E-commerce SEO that works: actionable insights from Yoast & alttext.ai

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to our webinar.

This is e-commerce SEO that works, actionable insights from Yoast and alttext.ai.

I am Carolyn Shelby.

Good so, good morning, or whatever time of day is appropriate for you, since I know that we’re spread all across the globe right now.

I would like to introduce to you our speakers today in order of appearance.

First up, me.

I’m Carolyn Shelby.

I’m a technical SEO expert and digital strategist with more than two decades of experience optimizing websites for search and performance.

I’m the principal SEO at Yoast, where I combine deep technical knowledge with a sharp editorial eye to help brands grow their visibility, authority, and revenue.

I’ve led SEO strategy for everything from startups to Fortune 100 companies, and I’m passionate about making complex SEO concepts accessible, actionable, and effective.

And then rounding out the conversation with a look at one of the most overlooked but essential parts of e-commerce SEO, we’re joined by Joshua Reeder Esparza.

Joshua is a full-stack developer, engineer, and designer with more than 10 years of experience building engaging digital experiences.

As head of engineering at alttext.ai, he blends technical expertise with creative design insights from his background in agency work and startups.

He’s especially passionate about crafting accessible, high-performance websites and digital products.

So, with our lovely speakers today, moi included, we are representing the hosts of the webinar, Yoast and alttext.ai.

Yoast SEO is the most trusted SEO solution for WordPress and now a growing favorite among Shopify merchants.

With more than 13 million active installs, Yoast helps businesses improve search visibility through smart automation, structured data, and user-friendly content tools.

From product pages to blog posts, Yoast makes great SEO for everyone.

And alttext.ai, the leading AI-powered solution for generating high-quality, SEO-friendly alttext at scale.

Designed for brands, publishers, and marketers.

Alttext.ai automates accessibility compliance while enhancing search engine visibility and user experience.

By leveraging advanced AI models, the platform creates accurate, context-aware alttext in seconds, saving time and improving website performance.

It’s trusted by Shopify merchants and enterprise businesses alike.

Alttext.ai makes digital content more inclusive, discoverable, and impactful.

So, we do have a little bit of housekeeping before we get started.

I wanted to draw your attention to the Q&A.

So, if you look in your, I believe it’s on the right, you can ask questions and upvote other people’s questions.

And when we get to the end, we will have a Q&A section.

And the questions with the most upvotes, we will try to answer first.

So, a couple other things.

There will be a recording of the show available after the show.

The URL that you’re looking for is right there.

It’s yoa.st, which spells Yoast, obviously, slash 5-2-C: yoa.st/52c Or you can just go to our website, yoast.com, look under webinar, and you’ll find all of the, I don’t want to say old, all of the past webinars that we’ve done.

There will be recordings for everything.

All right.

All right.

Now that all that’s done, are we ready to get started?

I’m going to pretend that you all yelled yay, yes, and that you’re all really hyped up.

Because it’s 9 o’clock where I am.

I’m one coffee into the day.

Let’s get going.

All right.

Building better e-commerce.

Building better e-commerce.

Structured SEO for real-world results.

I think the first thing I want to make clear to everyone is that e-commerce SEO is different than not e-commerce SEO.

Your product pages aren’t blog posts.

They shouldn’t be treated like that.

They require a completely different content strategy, structure, and optimization.

Where you might be, I would say that there’s more of an opportunity with blog posts and traditional articles to go after trendy keywords, constantly go back and revise things for not just freshness, but to kind of grab onto a little bit of that zeitgeist.

You don’t necessarily do that with your product pages.

Your product pages are more about articulating the value proposition of that product.

It’s getting that conversion.

You have to make sure that you’ve got the right schema on that page, and that schema is not article.

The schema is specific to the product.

It has to be there, especially if you want to get into the Google product feed.

There’s just different techniques for it.

So you shouldn’t be treating your blog posts and category pages and tag pages and homepage and your product pages all the same because they’re not the same.

They’re different.

Some of the problems that we tend to encounter with product pages are thin content because we’re not filling out those descriptions.

We’re not providing meaty descriptions.

We’re not giving the search engines enough to kind of grab onto.

We have problems with duplicate descriptions, especially when, let’s say you’re a drop shipper, or let’s say you’re reselling something that someone else has manufactured.

Frequently, you’re getting those product descriptions from the manufacturer, and you’re not making any changes to that.

And what that means is that what you’re doing is what a whole lot of other people are doing, and you’re all going to end up with the exact same descriptions, which creates duplicate content.

Duplicate content does not necessarily incur a penalty, but it’s a filter.

I don’t know if any of you collected baseball cards, but I did when I was a kid, probably dating myself a little bit.

If you have multiples of the same card, you don’t keep them all in the really nice binder that you use to show off all your good cards.

You pick the best card that you have, and that’s the only one you keep in your index of baseball cards, right?

That’s what Google does with webpages.

When it has multiple copies of essentially the same thing to choose from, it picks the one it likes the best, and it just doesn’t include the other ones.

And when you’re not included in the big nice binder, you’re not available to be found by searchers, and that’s why duplicate content is a problem.

Low crawl priority is a problem that we frequently encounter with product pages, mostly because they don’t change very often.

They’re not always linked to internally in a way that draws attention to them, so they just don’t appear to have a whole lot of value, which lowers the crawl priority.

That can be fixed.

Faceted navigation is a big problem with a lot of e-commerce systems.

That’s where if you have the same item that is available, let’s say you could search for it by the color, you could search for it by the size, or you could locate it by the thing that it does.

Some navigation systems create different URLs for each of those things, even though it goes to the same product.

