Alt text — short for alternative text — is a written description attached to an image, read by software rather than seen by eye. It exists for two audiences, and the Goblin would like to introduce them to each other, because shop owners tend to know about one and not the other.
The first audience: the person who cannot see the image.
A customer using a screen reader — because they are blind, or low-vision, or have the image-loading turned off on a slow connection — does not see your photograph. They hear, instead, whatever alt text you wrote. If you wrote nothing, they hear the filename: “I-M-G underscore zero four seven three dot jpg,” which tells them nothing and, the Goblin would argue, communicates a certain carelessness besides.
This audience is the reason alt text exists. It was invented for accessibility, and accessibility remains its first purpose. The Goblin, who has audited shops on behalf of shoppers who use screen readers, takes this seriously and asks that you do too.
The second audience: Google’s image search.
Google cannot truly see an image either. It is improving, but it still leans heavily on the text around an image — the filename, the caption, and above all the alt text — to understand what the picture depicts. Good alt text is how your product photographs become eligible to appear in Google Images, which is a genuine and frequently overlooked source of shop traffic.
Here is the happy part: the two audiences want exactly the same thing. A clear, accurate, specific description of what is in the image serves the screen-reader user and the search engine identically. You are not writing twice. You are writing once, well.
The rules.
- Describe what is actually in the image. “Brown leather A5 notebook, closed, photographed from above on a wooden desk.” Specific. True. Useful to someone who cannot see it.
- Do not begin with “image of” or “photo of.” The screen reader already announces that it is an image. Starting the alt text with “image of” is like answering the telephone by saying “this is a telephone call.”
- Do not stuff keywords. “Leather notebook brown notebook A5 notebook gift notebook handmade notebook” is not a description; it is a confession. Google treats it as one, and the screen-reader user is simply baffled.
- Keep it to a sentence. A descriptive sentence is the right length. A paragraph is too much; a single word is too little.
- Decorative images get empty alt text. Not missing alt text — deliberately empty. A purely decorative flourish, a background texture, a divider line, should have
alt=""so the screen reader knows to skip it rather than announce it pointlessly. This distinction matters more than most shop owners realise.
Where to set it on Shopify.
For product images: open the product, click the image, and there is an “Edit alt text” option, frequently overlooked because it hides behind a small menu. For images placed through the theme editor — banners, lifestyle shots on the home page — the alt field is in the editor panel beside the image. For images dropped into a description or a blog post, the rich-text editor offers an alt field when you insert them.
And before any of this: rename the file. Alt text and filename are two separate signals, and Google reads both. “walnut-bookcase-three-shelf.jpg” with alt text “A three-shelf walnut bookcase against a white wall” gives Google two consistent, reinforcing descriptions. “IMG_0473.jpg” with no alt text gives it nothing twice.
Alt text is tedious. The Goblin will not insult you by pretending otherwise; writing a sentence for every image on a shop of two hundred products is genuinely dull work. But it is dull work that serves a real person and a real search channel at once, and there are not many tasks in SEO of which that can honestly be said.
In an audit, the Goblin counts your images, tallies how many have proper alt text, and gives you a worked example for each image type so the remaining work is mechanical rather than uncertain.
— The Goblin, who describes things for a living.