Image ALTs will not make or break your SEO

Hey guys, just a quick one. Sometimes, I get asked by customers when they receive spam emails saying their SEO company is bad because they have no image alt text. So does image alt text help SEO? Kind of. I mean, the whole purpose of it is to describe what the image is, and it’s also to assist people who require screen readers, so they know what’s on the screen. However, over optimisation of this can also cause you to lose rankings and I know from experience. One of our customers were selling activewear were told they were doing a bad job with their SEO as we didn’t put much image alternate text for them. We told them that there was no need to as we have put them on the main images and most of the images are pretty much the same. They insisted because their email from Panjeet said they can get more sales if they do this. Okay, after a lot of back and forth, we put the alt text on all the images. These were words such as:

• photo of a lady standing showing blue leggings suited for the gym
• photo of a lady standing showing black leg leggings suited for the gym
• photo of a lady standing showing beige leggings suited for the gym.
• and so on

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Anyway, after this was done within a week, they dropped rankings. To be honest, it was a lot worse than I thought as this also affected their sales for that week. After, reverted back to what we had before everything went back to normal. Lucky as a lot of times this can take a bit longer to get the rankings back.

So, with your image alts, it will not make or break your SEO. Put them on the few of the main images and that’s all you really need. No need to overdo it. Hope this information helps. Let me know if you have any questions. Have a great day ahead.