When that happens, that creates duplicate content.

So you’ve got to make sure that if your navigation is faceted, you are using good canonical tags.

The canonical means a single product, even if it shows up at multiple URLs, only claims a single URL as its real home.

If you have questions about canonicals, it’s probably more difficult than I can explain right here, but your canonical should always be like the source of truth.

That’s what canon means.

Canon means source of truth.

So making sure, especially if you have faceted navigation, that you’ve got that canonical tag set correctly is incredibly important, because when that’s off, it breaks a lot of other things.

It also causes those indexing issues.

Another thing that we have a problem with in e-commerce is JavaScript-heavy platforms.

It’s not that the search engines don’t execute JavaScript.

It’s that they don’t execute it quickly or on the first task.

So it can cause problems, especially if your site is so JavaScript-heavy that these search engines can’t move around.

Or do things without executing that JavaScript.

You’re really, you’re not taking yourself voluntarily out of the index, but you definitely are, you’re voluntarily carrying a lot of extra baggage that doesn’t need to be there.

So if nothing else, we have to make sure that we’re making it easy for Google to crawl our site.

If Google can’t find our site, if Google doesn’t trust our site because we’re giving weird signals, it just isn’t going to include it in the index.

So four common e-commerce SEO pitfalls.

Ignoring structured data.

Without that schema markup, your site is going to miss out on enhanced search features like product-rich results, breadcrumbs and review stars.

All of these boost visibility and click-through rates.

Structured data is foundational.

It is not optional.

Under-optimizing your product pages.

Under-optimizing your category pages.

These two types of pages are often the most powerful pages on your site.

They’re often overlooked, especially those category pages.

They’ll have thin content.

They’ll have poor internal linking.

Unclear structure.

All of these things can sabotage your rankings.

Even if your product pages are good, if your category pages aren’t, you could be hurting yourself a lot.

And the final thing that is a really common pitfall is relying too heavily on paid search.

PPC can drive short-term traffic.

It’s great, but it’s expensive and it’s not sustainable on its own.

The second the money stops, that traffic’s going to stop.

So if you’re not also investing in organic SEO, you’re leaving that long-term growth and cost efficiency on the table, especially in competitive markets.

So let’s go through each of these pitfalls one by one.

We’ve got structured data.

Structured data, you want to make sure that you’re implementing the product schema, breadcrumb schema, and review schema to give the search engines more context about the structure of your site, the details of your product, and how to get around in your site.

And then, of course, the reviews so that they know that everyone loves your stuff, right?

Obviously, we don’t want to promote that if everyone hates your stuff, but I’m going to assume that you all have magical products that you’re selling and everyone’s giving you five-star reviews.

You also want to make sure that you’re implementing things that will help you get the rich results.

So things that end up in rich results, pricing, ratings, and availability.

All of these things, Google especially is looking forward to increase your visibility in product searches.

And then to get enhanced listings, you need all of the schema.

And enhanced listings are like Google product feed, all of those extra things that they’ll put in the search results.

These result in higher click-through rates, better engagement, and greater trust.

The greater trust especially is going to help you get higher rankings.

And the higher rankings is going to help you get more clicks, more customers giving you good reviews, good reviews giving you higher trust.

It’s a circle of reinforcement that you definitely want to be in and not skip.

All right.

Optimizing your product pages.

On your product pages, each product, each product.

Not most of them, each of them.

Unique descriptions.

You need internal linking from category, seasonal, and blog pages.

And when I say internal linking, I don’t just mean from menus.

I mean like, let’s say, from blog posts.

If you’re talking about trying to think of things that you can sell.

Let’s say that you sell jujubes, right?

You’ve got an article talking about seasonal flavors of jujubes.

Within the body of that article.

If you mention red jujubes and you sell red jujubes, the word red jujubes should be linking over to that product page.

That’s what an internal link is.

So when we talk about that, we’re not talking strictly about navigation.

Navigation.

We’re talking about opportunities in the text on the pages to create links in that body text to products, to categories when the anchor text is good, is optimized.

If you have a, if you sell kittens and you say the word kittens or kittens for sale, you better link that text over to the page where you sell the kittens.

This is how you’re going to tell Google, for example, that you trust this page.

And this is the page that you want people to find when they search for kittens or red jujubes or whatever it is that you sell.

You want to make sure that you are also leveraging your reviews and your user generated content.

People will provide you with really interesting keyword rich content that you can use.

Sometimes they provide you with opportunities to fix things.

Let’s say someone has a problem.

They have a problem with one of your products and they leave a comment or send you in a question where they explain this weird use case that they have and why they’re having problems with the product.

That is a great opportunity for a blog post.

Get the user’s permission and write something about that.

That’s content.

Don’t, don’t throw away obvious helpful content that’s going to be unique.

If all you’re doing is using.

I don’t want to say standard, but like you don’t want to be cliche, right?

Don’t be cliche.

Take advantage of the things that the users are offering to you because it’s often really good and it’s almost always unique.

And then avoid technical traps like those canonical problems or accidentally blocking resources.

You don’t want to noindex, nofollow things that should not be no followed or no indexed.

You don’t want to block access to certain JavaScripts or certain bots because it can cause problems.

When we talk about category pages, these are really the superheroes of our site.

They’re the best kept secret in e-commerce SEO because they target broader commercial intent keywords that users are searching for when they’re looking to explore, but not necessarily by a specific SKU.

So because they’re more stable than individual product pages, they tend to build stronger authority over time.

And that means they’re going to attract more links, right?

You can strengthen them further by adding supporting content to these category pages, like a shopping guide or a seasonal roundup or some FAQs.

