Onely specializes in AI SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for employment attorneys and law firms. Its approach combines employment-law […]
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There is no single best GEO agency for agentic commerce. Agentic commerce is shopping in which an AI agent searches, […]
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Onely provides AI SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for business law firms, with an approach built around the specific […]
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There is no single best GEO agency for a beauty brand that sells cosmetics online. A GEO agency works to […]
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Your jewelry can have all the bling, but first, people need to find it. Whether you sell ready-to-wear pieces, craft custom designs, or make jewelry for other businesses, search can put your work in front of people looking for exactly what you offer. That’s where SEO comes in. In this guide, we’ll explore why SEO matters for jewelry businesses, what people and AI models are searching for, and how to make your website shine in search.
SEO can help the right people discover what you offer. Here are three reasons to make it part of your jewelry business’s growth strategy:
Social media can help you showcase your jewelry, but going viral isn’t easy. You’re competing with countless other creators and brands for attention, and a post’s reach can fade quickly. SEO gives you another way to get discovered: helping people find your business when they’re actively searching for jewelry, products, or services like yours.
Did you know?
There’s plenty of search demand to tap into. A 2026 analysis by Softscotch estimated 673,000 monthly searches for “jewelry stores near me” and 40,500 for “custom jewelry.” People are also exploring brands through AI tools, making it increasingly important to build an online presence that clearly explains what your business offers.
Also read: Does social media influence your SEO?
You don’t need to rank for every jewelry-related search to attract customers. Focus on what makes your business different, whether that’s handmade silver rings, personalized wedding jewelry, or custom pieces for corporate clients. Targeting specific searches that match your products, services, and expertise can help you reach a more relevant audience, even if you’re a small business competing with established brands.
| Don’t have a website yet? Bluehost’s AI Website Builder can help you create a website to showcase your jewelry, portfolio, and services without having to code from scratch. |
Do check: The complete guide to building a website with AI
Unlike a social media post that may quickly lose visibility, useful, well-optimized website content can continue attracting people through search long after you publish it. A page about custom wedding jewelry, for example, can help potential customers discover your services whenever they’re looking for them.
SEO isn’t a one-time task, and results aren’t guaranteed. By keeping your website useful, relevant, and up to date, you can build a lasting foundation for your jewelry business’s online visibility.
Overall, think of SEO as building an asset, not chasing a moment. You’re creating a website that can steadily become more useful, relevant, and discoverable as your business grows.
SEO for a jewelry business is about understanding what your potential customers search for, the search intent behind those queries, and how your jewelry, services, and expertise can meet that intent. Before targeting keywords, you need to understand what makes your jewelry business unique and what your customers are looking for at different stages of their search.
Before you start researching keywords, take a step back and define what makes your jewelry business unique. SEO works best when you connect what you offer with what your customers search for. That means looking beyond broad terms like “jewelry” or “jewelry store” and identifying the details that make your business relevant to specific searches.
Ask yourself:
Must read: B2B websites and SEO B2C and B2B: what are the differences?
These answers help you narrow down your SEO focus. A jeweler specializing in custom engagement rings in London, for example, has a very different opportunity from a jewelry retailer selling affordable silver earrings online.
Once you know what makes your jewelry business different, the next step is to understand what your potential customers search for and the search intent behind those queries. People don’t always search for a business directly. They may search for a specific product, compare different options, look for a service, or seek advice before making a purchase.
Think about the different ways someone might search for what you offer:
These searches can have very different search intent, even when they relate to the same product. Someone searching for how to choose an engagement ring wants information, while someone searching for custom engagement rings in London may be looking for a jeweler. So, don’t try to rank for every jewelry-related keyword. Focus on the searches that match what your business offers and what your customers need.
Now that we know why SEO matters and how it can help jewelry businesses reach the right audience, let’s look at how to put it into practice. From choosing the right keywords to optimizing product pages and images, a few thoughtful changes can make your website easier to find and more useful to potential customers.
