Shopify image alt text: the rule, and the mistake that makes it worthless
Alt text is not a keyword field. It's a description of the image, used by Google Images and by screen readers. Written properly, it does both jobs.
The rule
Describe the product as it appears: 'black leather card holder, front view, on white background'. Not 'leather card holder buy cheap best leather'. Keyword strings get ignored and read badly.
The mistake
Setting every image's alt text to the same sentence, usually the store name plus keywords. Google treats repeated identical alt text as uninformative, and a screen-reader user hears the same sentence forty times.
Why it matters commercially
Image search is a real acquisition channel for physical products — it's how people find a product they can only describe visually. Every product image without alt text is invisible there.
Do this in ten minutes
Export your product list, add one column of alt text using the pattern above, and paste it back. For stores under 500 products this is a single sitting, and it's the cheapest fix on any audit.
Run the free scan → See a sample report
Written by the team that runs SEO Scan Audit. The counts quoted above come from our own crawls of live storefronts; the fixes are the ones we write into paid reports.