Extra content on these category pages is going to differentiate it from the product pages themselves.

It’s going to attract links, which creates a well of authority, right?

And then you’re linking over to those individual products and you’re sharing that authority through to the products, which is going to help them rank better.

So I think I mentioned all of that stuff.

Let’s talk about why SEO outlasts paid search.

Schema is going to bring visibility that lasts.

Schema is organic, not paid, right?

Unlike your paid placements, rich results aren’t going to vanish the moment that you stop spending.

I like to tell people that paid search is like a race car and SEO is like a freight train.

SEO can take longer to get up to steam, right?

It’s never going to go as fast, likely, as the race car is going to go.

And it takes longer to get up to full steam.

But it’s got so much inertia because it’s 90 tons.

Well, more than 90 tons, probably, of just inertia rolling.

You cut the power to it, it’s still going to go.

If there’s an algorithm change, it’s still going to go.

It takes 10 miles to stop.

It’s hard to stop once it starts going.

But it takes a lot of work to get it going.

Whereas paid search is going to go from zero to 60 in 3.7 seconds.

But you have to keep putting gas in it.

And the second you stop putting gas in it, it comes to a complete and utter stop.

So doing them tandem, I think, is a good idea.

Remember that you have to continue investing in that organic SEO if you’re going to reap the benefits long term.

You want to make sure that your site speed is enhancing your experience.

All of these things are going to help your organic SEO.

Your content is going to build confidence.

All of these things are supporting the ramp up to your freight train going full steam.

Whereas your paid search, you don’t need to do any of these things, to be perfectly frank, for paid search.

But it’s going to cost you a lot of money to overcome the fact that you don’t have your organic SEO buttoned up.

That’s really the gist of it.

AI is on everybody’s mind these days.

So if you’re wondering how AI and SEO are working together or AI is going to replace SEO completely, I would say AI is enhancing SEO.

AI is helping.

It’s almost helping advertise for you.

When you have a well-structured, optimized site, those AI overviews and AI summaries are looking for strong brands with sites that are structured in a way that make it easy for them to grab that content and repackage it.

So the summaries are going to pull their data from well-structured sites.

And if you’re one of the well-structured sites, you will get the mention.

Your structured data on your product pages, AI is like that.

Easy, bite-sized content for them to grab and reuse.

If you’re not optimizing, if your site isn’t easy for these AI crawlers to read, it’s not going to see you.

It’s not going to know you’re there and it’s not going to be able to refer to you, even if someone is searching for you by name.

So it is very important that you’re making sure that you’re structured and optimized, not just for the search engines, but now for the AI engines, to make sure that you’re getting the visibility that you deserve.

So your key takeaways here.

Structured data matters a lot.

It matters for SEO.

It matters for AI.

And it matters for rankings.

You need to fully optimize your product pages.

Don’t skip parts.

Don’t skip the description.

Don’t skip the short description.

Don’t skip…

Basically, if there’s a field to fill out, I encourage you to fill it out unless you actually can’t or it’s literally not applicable to the product.

Don’t…

Don’t skip steps.

Fill everything out.

Just like with the Yoast SEO plugin.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard this, I installed Yoast and it doesn’t do anything.

You didn’t configure it.

There are lots of different fields to configure.

If you install it but you don’t configure it, it’s not going to help.

Configure all of your things.

Don’t overlook your category pages.

They convert.

They attract links.

They’re a valuable part of your e-commerce puzzle.

You need to make sure that you’re not forgetting about those.

Remember that AI is going to amplify your visibility, especially if you prepare for it.

And that SEO remains the most cost-effective compounding traffic stream that you’re going to have in your marketing arsenal.

That was my portion of the talk.

I would like to now…

Let me see.

So we’ve talked a lot about optimizing content for structure, right?

We talked about schema specifically for e-commerce SEO.

But there’s one area that I know people do skip frequently, and that’s taking care of your images properly.

Your image optimization doesn’t just help with performance.

It plays a big role in accessibility.

And when it’s done right, it’s going to boost your search visibility as well.

So I know what you’re thinking.

Writing alt text for thousands of images is tedious, probably impossible to scale without losing quality.

I would just like to argue that automation and scale don’t have to be generic.

And that’s where alttext.ai is going to come in.

And to show you what smart, scalable image optimization can look like, I am going to hand things over to Joshua Reeder Esparza from alttext.ai.

All righty.

Thank you, Carolyn.

Thanks.

Let me share this screen with you all.

So my name is Joshua Reeder Esparza.

As you just heard, I will share the screen.

I work at alttext.ai, heading up engineering over here.

I’ve worked on the web, as Carolyn said, for a decade and change, working on agency sites, working with agencies.

I actually used a lot of Yoast in those days.

So I have been involved in a lot of accessibility audits as well as SEO audits.

And kind of right in the middle of that Venn diagram is alt text.

So I’ll just jump right in.

What is alt text?

So this is a concise written description of an image on a web page.

Where is that?

I’ll show you.

So you don’t have to be technical to know what it is.

You can at least see what this is.

This is just a little HTML snippet that shows up that explains what the text is.

So alt text came about somewhere in the 90s when you had a bunch of different people that had costly internet connections.

You might not pay to load the images on a site, but people still wanted to communicate what they were trying to communicate with that image.

So alt text came about.

We quickly then saw this is a really valuable tool for people that have some sort of vision impairment.

Whether that be a full vision impairment, they’re completely blind, or they have even just like trouble with colors.

There’s a way that you could then have this here to support what they’re seeing on the page.

So alt text is there as a description thing.

Dual rules of it is what I just mentioned is the accessibility angle.

It’s providing descriptions of images to somebody that doesn’t have the capacity to see the image fully.

So this is something that is a benefit.

But now, as we’ve seen in the physical world, this is starting to become something that’s litigated.

Many of you know about the European Accessibility Act forcing websites to become accessible with a lot of fines on the other side of it.

One of those things that people are starting to see as they’re running these accessibility audits is, oh, I need alt text on my images.

Okay, I’ve got a site with 3,000 images.

What do I do?

So that’s one angle is there’s the accessibility angle.

The other angle is SEO, which is what we’re talking about here.

So what you’re doing is, you know, Google, all these different search engines, they’ve got the capacity to look at an image and read it.

But it’s a lot easier to provide that text to them and for them to have the correct context as to what is going on in the image.

So this came about, you know, just like anything on the web, somebody to realize, oh, a great way for us to understand in a less resource intensive way what’s going on is just to read these alt tags on websites.

And that quickly became a way for you to provide more information to Google from an SEO perspective.

So accessibility, not just best practices.

As I mentioned, this is becoming something that is very litigious.

So Domino’s, I’ve got three here that are big examples.

You guys have probably seen Domino’s Pizza.

Lost in appeal a couple years back after a blind customer sued over an inaccessible website.

Beyonce’s Parkwood Entertainment, same thing.

Faced a lawsuit for lack of alt text on images.

And then there was a big amount of precedent set where Florida court ruled that a website could have the American Disability Act standards applied to it.

This is not to mention the number of websites I worked with with agencies where people would come to us.

And just through, you know, the discovery phase, trying to figure out why they wanted a new website.

It was very often that there was somebody doing drive-by suits the same way somebody would try and roll a wheelchair through a lobby, realize that it doesn’t have the right width constraints and slap a lawsuit on them.

People would come to us so they didn’t have to settle out.

They could then make their site more accessible.

And then that turned into a full project.

But we saw a lot of it.

SEO.

So it’s influence in image search rankings.

We’re not just saying it.

John Mueller, he’s a search advocate at Google.

He said, if you do want these images to be shown in image search, then using the alt attribute is a good way to tell us this is on the image.

Google Search Central, I pulled this directly from their documentation that’s publicly available.

Most important attribute when it comes to providing more metadata for an image is the alt text.

So anytime that these search engines tell us something explicit about what it is that’s going to influence rankings, we kind of latch on to it quickly.

So this information is there to amend what’s on the rest of the page, but also provide detail that might not make into a description and might do a good job of explaining what’s going on in the image.

So another reason that I’m sure you all are aware of is mobile.

So images in search appear 2.5 times more often in search results on mobile devices.

And we continue to see this number go up.

But 2024 mobile devices accounted for almost 75% of all e-commerce transactions.

The image displayed on Google is in many ways dependent on Google understanding what’s going on in that image.

And a significant part of what attributes to its understanding is that alt text.

We’ve also now realized that this is a valuable way to build organic traffic.

So HubSpot, they ran this test in over a period of a year, almost 800% increase in their image traffic.

They attribute it to 160K additional visits from Google.

But this was just they went through, they made sure that images that didn’t have alt text got alt text.

Images that did start to have alt text that included either more keywords, pointed towards the keywords, insinuated very well, or related to the content around them.

Another great example is Foot Locker.

They did a great job.

They, you know, firstly, they have this increase in organic traffic.

But not only you can see from this image, they not only increase their traffic, but they get the multi-image snippet.

So they go from just having shoes up there to now they’re competing directly with Nike.

And that’s a huge leg up when we look at how people interact and the click-through rates on things when it comes to having these better frame search results.

So what I mentioned there too was keywords.

What’s really important when it comes to this is these tools do a fantastic job of doing what we can or doing what would take a great deal of time for us to do.

We’ve got, when you’re looking at a product, you’ve got a lot of keywords that you might be trying to focus on.

Well, how do we teach the AI to then focus on that?

You take, let’s say, this Hawaii beaches destination vacations and holiday travel.

We could feed this into the AI and say, hey, I’m trying to at least get these words on my page, but I don’t want to get slapped on the hand for keyword stuffing.

So what it can do is, you know, man surfing near the beaches of Hawaii enjoying holiday travel, one of the top tropical destination vacations.

So it also does a good job of then going, well, this, you know, this word kind of relates, this one kind of relates.

It does a great job of forming something that at least stays within the realm of those keywords.

If it’s not going to directly input that keyword and altogether, sometimes if it doesn’t seem reasonable to put it in there, it won’t because it knows that will then trigger you getting slapped on the hand because of that image, that keyword stuffing.

So all this comes down to, as Carolyn mentioned, the real cost of doing it manually.

So you’ve got 350 products with variants, which is pretty typical.

I think the average e-commerce site is somewhere around a thousand.

Each has four to eight images.

So put all that together, that’s 2,100 alt texts.

To go through and write something of this quality with this many images, it’s not so much that it’s an astronomical task.

It’s just one you’re not going to do.

And it’s a way that you’re going to leave a lot of that SEO ability on the cutting room floor.

So to give you kind of a good example that might be easier just to see it actually working, let me show you right now.

Let’s take a look at how this plays out in practice.

For example, if you have an e-commerce site, you have information such as the brand, the name of the product, as well as a little bit of information about that product itself that you would want to use to influence the information generating the alt text.

So for example, I’ve got a somewhat generic looking handbag here.

I’m going to add in my product name.

The brand name will be Maven Supply.

And we’ll say that this one is crimson instead of just saying that it’s red.

And let’s say that this is targeted at small, everyday use, minimalist handbag, information that we want to include, but doesn’t necessarily have to specifically hit those words.

That way we’re not hitting keyword stuffing.

It’s more natural, similar to what you would do if you were creating this yourself.

So I’ll add this in here.

Click add image.

What it comes up with is the crimson mini cross body bag by Maven Supply features a curved flap, top handle and detachable strap, ideal for everyday use.

So what you can see is we’ve got everything that we needed here.

We’ve got the brand, Maven Supply.

We’ve got the product name, mini cross body bag.

And then we have, you know, instead of it just being red, it’s crimson.

It has a little bit of information that explains what’s going on in the image, as well as pulls in some of those keywords we were looking for everyday use.

Trying to align this with some sort of subset of customers.

This is a great way for you to, instead of stuffing in a knit, just saying small everyday purse, minimalist handbag.

The AI then knows, okay, how do I fit this in in a way that is going to benefit SEO in the long term while not generating a bunch of keyword stuffing?

You take something like this and then you start to think of it at scale.

All of this information is available on your products.

You’re already writing all this information.

So take that information and multiply it by 100 products, 1,000 products.

Its capacity to get the information that you need in your product alt text without you having to lift a finger is fantastic.

So you can see that doing it by hand isn’t necessarily the most ideal way to go about things.

And, you know, just like what Yoast does, we create a tool that does this for you.

So you might as well have this stuff plugged in directly to your system so that instead of you going through and uploading images, copying your alt text, we’re in WordPress, we’re in Shopify.

We actually use the SEO keywords that Yoast generates.

So we’re working with Yoast on the back end there.

And this stuff can be automated.

Yeah.

All right, Carolyn, pass it back to you.

Carolyn, at the moment you’re muted.

I think when I went to video, it muted you.

It was mostly talking to myself.

I was just like, let’s click here.

So that was awesome.

I see we have a ton of questions.

So I would like to leave a lot of time for questions and answers.

Let’s see what kinds of questions we can answer today.

So I actually tried to pre-answer a question.

So I’m sorry about that.

Let’s do…

Let’s see.

Here’s a question.

And I’m going to show it on the stage.

We sell many products that are quite similar.

How can we avoid having the same SEO keywords for all of those similar products while keeping them still dialed in?

My understanding is that too much of duplicate SEO keywords is counterproductive.

I would say that.

I would say that that is true.

There has to be…

There has to be a way in which you can select non-identical keywords.

So it doesn’t necessarily matter that all of the keywords maybe have the same root.

What you’re looking for is adding modifiers.

You can’t…

It wouldn’t be fair to say that all of your products are handbags.

Because they’re not all just handbags.

They’re Kate Spade handbags.

They’re Louis Vuitton handbags.

And they’re different model numbers.

And they’re different SKUs.

And they’re different sizes.

They’re top handles.

They’re totes.

They’re crossbodies.

There’s all sorts of different modifiers that you can use to make those your keywords.

What you want to do is think about if I were a customer, how would I be looking for…

How would I naturally search for this particular product?

How would I describe that?

Here’s a fun story.

I worked at a place that made stainless steel sinks and faucets.

Right?

And they have this one particular kind of sink where it’s steel and it’s got a lip on the side.

Right?

And you cut a hole in the countertop.

And that lip catches the top of the countertop.

So it’s not an undermount.

You could arguably call it a top mount.

My mom would call it a drop-in sink, which I think is what a lot of people call it.

But this company insisted on calling it self-rimming.

And I kept telling them that no one is searching for this.

And this is not a keyword phrase we should target.

They didn’t believe me.

But I assure you, people search for drop-in.

If you do your keyword research, you will see that there’s a certain way that people are going to search for certain products.

Those are the keyword phrases that you want to use.

So unless you think that all of your products are only going to ever be looked for by one particular phrase, I think that you are probably very well positioned to have a variety of SEO keywords.

You just need to do a little bit of keyword research.

Josh, did you have any?

Yeah, I’d say, you know, if you are willing to present these different products to your customers with the assumption that they’re going to buy them for different reasons, I think inherently in there, you have some information that’s going to help you differentiate what it is that would lead to some good SEO keywords.

All right, let’s see.

Here’s one.

I write quite descriptive alt text.

How do I know if the alt text is too long?

That’s a good question.

Yeah.

So there’s a couple ways to look at it.

First and foremost, alt text is for accessibility.

So you’re trying to figure out how do I communicate this to somebody that can’t look at the image in the most reasonable way.

If that is an image that does require a great deal of detail, it could be a little longer.

We find that around 150 characters is kind of the sweet spot.

You’ll see some people say 125.

There’s no length limit when it comes to like WCAG, the web standards 2.1.

That’s one that you’ll see like the EU Accessibility Act is enacting.

So there’s not really a rule.

But as far as what you’re trying to do is how do I communicate this to somebody that can’t see it, as well as how do I get enough information in there in the first place?

So it’s not, you know, just image.jpg or an image of hat.

You’re trying to give something meaningful in there.

So I’d say somewhere around 150 characters, 200 characters.

I have not, I haven’t seen anyone go too long to the point where I’m like, you have to shorten this.

And not necessarily related to products, but for editorial images.

I’ve, ever since my days at the newspaper, I found that the captions that people write for it to describe images for newspapers in particular work well as alt text.

So I would copy the caption and repeat it in the alt text.

And I found that that, that worked too.

I think it’s, I think you really have to try to write one that’s too long to be perfectly honest.

All right.

Next one.

Here we go.

