual signals. An image described as "handwoven raffia basket with leather handles, made in Port Harcourt" can be surfaced, attributed, and recommended. An undescribed image can't be part of any answer.
Every well-described image is a small piece of your business that machines can confidently repeat. Multiply by every photo on your site.
How to actually write it (the phone test)
One technique covers all three jobs: describe the image as if reading the page to someone on the phone. You'd say what matters and skip what doesn't. That instinct is the entire skill.
Weak: `bag` Stuffed: `leather bag buy leather bag Lagos best leather bags cheap leather bags Nigeria` Right: `Brown handmade leather tote with brass buckles and inner zip pocket`
The right version helps a blind shopper decide, gives Google honest ranking signal, and hands AI a clean fact, one sentence, three jobs.
A few working rules:
- Lead with the subject, add the distinguishing details. What is it, then what makes this one worth clicking.
- Include the detail a buyer would ask about. Color, material, setting, whatever answers the question the photo was meant to answer.
- Skip "image of" and "photo of." The screen reader already announced it's an image; don't bill by the word.
- Decorative flourishes get empty alt on purpose (`alt=""`), that's the polite signal for "nothing here, keep moving," and it's better than describing a divider swirl.
- Never repeat the same alt text across different images. If two descriptions match, at least one is lying.
The compound effect
Here's why this humble field belongs in your weekly routine rather than your someday list: alt text is written once and works forever, across three audiences simultaneously, at zero ongoing cost. Almost nothing else on a website has that profile. It's not glamorous. Neither is compound interest.
We treat accessibility and search as one discipline in every build, web design that works for everyone isn't a separate service tier, it's just what "finished" means. A website that only works for people who see it perfectly, on fast connections, in one language, was never really finished.