Image Alt Text Does More for a Local Site Than People Think

Open any local business website, look behind the photos, and you will usually find the same thing: nothing. The alt attribute, the short written description that travels with every image, has been left empty. Image alt text is the most consistently skipped field on the web, and skipping it costs a local site more than people think.

Here is the argument in one sentence. Alt text exists for people who cannot see your images, and if you write it for them, the search benefit arrives on its own.

That order matters. Owners who bolt on alt text purely for rankings tend to stuff it with keywords, and stuffed alt text is worse than an empty one. It reads as spam to Google and as noise to the person actually relying on it.

Alt text is for people first, Google second

A screen reader speaks your alt text aloud to a visitor who is blind or partially sighted. Someone on a patchy connection outside Helmsley sees it while your photos fail to load. That is image accessibility in practice, and it is the job the attribute was invented for.

Google is the second audience. A crawler cannot fully see a photograph. It works the image out from the filename, the surrounding text, and the alt text. Leave the alt empty and you have told Google nothing about what might be the best evidence on the page that you do what you say you do.

What good image alt text actually looks like

Take a Malton joiner with a gallery of finished work. Before: every image reads alt=“IMG_4382.jpg”, because that is what the camera named the file and nobody changed it. After: alt=“Oak staircase with a curved handrail, fitted in a farmhouse near Malton”.

The second version is one honest sentence. It tells a screen reader user exactly what is there. It also happens to contain the trade, the material and the place, which is precisely what Google wants to know. Nothing was stuffed. The description is simply true.

The test for writing alt text is the phone test: describe the picture as if you were telling someone about it over the phone. “Joiner staircase Yorkshire staircases oak joinery Malton” fails that test instantly. If the words would sound odd spoken aloud, they do not belong in the attribute.

Blank is a loss, stuffed is a spam signal

Purely decorative images, the borders and background textures, can honestly carry an empty alt. That is correct usage. But every photograph of real work, real premises or real people deserves a sentence, because those images quietly earn clicks of their own. Someone searching for “oak staircase Malton” in Google Images can land on the joiner’s gallery photo, and that click only exists because the alt text told Google what the picture showed.

If the same photos are also slowing your page down, that is a different problem with a different fix, and we covered it in the photo slowing your homepage down.

The practical move is small. Tonight, open your homepage, list every image on it, and give each one a plain sentence describing what it shows. No tools, no budget, no developer. It is some of the cheapest SEO work you will ever do, and almost none of your competitors have done it.