If you're not taking the alt text on your website seriously, you're making a big mistake.
When designing a website, there’s no denying that you’ve got a lot to think about. From user experience to CTAs on your landing page, getting everything right is essential to SEO and digital marketing success.
One thing that often gets overlooked is alt text. Today, we’re going to tell you how alt text can boost both searchability and accessibility on your site.
As a top SEO agency in Orange County, we understand how your SEO content lives and dies with how much effort you put in. Keep reading and learn more about the importance of alt text.
What is Alt Text?
At its core, alt text is simply a description of an image on a landing page. It comes into play in a few different scenarios, the most crucial of which is when it’s read aloud by screen readers for the visually impaired. It also displays in place of an image that doesn’t load properly.
For marketers, alt text is an important aspect of SEO. It gives search engine context when analyzing information on your landing pages and helps with indexing images for image searches.
How Alt Text is crucial for accessibility
The original purpose of alt text was to make websites more accessible to visually impaired users, of which there are around 12 million in the US. With the help of a screen reader and accurate alt text behind the image, all users will be able to understand the purpose and intent of your content.
For that reason, alt text should always be written in a descriptive and grammatically correct way. A picture of a man re-shingling a roof on a roofing website should have alt text that reads something like, “A man in a hardhat kneels on a roof with a hammer”.
Alt Text and searchability
Alt text is also one of the factors that search engines will look at when ranking SEO content. Along with file formats, file names, and schema markups, alt text helps Google understand the nature of your images to give users a relevant result.
Search engine crawlers don’t actually see the images on your website. They need these descriptors to properly make sense of your landing page. If you don’t put alt text – or fail to write accurate alt text – you run the risk of having your page miss out on rankings or become incorrectly ranked.
You also have an opportunity to integrate keywords into your alt text. Doing this just gives you more SEO content options beyond keyword stuffing your on-page content.
Get the Best SEO Agency in Orange County
Now that you know why alt text is important and how to write it, you can start optimizing your landing pages even more while making them more accessible to all users. As a business owner, you should always be prioritizing the user experience, as well as your SEO.
If you need help with SEO, it might be time to hire the best SEO agency in Orange County. At Bastion Amplify, we’re a full-service SEO, social media, and digital marketing firm for a variety of industries.