Before optimizing your website, you need to understand what potential customers are searching for. Keyword research helps you discover the words and phrases people use when looking for jewelry, custom designs, or services like yours.
Start by identifying what makes your business stand out. Do you create handmade jewelry, use sustainable materials, specialize in personalized pieces, or manufacture jewelry for other brands? Perhaps you’re a local jeweler known for engagement rings or a maker who creates one-of-a-kind designs. These unique selling points (USPs) can help you identify the searches most relevant to your business.
Here’s a blueprint that offers an overview of finding the right keywords for your jewelry website:
Remember, keyword research isn’t about finding the most popular terms and squeezing them into your website. It’s about understanding your audience, identifying what makes your jewelry business different, and choosing the searches that connect the two.
You can also simplify this process with Keyword data via Semrush in Yoast. Available in Yoast SEO, Yoast SEO Premium, and Yoast SEO for Shopify, this integration suggests related keyphrases and provides insights such as search volume and trends, helping you find relevant terms without constantly switching between tools.
Once you have a list of relevant keywords, decide which pages should target them. Each important page on your website should serve a distinct purpose and meet a particular customer need.
For example, a jewelry retailer might have a category page for gold rings and individual product pages for specific designs. A custom jewelry manufacturer, on the other hand, might create separate service pages for personalized bracelets, corporate gifts, and event jewelry. This helps potential customers find the most relevant information without having to navigate through unrelated offerings.
That’s the approach taken by Polish jewelry company LogoBijou. The company creates custom-made jewelry for businesses, brands, and institutions, including personalized bracelets, pendants, cufflinks, and pieces for corporate gifts and events. Its website showcases its work and helps potential clients understand the projects it can create.
Your website should also tell people who you are and what makes your business worth choosing. An ‘Our story’ page is a good place to share your background, craftsmanship, inspiration, materials, and values. For jewelry businesses, these details can help build trust and distinguish your work from similar offerings. They can also give search engines and AI systems useful context about your business.
Your product pages should help potential customers understand what you’re selling while giving search engines and AI tools accurate information to interpret your products and surface them for relevant searches and queries.
Start with descriptive titles and detailed product descriptions that highlight the materials, design, dimensions, finish, and customization options. For example, instead of a vague title like “Ring,” use “18-karat gold ring for everyday wear.” Then, make the description more useful by including specific, verifiable details about the piece.
Interesting read: 7 ways to improve product descriptions in your online store
Take a look at a product page from Lemoniq. Its Taurus bracelet page illustrates how to combine descriptive copy with practical product details.
Here are four ways to improve your product descriptions, using Lemoniq as an example:
Include details that help customers understand exactly what they’re buying. Lemoniq’s Taurus bracelet page specifies garnet, hematite, and tourmaline, along with gold-plated 925 silver, color, clasp type, and size. This information helps shoppers assess the product and gives search engines and AI tools specific attributes to interpret.
Tell shoppers what inspired a piece or what makes it meaningful. For instance, Lemoniq connects its Taurus bracelet to the zodiac sign and explains the symbolism associated with Taurus and the gemstones. This context helps shoppers understand the design and gives search engines and AI tools more information about its significance.
Anticipate what shoppers need to know before buying, from sizing and materials to customization, care, shipping, and returns. Lemoniq, for instance, specifies the bracelet’s elastic band, adjustable size, and gift packaging. Clear answers help customers make informed decisions and provide useful context for search engines and AI tools.
Avoid using the same generic description across your product catalog. Highlight what makes each piece different, whether it’s the craftsmanship, design inspiration, or intended use. Unique, accurate descriptions help customers distinguish between products and give search engines and AI tools information specific to each item.
The takeaway? Be descriptive, accurate, and transparent about what you offer. Beyond your product pages, make it easy for people and discovery systems to learn about your business, craftsmanship, and sourcing practices.
Pro tip:
Don’t focus only on your product pages. An informative About Us page, verifiable credentials, and credible mentions from relevant industry sources help establish your jewelry business’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). These signals can build trust with potential customers and support your visibility in search results and AI-generated answers.
