When the alt text lies
Every image on your store ships with alt text, a one-line description that screen readers speak aloud to blind shoppers and that search engines use to understand your images. Filled with keywords, it stops describing and starts performing, and the blind shopper gets a sentence written for a robot they cannot see. This is a five-minute audit, image by image, with the exact rewrite that fixes each case.
1. Find the keyword-stuffed ones first
Open your product pages and inspect any image’s alt attribute. The giveaway is repetition: “candle candle best candle online candle Australia affordable candle”. Write down every page where the pattern appears, because those are the images talking nonsense to people who are relying on them.
2. Run each failure against this decision rule
Alt text is a description, not a slogan. The test for every image: does the sentence describe what is visible, in about ten words. If it contains your whole keyword strategy in sequence, it is a stuffed attribute, and the rewrite is a noun phrase, not a marketing campaign.
<!-- Before (stuffed): -->
<img src="candle.jpg" alt="candle candle best candle online candle Australia">
<!-- After (descriptive): -->
<img src="candle.jpg" alt="Amber soy candle in a frosted glass jar">3. Match alt text to what the product actually looks like
Each product photo gets a plain-English description of what a blind shopper needs to know: material, colour, shape, or function. The context carries brand and product names; the alt text carries the visual. Say it aloud: if the sentence makes a natural caption, it passes.
<img src="linen-tote.jpg" alt="Natural linen tote with leather handles">
<img src="candle-jar.jpg" alt="Amber soy candle in a frosted glass jar">4. Keep decorative images out of the reader’s way
Purely decorative elements should carry empty alt attributes so they are skipped, not narrated. This is the counter-intuitive one: a swatch of brand texture or a background divider needs no description and would be noise in the line.
<img src="decorative-swirl.png" alt="">Why the quick audit is worth more than it looks
Keyword-stuffed alt text is a habit from an older web, and it actively harms two audiences at once. Blind users get a nonsense sentence in place of a description, and modern search engines are trained to spot keyword repetition and penalise the page rather than praise it. The rewrite takes minutes per site and leaves your images describing, quietly, honestly, in ten words, the way a shop assistant in your store would.
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