What's the best way to mass-add alt tags across product description pictures?

[parksriley]

We recently had a third-party SEO firm audit our site, and they provided us with a list of images that could use alt-tags. The image links they provided us, however, were direct links to the Shopify file. One of these images, is an image that shows up across one brand in all of the products' descriptions.

Naturally, I could go through each product description and add the alt-tag, but I figured since the source of this image in all of the products is the same Shopify file, there must be an easier way to do this.

If there aren't any better ways of going about this, I suppose I need to set a good part of a day aside for it.

Thanks

[Julie]

Hi, @parksriley!

Julie here from Shopify Support.

It's great to see that you're focusing on SEO. Adding alt-text to your images is not only a great way to boost SEO, but also makes your website more accessible for customers who are visually impaired and use assisted technology to have content read aloud to them. Alt-text is also useful in situations where an image fails to load; when this happens, alt-text will appear instead, giving customers a good sense of what the image was. 

While we have help docs on how to add alt-text to your product images, we also have instructions on how you can add alt-text to your theme images directly in your Theme Editor.  These images include ones you have added to a slideshow, image gallery, or even to certain pages. 

However, I understand that it can be quite tedious to update the alt-text for each individual product. Luckily, this can easily be done in bulk with an app. Some popular options include: 

• Alt Text 
• Smart Image SEO
• TinyIMG SEO Image Optimizer
• Minifier SEO Image Optimizer

With these apps, you can update the alt-text for all of your online store's images in bulk and even receive recommendations on how to make your alt-text more effective for SEO. They also have the ability to automatically apply alt-text based on the product title and description. Feel free to check them out and see which one suits your needs the best.

As you begin working on adding alt-text to your images, I recommend checking out our post in the Shopify UX blog, "Considerations When Writing Alt-Text". This is a great resource that will teach you more about what alt-text is, why it's important, and how you can write effective content for your images. I'm sure you'll find it quite useful.

I hope this helps! What else have you been doing to boost SEO? 

[danielpretorius]

Hi @parksriley 

You can accomplish this rather easily by integrating your Shopify store with Airtable. Once you've synced all your images to an Airtable sheet your can very quickly change the alt tags of your images using Airtable's super easy spreadsheet interface. Then, just sync the data back to Shopify. Read more about how to manage your Shopify Images with Airtable and also how to bulk update your Shopify data in general.

[parksriley]

Will this work with images in product descriptions, blogs, home page images, etc.? Or only product pictures?

Really what I'm looking for is a way to use all of the pictures used on the site under /admin/settings/files and apply alt tags to those, and have it update across the site.