Jewelry is a visual product. People want to see the details, finish, and craftsmanship before deciding whether to buy a piece or commission a similar design. High-quality, genuine product photography is therefore essential to both the shopping experience and your website’s presentation.
Whenever possible, use your own photographs of the actual jewelry you sell or make. Show the piece from multiple angles, capture important details, and include a sense of scale where useful. For custom jewelry makers, photographs of completed projects can also demonstrate your craftsmanship and help potential clients understand what you’re capable of creating.
Alongside the photography itself, pay attention to these SEO basics:
Instead of uploading an image named IMG_1234.jpg, use a meaningful filename such as handmade-silver-pendant.jpg. Here’s what Google Search Central’s doc on image SEO best practices says about image filenames:
“… filename can give Google very light clues about the subject matter of the image. When possible, use filenames that are short, but descriptive.”
Describe what the image shows, such as “Handmade silver pendant with an oval blue gemstone.” Don’t stuff alt text with keywords or include details that aren’t visible. Image alt text improves accessibility and helps search engines understand the image’s subject matter.
If you use Yoast WooCommerce SEO, you can also check for missing alt text across your product catalog using the Bulk Editor and generate image alt text with AI. You can review, edit, or approve each suggestion before applying it.
Compress images appropriately so they load quickly without sacrificing too much visual quality. Here’s what the Google Search Central article mentions about the image file sizes:
“Images are often the largest contributor to overall page size, which can make pages slow and expensive to load.”
Along with compressing images, you can use responsive image techniques, HTML attributes, CSS styling, and modern optimization strategies like lazy loading to deliver the right image file size, improving overall website performance, reducing data usage, and enhancing user experience.
Choose image dimensions and formats appropriate for how your photos appear on your website. This helps prevent unnecessarily large downloads, keeps images looking sharp, and supports a smooth experience across devices.
Include front, side, close-up, and scale-reference images where relevant. These views help shoppers assess details such as a piece’s finish, craftsmanship, and proportions, giving them more information to make confident purchasing decisions.
These practices help make your website more accessible and improve the page experience. They also give search engines useful context about your images. However, you have to remember that descriptive filenames and alt text complement good photography; they can’t make up for poor-quality or misleading product images.
Jewelry can be a costly purchase, and it often comes with a lot of questions. Customers want to know how to choose the right ring size, care tips for a gemstone, how to compare gold purities, or how to customize a piece. Answering these questions helps you reach people who are searching for that information before they’re ready to buy.
FAQs are a great way to address specific, conversational queries that might not fit naturally into a product description. Clear, direct answers give search engines and AI tools useful content to interpret when responding to relevant questions.
Make your FAQs useful to both potential customers and search engines by following these practices:
If your website runs on WordPress, the Yoast FAQ content block makes it easy to add questions and answers to your pages while automatically adding FAQ structured data. You can focus on providing helpful answers without having to implement the markup manually.
If you run a physical jewelry store, serve a particular region, or offer custom jewelry services locally, local SEO can help people in your area discover your business.
Start by identifying the searches local customers might use. These could include “jewelry store in [city],” “custom jeweler near me,” or “wedding jewelry in [city].” Use relevant location terms naturally on your website, particularly on pages that describe your products, services, and the areas you serve.
Here are a few other ways to improve your local visibility:
Local SEO isn’t just for retailers with storefronts. Jewelry makers and custom jewelers who serve customers in specific areas can benefit too. The key is to make it clear where you operate and which customers you can help.
If your website runs on WordPress, Yoast SEO Premium’s Local SEO features can help you optimize your website for local searches, manage business location details, and add Google Maps to your site. These tools are especially useful if you operate multiple jewelry store locations.
Great jewelry and helpful content won’t bring much search visibility if search engines can’t access your website or understand its pages. Technical SEO helps search engines crawl and index your content, while a well-structured, accessible website also makes it easier for AI systems to retrieve and interpret information about your products and business.
Here is a checklist of the technical SEO essentials for you:
Search engines need to discover and index your important pages before they can show them in search results; therefore:
Also read: What is indexing in regards to Google?
Shoppers should be able to browse your jewelry, examine product images, and navigate your store without friction; therefore:
A clear website structure helps customers find the right products and helps search engines and large language models (LLMs) understand how your pages relate to one another; therefore:
Also read: How to perfect the category page of your online store
Structured data provides additional context about your products and business, therefore:
AI discoverability isn’t a separate technical checklist that replaces SEO. Start with the fundamentals above, along with the following:
Jewelry is more than an accessory; it can celebrate relationships, mark milestones, and create lasting memories. According to Shazé, 68% of consumers associate jewelry gifts with emotional closeness and stronger relationships.
For jewelry businesses, occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, anniversaries, Black Friday, and Christmas offer opportunities to reach shoppers looking for meaningful gifts. Prepare seasonal landing pages, gift guides, and product collections in advance to help customers discover the right pieces when they’re ready to buy.
Here are a few ways to prepare your website for seasonal demand:
Seasonal SEO isn’t just about capturing a short-lived spike in traffic. It’s about helping shoppers discover relevant products when they’re ready to buy.
Must read: How to prep your Shopify or WooCommerce store for Black Friday before the rush starts
SEO tools can make optimization easier by helping you identify issues, improve your content, and understand how well your pages are optimized. Instead of guessing what to change, you can use their feedback to make more informed decisions.
Yoast offers tools to help you optimize your jewelry website, from improving SEO titles, meta descriptions, and content to managing ecommerce SEO with Yoast SEO for Shopify and Yoast WooCommerce SEO. You can also use Yoast SEO AI Brand Insights to explore how your brand’s bling appears in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
You can see some of these features in action in the video below.
Watch how Christina uses Yoast SEO for Shopify to refine a jewelry product page, from improving its SEO title and meta description to making its content more relevant.
If you’re new to SEO and looking for a trusted place to learn, Yoast SEO Academy is a great place to start. Its courses help you understand SEO fundamentals and apply them to your website, even if you’re not an SEO expert.
Rafał Juchno from LogoBijou, a Polish jewelry business and Yoast WooCommerce SEO customer, shared his experience in our survey. He explained that Yoast SEO Academy helped make SEO feel less like “black magic” and taught him the value of holistic SEO: building a useful, trustworthy website that attracts the right audience rather than chasing traffic for its own sake.
His advice for other jewelry businesses?
“Understand your industry, your audience, and what potential customers are searching for. You don’t need to be aprogrammer or an SEO expert to start making your website more discoverable.”
Your jewelry has a story, whether it’s a handcrafted piece, a custom design, or a collection made for other brands. SEO helps you bring that story to the people looking for what you offer. Start with the basics, focus on what makes your business unique, and keep making your website more useful and discoverable. With the right SEO foundations, your jewelry doesn’t have to rely on going viral to get noticed.
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Today, we’re announcing our plans to support
a shared AI training control
in robots.txt. This will help websites express their AI training preferences across multiple AI
providers in a single step and is based on work from the AIPREF working group at the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). This builds on our long history of providing website owners with
clear controls, including through
Google-Extended,
the AI training control we’ve offered since 2023.
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Most content strategies don’t fail on their merits. They stall out because content strategy buy-in never arrives from the person who funds the work, approves it, or executes part of it. That might be a client-side VP, your own executive team, a sales director, or a legal reviewer who has never opened your editorial calendar.
The data supports the gap. Content Marketing Institute research ranks cross-department collaboration among the top content marketing challenges for 21 percent of B2B marketers.
Content marketers get very good at doing the work but still struggle to convince stakeholders how necessary it is. Those are separate skills, and we need plenty of practice in both.
