Alt text AI: Enhance accessibility and SEO with automated image tagging

In a crowded search landscape full of thousands of keywords jostling for attention, marketing teams that unlock the value of organic search can give their brands a powerful advantage. 

But while text content and keywords are often (literally) the headline act in search engine optimization (SEO), there’s a lot to be said for the power of the visual in a content strategy — in other words, the search value of your images — and of image tagging.

And, if we accept the SEO potential of images, the next logical step is to think about fine-tuning those images, just as you would any other piece of content, to appeal to search engines. One of the best ways of doing that is to start thinking about metadata, and alt text image tagging. 

In this post, we’re going to examine the role that alt text image tagging plays in SEO, the challenges involved in tagging image content — and how Contentful’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help you tag images more efficiently. 

What is alt text and alt text image tagging?

Alt text, also known as alternative text, is a type of HTML metadata that’s added as part of an <img> tag on a webpage. The text is a description of the substance of the image — and not the literal name of the image. For example, an image of a takeaway pizza in its box (“pizza.jpg”), would be accompanied by the alt text tag “a pizza in a takeaway box,” rather than “pizza 1” or similar. 

And the alt text tag for the image would be represented in HTML code as: 

<img src="pizza.jpg" alt="A pizza in a takeaway box.">

What does alt text do?

Alt text essentially explains the content of a digital image for search engines. Although alt text was originally an attribute for screen readers, it helps Google’s search algorithm understand what’s on your page and, in turn, whether it should appear in SERPs. 

With that in mind, when you tag images, the accuracy and effectiveness of alt text can help your page’s ranking in SERPs, encourage clicks and page views, and, ultimately, boost conversions. 

In other words, image tagging isn't an afterthought  —  it should be an SEO priority. 

GEO value

Today, any discussion of SEO value should also include mention of generative engine optimization (GEO) — that is, optimizing content for inclusion in the outputs of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Gemini. 

Search engines are increasingly integrating AI outputs into the results they deliver for their users, and so it stands to reason that brands should ensure their content (text and image) speaks to LLMs in the same way that it speaks to the “traditional” search algorithm. 

The good news is, alt text image tagging is a way to strengthen image content’s appeal to generative engines, and give it the best possible chance in featuring in those kinds of AI-powered results.  

But there’s more to alt text than that.

User accessibility

Alt text’s importance goes beyond organic search and marketing numbers — it’s also an important accessibility feature of your website. That’s because the alt text tags on images feed into automated screen readers, which convert the text to audio, and help visually impaired site users understand the content on the page.

To underline just how important the accessibility factor is, the European Union recently implemented the Accessibility Act, which makes alt text tagging a requirement for websites in order to help visually impaired internet users. By opting to tag images correctly, and adding alt text, you’re not just boosting your SEO, you’re making the web a little better for everyone!

Alt text challenges

So, that’s why you should be using alt text, but here’s the kicker: it’s not always easy to add alt text to digital image content. In fact, finding a simple, efficient way to create and apply the relevant tags may rely heavily on the technology you use to manage content — your content management system (CMS). 

Some of the most common alt text challenges include:

• Content volume: Brands that publish large volumes of digital images necessarily create a greater amount of image tagging labor. That job gets even more daunting if your content team is having to tag each image manually. 

• Text quality: The text used in alt image tags should describe the image accurately, and efficiently. Creating appropriate descriptions can be tough, especially when you’re dealing with certain types of images, like charts, graphs, and abstractions. 

• Language: If you’re publishing content to multiple regions, you’ll need to adjust the alt text to account for different languages, and even take certain cultural nuances or sensitivities into account when image tagging. 

• Length: There’s an optimal length for alt text tags — 125 characters or less, and between three and 15 words. That restriction can make it difficult to generate a suitable tag, and so content creators and editors will need to learn how to be concise. 

• SEO value: It’s not enough to simply fill out alt text for the relevant tags and hit publish. For your tag to deliver SEO value, you’ll need to think about keywords, and make sure you use those phrases in the tag in a natural way as you're image tagging. If you resort to “keyword stuffing,” however, it’s likely the search algorithm will notice, and penalize you. 

Leverage AI to transform alt text

The alt text challenges we mentioned above are all linked to, or exacerbated by, a reliance on a manual image tagging process — in which CMS users have to go through site images, one by one, and add text by tapping away at a keyboard. That approach makes alt text image tagging time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error.

As you might have guessed, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Today, we can leverage AI to transform the way we create and apply alt text to images. More specifically, AI tools can automate much of the image-tagging process, reducing or even eliminating manual work, and enabling content teams to work across vast amounts of images in a fraction of the time it would have taken for a human editor chained to a keyboard. 

By integrating AI alt text solutions with their tech stacks, editors and marketers can make the image-tagging process a seamless part of the content workflow, adding text in the relevant CMS fields, and generating keywords and regional translations at the click of a button. 

For a more detailed look at how alt text AI is helping brands supercharge image tagging, we need look no further than Contentful. 

Alt text AI in Contentful 

AI actions

Contentful’s native AI Actions feature gives content creators and editors the power to add alt text to images, in seconds. AI Actions scans the content of the image being uploaded, and then generates an alt text suggestion which the user can implement or adjust. The AI alt text generator is effortless to use, saves significant time, and frees up skilled editors to work on more important tasks.

Translation and localization

Growing brands, serving multiple territories, must keep their alt text relevant by translating it for different search environments and adjusting for regional cultural expectations. Fortunately, Contentful’s AI takes care of that too. Not only can our AI Actions translate alt text into different languages, but localizes the content for different regions so you’re always optimizing your images for the appropriate audiences. 

Scaling 

One of the big challenges of alt text image tagging is simply getting it done efficiently. That’s especially important if you’re growing, and adding pages to your footprint, or new products to your ecommerce store at pace. Contentful’s AI does that for you, taking the tedious manual work out of image tagging and letting you add or update tags for your content automatically, while maintaining the consistency and quality of your brand voice. 

Integrations

Built with an API (application programming interface)-first philosophy, Contentful’s composable flexibility means that you can build out your alt text image tagging solution with a range of powerful AI tools, effortlessly. You can also integrate Contentful with a range of digital asset management (DAM) solutions, working with a range of other files, and shaping your digital experiences more precisely to your content profile. 

The bottom line: Image tagging with Contentful

Long story short, if you’re not adding alt text to your site’s images, you’re leaving valuable SEO capital on the table, and probably making it harder for some of your audience to engage with your content. The AI frontier is expanding every day, and brands that ignore the pace of change risk falling behind the cutting edge quickly. 

Given how easy it is to get your image-tagging job done with Contentful’s native AI, it makes sense to explore the SEO possibilities of alt text tagging, if you haven’t already done so. You can start your journey on our fully integrated digital experience platform, where you can automate your image tagging process and build game-changing efficiency into every step of the content-creation workflow. 

Check out our AI Actions demos to learn more, or drop a line to our sales team who can talk you through your next move.  

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