How do you naturally input keywords into alt text without keyword stuffing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the reasons that these large language models are so valuable is they’re great at language.

So what you’re trying to do is offer that up, those keywords to the AI in the first place.

That’s kind of what we’re doing with our SEO keywords on our backend.

And tell it, hey, fit these in, in a way that doesn’t come across as keyword stuffing.

It might leave some on the table intentionally to say, if we put these three in here, there’s just no way that Google is going to look at it and not see it as keyword stuffing.

So it’s, it’s done with a light hand, but that’s the reason that we think that these AI tools are fantastic at this work is because they’re just great at language.

And I would just say that, and I think I answered that in the, in the actual chat, not, not in the quick Q and A.

You know, when you’re keyword stuffing, if you’re writing to be unambiguous and you’re writing to be clear, that’s not going to get you in trouble.

And that’s keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is when it feels wrong.

Like you’re reading it and you’re like, I don’t like this.

The example I gave was there’s a difference between wedding photos by Jim’s wedding photography of the Smith Jones event in Atlanta, Georgia.

And wedding photography and pictures by Jim’s wedding photography of Atlanta, Georgia, of the Smith Jones wedding, photos, wedding photos, Atlanta, Georgia.

Like, obviously you’re, you’re cramming wedding photos in there every five seconds.

That’s keyword stuffing.

So a lot of it is just, you know, when it reads, right.

So you’re double checking, especially if you’re using a tool, you’re going to want to double check things.

Everything’s double check.

I, you know, trust, but verify.

Right.

All right.

All right.

Let’s do.

What’s the best way to retrofit all the existing images with new alt text content?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

And that’s why we have the tool that we have.

We’ve got, you know, there’s a lot of ways to do it.

We just created a product called instant alt that it’s like putting a Google, the way you put the Google Analytics script tag in, it just goes through and does it automatically.

Page loads.

It caches it, does all the, you know, magic in the background to generate alt text.

Other than that, we also have a ton of integrations with different sites.

So you’re installing a plugin directly on Shopify or directly on WordPress or all these different integrations that we have that then uses the data that exists there.

So it’s that or it’s right at yourself.

And writing yourself, to be honest, is just not feasible when you’ve got a website that’s got 2000 something products, 2000 images, let’s just say.

And then put on top of that, that you’re going to release some stuff in spring.

You’re going to release some stuff in fall.

Is that going to then slow down your release cycle?

It’s a lot better just to go, let me have something that just does this in the background.

It knows the data that I’m inputting because I’m using Yoast well.

I’m putting my keywords in.

I’m making sure that all my schema data is there.

And then just let a tool like ours pull that information in.

Awesome.

Here’s another good one that you’re going to want.

I tried the alttext.ai free trial last week.

It was providing really long descriptions, not including the keywords and adding very irrelevant information.

What was I doing wrong?

Yeah, you know, that might just be it comes down to your settings.

So what you’re trying to do, it’s only going to put out what you put in.

So you can shorten that description to be concise.

We’ve got a lot of different ways that you can tune the model.

We always recommend that people go into the dashboard to try and see how it’s going to interact with their content.

And you have to provide that information.

So often when people are saying it’s not including the keywords, things like that, we find that they just don’t have the integration set up so that it will pull that information.

But that just kind of comes down to getting it set up.

Like Carolyn was saying with Yoast, oftentimes it has to do with that initial setup.

So yeah, I would recommend looking at those settings in your account.

You can shoot me an email, jre@alttext.ai, and I’d love to help you out to figure out what was going on there.

So is it okay to delete a product or is it better to leave it there?

For example, is it okay to delete the Father’s Day specific products after Father’s Day has passed?

What about discontinued products?

So I will, I’ll take that one real quick.

I would say that if it’s not something that you offer all the time, let’s say, let’s say it is something that you offer all the time and you’re just out right now, I would not delete it.

I would put up a sign that says we’re out, maybe offer to take back orders.

I wouldn’t want to lose that URL because the authority and value that you accumulate per page is assigned per URL.

So if you change the URL by making a new product later, all of that accumulated authority that you had is going to be gone unless you remember to 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL, which not everybody remembers to do.

If it’s something that you’re never going to have again, like never going to have again, and that particular product didn’t have a ton of backlinks to it.

Let’s say it didn’t, it didn’t have a ton of, there’s not a lot of accumulated value there.

In that case, you can delete it.

When you delete it, you can delete it with a 410.

A 410 means I have deleted this with extreme prejudice.

It is never coming back.

Or you can just do a regular 404.

If you do feel like you’ve got a comparable product that you would like to redirect that value to, you can delete the product, but 301 the URL to a new product that is similar.

So it really, it really depends.

Like with a discontinued product, I would hope that there’s something new that’s now available. like they discontinued this model, but this is the newer model.

So you’d want to just redirect that old product to the new product.

You can, you can nuke it if you want.

The redirect should prevent people from landing on the old page, but it would also preserve the data from old product.

I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule.

I think you can, there’s a lot of different ways you can accomplish that, accomplish your needs, and it’s going to vary a little bit for business case.

Is that pretty accurate?

Makes sense to me.

Carolyn, you might know this better.

Is that what I see going on when people have products that are out of stock and they have kind of the notify me there, that they’re trying to keep that, that URL’s value while still getting interaction on it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I, and I do that too.

And I’ve got, I’ve got some sites where it’ll pop up a notice. that the stock is low.

And then starts notifying me that the stock is low.

And sometimes I run out before the new stuff comes in.

So we can, we can put up a couple of things.

We can say, let us know that you want us to order more.

We can say, you can back order it.

