Boosting organic rankings is every ecommerce brand’s prerogative.
After all, the more targeted, organic traffic coming to your site, the more conversions and sales your brand will generate! There are many ways to boost your organic rankings and we’re here to delve into one that is vital, but all too often overlooked as a valuable SEO tool. Yep, you guessed it, Alt Text! Whether you’re just starting out on your SEO journey or you’ve already dabbled in driving your website up the SERPs, it’s time to start taking Alt Text optimisation seriously. Here’s why…
Why is Alt Text important?
Alt Text is integral to the visibility of your website in a number of ways. Not only does alt text play a vital role in SEO, it also provides textual descriptions of imagery that is dotted throughout your website, allowing visually impaired users to access your content and understand imagery via screen readers. Ensuring accessibility is integral to building your brand as it demonstrates care and consideration for your audience, regardless of their ability, geographical location or device they are using to access your site. Alt text dramatically improves SEO as helps search engines to index images accurately, improving their visibility within search results. Now more than ever, this proves vital to boosting traffic as Google Lens is taking a more prominent role within searches. Alt text could be the secret weapon you’ve been needing to amplify your SEO strategy and improve search visibility.
How to optimise Alt Text
Optimising alt text can take years of practice to ensure you strike the perfect balance between being descriptive and being concise. To ensure you can lay solid foundations to build upon, we have gathered our top tips for optimising alt text to skyrocket your pages up the rankings! Be sure to implement these tips from now on;
1. Be concise yet descriptive
Alt text should always clearly describe the image in a way that provides both context and purpose, this allows search engines to index your image and present it to the correct users who are searching for relevant queries. Alt text should ideally be under 125 characters and for example, instead of simply writing ‘cat outside’, which leaves crawlers wondering if it’s a lion, and where on earth outside is this big cat? Writing ‘ginger cat lying on a green field’ provides more context in a succinct manner.
2. Avoid redundancy
If the text surrounding your image clearly states what the image is, there’s no point in simply repeating what you’ve already said in your main content. Instead, think about what additional context you can provide for search engines and screen readers to better help them to understand why this image is in your content and why it’s important to the overall story.
3. Include context
Context is king! As mentioned above, providing additional context that may not be relevant to write within your main body text is a great way to enhance your alt text. Additionally, if you’re using an image as your call-to-action (perhaps it’s a graphic image), writing ‘click here to learn more about SEO’ is a great way to tell search engines the purpose and context of that particular image.
4. Use unique alt text for every image
Never fall into the trap of copying and pasting alt text for different images. This can hugely confuse search engine crawlers and lead to poor performance for your website. Each image on your site should have unique alt text to ensure that it contributes to your site’s SEO effectively, just like duplicate content on your main pages, it can significantly impact your SEO efforts.
5. Use relevant keywords
Incorporating relevant and target keywords into your alt text is a great way to boost your SEO efforts. Be sure that you incorporate them naturally as it’s important not to overstuff keywords, always prioritise readability and relevance over quantity of keywords.
6. Label decorative images
If an image is purely intended to be decorative and doesn’t add any meaningful information whatsoever, it’s appropriate to use an empty alt attribute (alt=””) to signify to screen readers that they can skip it. This helps search engines and screen readers alike.
And there we have it! Our top tips for optimising alt text. We’d love to hear how you get on, don’t hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance!