Alt text for product images: an SEO guide for Shopify

Alt text is a short written description attached to an image. It exists for people using screen readers, it’s what shows when an image fails to load, and it’s the clearest signal search engines get about what a photo contains. On most Shopify stores, it’s empty — which means the most neglected field in your admin is also one of the few SEO levers with zero competition on your own site.

Who alt text is actually for

In priority order:

1. Shoppers using screen readers. For a blind or low-vision customer, your alt text is the product photo. “IMG_4302” read aloud six times is what a broken store sounds like. This alone justifies doing the work.
2. Search engines. Google reads alt text to understand images — it feeds both Google Images (a real discovery channel for visual products) and the page’s overall relevance. Written naturally, alt text reinforces exactly the queries you want the product to rank for.
3. Anyone on a bad connection, where alt text renders while images don’t.

The formula

Describe the photo to someone on the phone who can’t see it, in one sentence, leading with what the product is:

[product] + [the attributes that distinguish it] + [what this particular shot shows]

• Walnut desk organizer with three compartments, front view on white background
• Women’s trail running shoe in coral, sole tread close-up
• Ceramic pour-over coffee dripper in matte black on a kitchen counter beside a glass carafe

Aim for roughly 10–20 words. Screen readers typically announce around 125 characters comfortably; Shopify stores up to 512, but if you’re approaching that you’re writing a description, not alt text.

Every image on the listing gets a different line

A product page with six photos needs six alt texts, because each photo shows something different — that’s why it made the listing. For one desk organizer: front view, back panel with cable slot, close-up of the grain, next to a laptop for scale, in use on a desk. Copy-pasting the product title six times tells a screen reader user nothing and looks like automation to a crawler — because it is.

The mistakes that hurt more than help

• Keyword stuffing. desk organizer wood desk organizer walnut organizer desk storage wooden reads as spam to Google and as gibberish to a human ear. One natural mention of the product type is enough.
• “Image of…” / “Photo of…” — the screen reader already announces it’s an image. Start with the product.
• Restating the visible text. If a badge next to the image already says “Sale,” the alt text doesn’t need to.
• Describing your feelings about the product. “Stunning premium luxury organizer you’ll love” describes nothing. Adjectives that survive: the ones a returns department could verify — color, material, count, finish.
• Leaving decorative images described. Purely decorative flourishes (divider graphics, background textures) should carry empty alt (alt="") so screen readers skip them. Product photos are never decorative.

Where to edit alt text in Shopify

1. Product media: Admin → Products → open the product → click a media item → Edit alt text.
2. Theme images (banners, sections): the alt field lives next to the image picker in the theme editor.
3. Files: Content → Files exposes alt fields for images used across pages.

While you’re in there: image filenames are a smaller cousin of the same signal. walnut-desk-organizer.jpg beats IMG_4302.jpg — set it before upload, since Shopify keeps the name in the CDN URL.

Covering a large catalog

Ten products: an honest afternoon. Four hundred products with six images each: nobody is hand-writing 2,400 lines, which is why the field sits empty on most stores. Realistic options:

• Triage by traffic. Your top twenty products first — they carry most sessions. Work down from there in best-seller order.
• Write patterns per product type. A template like [title] in [color], [shot type] gets variants done fast without becoming copy-paste spam — the variables genuinely vary.
• Let the pipeline do it. Every asset Imagefall generates ships with alt text written from what’s actually in the frame — packshot, scene, model shot — and you can edit it in review before it’s applied. Details in how assets reach your store.

The test

Close your eyes and have someone read your product page’s alt text aloud. If you can picture the listing — what the product is, what it’s made of, what each shot shows — it’s good alt text. If all you hear is the product title on repeat or a keyword salad, you now know exactly what to fix. Pair this with the image size cheat sheet and the images on your store are pulling their full SEO weight.