I’ll take your money for it and I’ll just ship it when it’s available.

Not everybody wants to do that.

You can say, you can order it now and it’s not expected to, we’re not going to receive it for two more months.

So you can expect it in a certain day. there’s lots of different things you can do if you want to preserve that, but I wouldn’t take it down because taking it down throws off the crawl.

It, it, it just, it introduces unnecessary flux in, in how Google understands your, your site and your layout and how the, how the authority flows through your site.

So that is what I would say to that.

This is a good one.

Does the AI see and understand the picture?

If I sell plush bears, where, and the keywords were bear and plush with the AI see and know that it’s a red, that it’s red and add red plush bear to the description.

Yeah, that’s a great question.

And Steve, if you’ve not seen how these tools do with this stuff, it’s fantastic.

We actually, we were on a product demo a few days ago and there was somebody that works within a lot of, they published scientific articles and I pulled some image off their site just to try it out.

And I mean, it would take a PhD for me to understand what was going on with what was represented there.

And it got it like that.

So they’re very, very good at figuring out what’s on the image, color, anything like that.

So you could put bear in there.

There’s a great chance that it would say plush red bear just from the word bear or not even put that information in there.

So it does a good job of getting that detail.

So, yep.

I’ve seen, I’ve seen AI do some pretty awesome things with that.

Not related to, to alt text, but I uploaded an image of two walls in the corner of my room and it recognized generally the paint color.

And I started asking questions about, I’d like to do, I’d like to color drench the room.

Can I, you know, what are coordinating colors that I could paint the trim and the ceiling?

And it started mocking things up and making paint color recommendations when it found out what brand I like.

It was, it was wildly accurate and a bit frightening.

I’m not going to lie.

Okay.

Let’s see.

How can WordPress users go about adding rich and structured data to their content?

WordPress users have a ton of tools at their disposal.

So I assume that you’ve got, that you’re running WooCommerce because most people do, if you’ve got WordPress, right?

There are a lot of plugins that will add schema and help you with the rich data.

Obviously, I’m going to recommend Yoast.

We can help you with that.

We’ve got, we have a specific add-on for a plugin for WooCommerce.

And it does contain all of the things that you would want to have associated with your product pages.

So that I would say is probably the easiest way to do it.

And I am biased and I do have a financial interest in, in promoting that.

I know that there are other tools available, but obviously I think we’re the best.

So that’s where I’m going with that.

Did you have any, any recommendations or did you want to throw anything out there?

I mean, I can sound less biased and tell people that I built a WordPress site about four months back.

And first thing I did after we were getting ready to launch, it was put Yoast on there to make sure that it cleaned up all the schema and whatnot.

So yeah, I’ve used Yoast for years.

Highly recommend it.

We like to hear that.

All right, let’s see.

Does this style of creating alt text apply to all images on a site or specifically product images?

Yeah.

When it comes to search engines, downranking you, or at least not upranking you because of your lack of alt text, it doesn’t care if it’s just a product image or different types of images on the site.

Most platforms are going to have the alt text spit out on the image, no matter where it is.

So it could be a blog post.

It could be one of those category pages, a header image, things like that.

So it matters for all of them.

We have a tool within Shopify that goes through and actually pulls through theme images and indexes those and make sure that they all have alt text attached to them.

Same thing for things like WordPress.

But yeah, you need to make sure that every image that is not, that is descriptive, which effectively means every image that’s not like a, you know, 10 pixel by 10 pixel image of like a button or something along those lines, has information.

For those little images, it is important to at least have some way to explain what is going on.

But usually that’s not with alt text.

It’s with something like an ARAI area role.

ARAI, I can’t spell right now, but with an area role that will then explain, hey, this button goes to submit a form.

This button goes to close this modal, this button.

So yeah, what matters is making sure that everything that is an image tag has alt text attached to it.

Awesome.

Here’s a good one.

How can we do this with large numbers of products in Shopify?

And the client has more than 10,000.

I mean, Barbara, you’re, you’re talking exactly the problem that we’re trying to solve.

So we’ve, that’s part of what we do is we’ve got a bulk image, updater that will go through every single product, everything, single image, send that to the AI, 10,000 images is no problem.

So you can check out our site.

We’ve got some plans that would include 10,000 images, as well as, give you some room for more as you add products and update them down the road.

What’s the max number of images you think you can handle?

We just, I mean, millions.

Yeah.

It’s like, you’re, you’re just, it’s a matter of the server spinning up to take care of it.

So we just had a client sign for 1.1 million, I think images that they have a back catalog to go through.

So yeah, that’s one of those cases where it’s like, it’s a complete impossibility to think that you could ever create that much alt text, but yeah, 10,000 totally doable.

Wow.

Let’s see.

Is sentence structure important for all descriptions?

Example, using active voice, small sentences, et cetera.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, go ahead.

Is it?

I do think so because what Google is doing is trying to figure out whether or not you’ve stuffed, you’ve stuffed information in there.

It wants it to sound natural.

So, active voice, small sentences.

If you’re talking about things like punctuation and things like that, you could potentially have less of that.

But if you’re trying to make sure that it sees that this is original content, which Google is trying to emphasize in the days of AI, it’s important that that information sound like a sentence.

Yeah.

So sounding like a sentence.

Yes.

Active voice versus passive voice.

I would say a less important. because that’s the difference between.

I will be going to the store or I am going to the store.

Correct.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

If that’s the case, I don’t know that.

I don’t know that it’s going to be picky about that. as far as sentence length, I’d go, I’d shoot for natural.

I mean, I can’t imagine you’re going to be writing PhD level dissertations in your alt text.

