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Did I just waste years not naming photo files or using alt text?
Posted by on September 8, 2025 at 2:42 pmFor years I’ve been sending photos to my website guy and he never once told me that file names or alt text mattered. (He’s not an SEO guy but an actual website developer.) Now I’ve learned that they might actually play a role in SEO, especially for local businesses like mine. He never gave me access to my site up until recently so now I’m currently spending hours (literally) going back through old photos, organizing, renaming, and adding alt text. It’s exhausting, and honestly I’m annoyed that nobody mentioned this sooner.
My question is does all this work actually move the needle for SEO? Have any of you seen measurable results from cleaning up photo SEO or is it more of a minor detail compared to content, links, etc.?
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1 Reply
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yes.
Document Names are crucial to Google Keyword Targeting. for Image search, alt-text is probably the most important unless it can read the text in the image
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Well, it’s weird that you never had access to your own website, very unprofessional developer if you ask me. Anyway, if you’re using a CMS, it’s possible that you have some plugin to do it more or less automatically. If it’s hard coded, then it’s even easier (as long as your dev is somewhat competent).
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If you have WordPress site, alt tag pro will add alt tags to all images
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This is a job for automation. Many plugins for this. Or you can build something on make com or n8n to do this process automatically.
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Worth it! A pain I know.
I’m always so surprised how siloed most web devs are from SEO.
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First I’ve heard of file names being significant but I use WordPress so maybe there’s a detail I’ve missed. Alt text is useful for both screen readers and also for web crawlers. I always try and add at least my main keyword of the post or the page into a couple of pictures. Doing it too much could be construed as keyword stuffing though and from what I understand it, Google has tried to sniff that out and penalise it accordingly.
The last thing they want (or at least used to want) was the whole web to get worse in order to change their rank on search engines as that would lessen it’s usefulness eventually.
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Image SEO, among other things, lets you appear in the Google Image search results. For a local business I’d say that’s pretty crucial.
Your website guy doesn’t seem really professional. Anything else he might have messed up? Do you have good rankings? Get customers through your website who find you through Google etc.?
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Unless your business is highly dependent on image search, then no, you didn’t waste years.
Alt text can help with image search, as well as file names, but it is mostly for screen readers for people who are visually impaired.
It will barely move the needle, if at all, for traditional rankings. In fact, I would argue if it does move the needle for your site, that is a sure sign that your content is average to bad at best.
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This can be automated. Saving days of work!
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Alt text should not be viewed as an SEO effort. It’s best practice for accessibility. Make websites that function well for your users.
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A few things: it is a factor since images are seo-indexable (not background elements though so don’t bother with those) but as far as moving the needle – meh.
I do get some traffic directly from images, but it’s nothing crazy.
The bigger thing though that WILL have a big effect on your SEO is optimizing your images and if he’s not experienced enough to drop in simple alt images – I doubt he’s concerned about file formatting, compression, and image sizes.
Without optimizing your images, depending on how many you have in a given page (which seems like it may be a lot by saying how much work your considering for alt image tags, etc.) you are probably slowing the hell out of your load speed which can have a dramatic effect on how search engines rank you.
Since you’re on WordPress, there are plug-ins yo handle all of that, along with the alt tags, but that will usually bloat your site and cost you some cash as most of those plug-ins offer some small amount free and then charge for additional credits.
I suggest getting photoshop and just learning how to properly size and export your images which will give you the chance to change the file names and alt image tags when you import.
I suggest creating AVIFs with WebP as a fallback. If you’re using any jpeg or png – you’re doing it wrong.
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Most devs don’t think about SEO details like that. Fixing filenames/alt text won’t be a magic traffic boost, but it does help with accessibility, local signals, and even image search.
Think of it as “compounding gains”, it supports the bigger stuff (content + links).
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