How Important Is Alt Text for Shopify Stores?

Alt text is one of those things most Shopify merchants have heard they should do but never actually get around to. And when they do look into it, the advice is usually vague — "it helps SEO" without any explanation of how or how much.

Here is a straight answer.

What Alt Text Is

Alt text (short for alternative text) is a short written description you attach to each image on your store. It was created for accessibility — when someone using a screen reader visits your store, the screen reader reads the alt text out loud to describe the image. Without it, screen reader users hear nothing, or just the file name.

Search engines also read alt text. Since Google cannot see images the way a person does, it uses alt text to understand what each image shows. That understanding affects whether and where your images appear in Google Images search results.

How Important Is It?

For SEO, the honest answer is: moderately important, with significant upside if your products have visual appeal.

Alt text is not going to double your traffic overnight. It does not carry the same weight as backlinks, page titles, or overall site authority. But it is a real signal, and for Shopify stores specifically it opens up a traffic channel that most merchants ignore entirely — Google Images.

When someone searches for "floral midi dress" or "black leather sofa" and clicks on an image in Google Images, they land on that product page. That is a purchase-intent visitor who found you without you paying for an ad. Alt text is what gets your images into those results.

For stores selling visually driven products — clothing, home decor, jewellery, plants, food — the Google Images channel is genuinely worth going after and alt text is the main lever you control.

If you want to understand exactly what good alt text looks like and how to format it, Shopify alt text best practices covers the specifics.

What Happens If You Have No Alt Text

If your alt text fields are all empty, three things happen.

Your images are less likely to appear in Google Images results because Google has no text signal to match against search queries.

Shoppers using screen readers cannot understand what your product images show, which affects accessibility and legally matters in some regions.

You miss out on a free, compounding source of organic traffic that does not require any ongoing ad spend once it is set up.

What Bad Alt Text Looks Like

Most stores that have alt text at all fall into one of these patterns:

The alt text is just the product title. "Classic Leather Jacket" repeated on every image. Google already knows the page is about a leather jacket from the title tag and product description. Alt text that just repeats this adds little extra signal.

The alt text is just the color variant name. "Black" or "Olive" with nothing else. This is what happens when Shopify themes auto-populate alt text from variant names. It is technically not empty but it is not useful either.

Alt text generated by an AI that was not actually looking at the image. Vague descriptions that could apply to any product of that type, written without seeing the specific image.

What Good Alt Text Looks Like

Good alt text describes what is actually visible in the image. What color is it, what material, how is it styled, what is the background, what angle is it shot from.

"Black leather biker jacket with silver zip detail, worn by male model against white studio background" — this is specific, accurate, and contains details someone might actually search for.

The ideal length is 50 to 125 characters. Do not start with "image of" or "photo of" — just describe what is there directly.

Where to Start If You Have No Alt Text

Do not try to update everything at once. Start with your best-selling products and your most visual collections. Those pages are already getting traffic, and better alt text will help those images appear in more searches.

Then build it into your process for new products so the backlog does not grow. If you have a large catalog to work through, managing alt text at scale has a practical approach for doing it without making it a weeks-long project.

If you want to see where you stand across your whole catalog, AltMate shows every product image and its current alt text in one table, with indicators for missing and weak descriptions. It also lets you edit everything without opening each product individually in Shopify.