Originally created to increase accessibility for those using screen readers, alt text has grown in importance, both for accessibility and for search engine understanding. It helps you stay legally compliant and it’s foundational to proper image SEO. Getting it right allows your content to be comfortably available to more people. Getting it wrong…. Come on, don’t be that guy.

Alt text is a short, clearly written description embedded in the HTML of an image. Its job is to describe the message the image is trying to send.

Hold up. Read that again.

Here’s the important nuance: Alt text is not just a short description of the image. It is a short description of the message the image conveys. If you have a bar chart on your site and your alt text for it reads: “An image of a bar chart”, you aren’t helping anyone using a screen reader, you aren’t helping search engines, and you aren’t helping your brand.

So what’s good alt text? Focus on what the image conveys: “bar chart demonstrating [Solution X] yields 47% more revenue than [Solution Y].”

Your images are, after all, carefully designed according to your brand guidelines. They’re an opportunity to leverage that old adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. And while your alt text can’t be a thousand words long, the description you choose can go a long way to helping both your audience and search engines understand what those thousand words would be.

Beyond increasing the accessibility of your content, alt text is your chance to speak directly to search engines. WebAIM points out that alt text helps search engines assess the purpose of your page. The last thing you want is to tell searching engines that the purpose of your page is “bar_chart.jpg”

Search engines can’t “see” your images. They rely on alt text and surrounding content to understand what an image shows and what it means in context. Your sitemap, assuming it’s been properly designed, does the heavy lifting of showing search engines the hierarchy leading to your landing page, but alt text helps engines focus on the details.

Here’s an example: Your sitemap has guided the search engine to your ‘Solutions’ page and made it clear that this is a high-priority page. From there, your on-page copy makes it clear that, when using your solution, teams suffer less decision fatigue. The image that goes with that copy is a team working in obvious harmony, smiling, no stress to be found. If your alt text is “teamwork.jpg” the search engine will understand that you reduce stress, but not that you increase group efficiency.

So how do we do better?

Describe what the image adds to the page, not just what it shows. Take a moment to think about the purpose of the image, the unsaid portion of the communication. A photo of a team working in harmony isn’t a “photo of teammates smiling.” It’s “A team smiling and collaborating efficiently at a workstation, representing reduced decision fatigue.”

Taking this approach helps keep image selection top of mind as an important part of your brand ecosystem, rather than just a way to fill up space. It makes sure each image used is intentional and propels your messaging. That’s why Yoast pushes the importance of alt text so hard. Yes, it’s about accessibility, but it’s also crucial for strengthening your overall messaging strategy.

Alt text doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s just a single moving part in the engine of your on-page SEO, digital compliance, and messaging strategy. Trying to bolt these parts together after the fact is how brands lose traffic and fail audits.

That’s why Punch doesn’t do “afterthoughts”. When we build a site, technical SEO and accessibility are baked in from day one. From sitemap to final go-live we build high-performance sites that algorithms favor and that users trust.

• WebAIM: https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/
• Yoast: https://yoast.com/image-seo-alt-tag-and-title-tag-optimization/