So that’s the only time I would start to worry about your sentence structure getting too, too complex for the alt text, but you don’t want to be so reductive that it reads like a Dick and Jane book. you know, see spot run, that kind of stuff.

It doesn’t need to be that simple.

I think you’d have to try hard to make it so complicated that it would be bad.

So I, I know I, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

I think it’s the short answer. we talked about that.

A couple more here.

What about videos?

Do they need alt text?

And what if it is remote hosted?

Yeah, there’s not the same, alt text for videos.

That’s going to use some content surrounding it.

There’s a lot of different ways that the web is kind of built schema to pull video information in.

There is a title tag similar to, things like SVG, but what’s challenging is there’s a lot of different ways that you’re going to display video in a webpage with images.

It’s a pretty simple, it’s the image tag.

So it’s easier for search engines to go.

The requirement is you have this alt tag and it have information.

So, I would have to do a little bit more research.

Videos aren’t really part of what we’re working on because there isn’t this huge accessibility push for videos to have the alt text.

I imagine for somebody that is vision impaired, they would want to at least understand what’s going on if the video didn’t have audio.

So in that case, it would look like a caption below it.

Remember, you know, as you’re going through this, process of trying to make sure that everything is descriptive for a blind user, you’re just trying to figure out how do I get them through this while explaining what’s on the page while also not, you know, using their whole day so that it’s not, they’re tabbing through the page and then video description.

And it’s going to take six minutes for a screen reader to read through it.

So yeah, there’s, there are ways to go about it, but that is a good question.

One I’ll take a look at.

Absolutely.

I’ll probably do just a few more.

Here’s a good one.

So she says, I believe in the past, the recommendation was to add the word image colon followed by the alt description of the image.

Is it still required?

So I would say I have not heard that this was required and I don’t know that I’ve ever done this.

Have you seen this before?

Cause I, this is not something that I’ve seen in practice.

We actually do a lot of work to make sure that doesn’t happen.

So the reason is all of this is going to come through the filter of, like I said, how does this come to somebody on a screen reader?

And if you’ve used a screen reader before, it’s going to tab through.

And the first thing it’s going to say is an image, and then it’s going to give you the description.

So it knows what’s going on the page well enough to know that this is an image that it’s looking at.

So a screen reader, it would read as an image, an image of an image, like there could be a bunch of repetitive things there.

So, usually we find it’s not a, that valuable for SEO because it already knows it’s an image and be not that valuable for accessibility because again, they already know it’s an image.

And I would say for SEO purposes, I would almost treat a, I would treat the alt text almost like I would treat anything else in that. for SEO specifically, you want to front load the most important terms if possible.

So starting it out with an image, if it’s not an image of an image would be not useful.

It would, it would be wasted, wasted characters in my opinion.

Okay.

Here’s a good one.

This will be probably be our last one.

If I already have alt text that I’ve added manually, and then I add alttext.ai, will I overwrite what I currently have or cause duplicate content?

Yeah.

So when you run through, well, I’ll just start with this.

There’s only one alt tag.

So an image can’t have multiple alt tags.

It’s always just going to display it.

So overwriting the content, it wouldn’t create a duplicate content.

It would just create new content that was there in place of it.

In all of our plugins, we do have the option for you to skip images that already have the alt text attached to them.

But whenever you’re running an update like this and improving the alt text on all of your images, usually you want to run and overwrite just to make sure that everything has information.

If you’ve gone through and done the work though, you can, tell it to not overwrite those.

You can just find those in the plugin settings.

All right.

And then I did find one more that I want to, I want to make sure we hit, here we go.

Last one.

My company has a multi-language site.

Is AI good with multiple languages or mainly just English?

Yep.

Again, language models, they’re fantastic at this.

So we support over 130 languages.

If it’s something that is generally available in, translators, we have access to that.

But not only that we’ve found, I was just working with somebody where I’m in the States.

I was working with somebody in the UK and they wanted more British spelling for all their text.

So, you know, how do you translate UK English in like versus American English or specific dialects?

Having the AI go through after the alt text is generated, which we have a tool to pass it back through ChatGPT.

It does a great job of adding, you know, the use and all the extra letters that they add into the English over there or that we take out rather, I suppose.

But, yeah, it does a fantastic job of language.

I have found that ChatGPT is very good at, the idioms and the little regional differences.

Like between British and English, I can, I can spot when someone is a British writer versus an American writer, because they’ll say things like, in the US when we try to describe something as being all across the country, we say coast to coast because we’re wider than we are tall.

And in the UK, they say up and down the country because they’re taller than they are wide.

Like just really little things like that.

But ChatGPT is very good at catching it.

So that is awesome that you handle that.

So we are just about in time.

I’m going to go ahead and first thank everyone for all the great questions.

That was awesome.

Thank you so much.

And now I am going to share our discount codes.

So because you visited us today, we have free giveaways.

You can claim your 15% discount on all Yoast products using the discount code on yoast.com.

So it’s EcomYoast15%.

And a coupon expires at the end of the month on April 29th.

If you want, you can also just take a picture of a QR code and it will directly apply it.

But that is good for all of the products, including the WooCommerce add-on, if you are so inclined.

And we have a 20% off the first term, which is the first year or first month of the package you choose. at alttext.ai.

And the code there is yoast20.

So I want to thank everyone for joining us.

Thank you, Josh.

I’m glad we got out this time.

So thank you.

Thank you everyone for the great questions.

Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I was just saying, yeah, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Well, it was wonderful.

I think I really thought the questions were great.

Thank you all so much for participating.

And we hope to see you again soon.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye everyone.