If you feel like you’re failing to get the right stakeholders on side for your strategy, read on. You’ll learn how to explain content strategy to non-marketers, so they understand the rationale enough to defend it (even when you aren’t in the room).
When stakeholders deny or ignore content strategy, we usually blame the audience. Leadership doesn’t get it. The client won’t listen. Sales ignored the brief (again).
That explanation feels comfortable, but it’s not always the truth. The question is, how well are we explaining ourselves?
The same pattern shows up in every department. A client executive, a product manager, and a compliance reviewer all evaluate your recommendation against a different set of priorities. A decision that looks obvious to a content strategist can read as a cost or a liability to someone who only thinks about content for 20 minutes a month.
Stakeholder education in content marketing is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. Nobody is born knowing how to translate a content audit into CFO speak. You practice, watch what explanations tend to land, and adjust. Here’s what I’ve found works consistently.
Lead with why the decision matters to the specific person in front of you, in their terms, before you name a framework or tactic. This does more for getting buy-in for content strategy than any deck you build.
Attention follows relevance. Open with a scenario that matches your stakeholder’s priorities, then connect your recommendation to it.
Use this same move across different audiences:
Translate your content strategy into the currency your audience already trades in, then explain the specifics where you need sign-off. Most collaborators tune in if you’re covering cost, risk, or speed.
Beyond buzzwords, root your argument in data they recognize. A content strategist lives in organic sessions, keyword rankings, and time on page. A sales leader watches pipeline contribution and deal velocity; a CFO watches customer acquisition cost and ROI. You don’t have to drop your own metrics, just connect them. Bring the organic sessions that became pipeline; tie your rankings to the deals they influenced. Pull evidence from the dashboard they already open, then draw the line from your metric to theirs.
Nearly every content strategy shift arrives attached to an alarming headline. A traffic decline. A ranking drop. A platform change nobody controls.
The Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 Google searches and found click-through fell from 15% to 8% when an AI Overview appeared. Read that insight cold in a quarterly review and your client hears one message: our investment is evaporating.
Speak to those concerns before they raise them. State the numbers plainly, then correct potential wrong conclusions immediately. Something like this works: “organic clicks are getting harder to win on informational queries as search engine trends shift, which is why we’re moving effort toward pages that convert and toward becoming the source these systems cite.”
Skipping an uncomfortable number doesn’t make it disappear. Your audience fills in the blank themselves, usually with something worse than reality, and you find out during Q&A after you’ve lost the floor.
Naming the fear yourself also reads as honesty rather than spin. You’re reassuring stakeholders you already see the problem they’re worried about, and you brought a plan for it.
Two techniques work together here to educate stakeholders. First, translate jargon honestly.
Digital marketers have a terminology problem, and pretending otherwise costs you credibility with collaborators outside our industry. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) describe heavily overlapping ideas, and many vendors define them differently. Clarify the terms you’re using rather than posturing.
Skipping this step carries a measurable cost. A survey of 1,000 US workers found that 43 percent believe corporate jargon alienates employees who do not understand it, and a phrase as familiar as “content is king” left 13 percent unsure of its meaning. Assume less shared vocabulary than you think you have.
Second, name what stays the same before you name what changes. Most new content tactics still rest on fundamentals your stakeholders recognize, including clear writing, logical structure, and demonstrated expertise. Optimizing for AI citations relies on many of the same signals that Google’s E-E-A-T guidance has rewarded for years.
Lead with that overlap and your collaborators read the shift as evolution. Lead with everything that’s new and different, and you’ve accidentally told the room that last year’s investment was a wash, which might make them slower to fund the next one.
None of this dumbs the idea down. You’re sequencing it. Familiar first, unfamiliar second, so your content strategy buy-in comes easier.
Nodding along in a meeting and acting on something afterward are two different outcomes. Content strategists must close the distance between them.
General recommendations rarely get implemented. Checklists do. Short do-and-don’t lists do. Before-and-after comparisons do, because they already connect strategy to action rather than asking your audience to do it alone.
Compare two versions of the same recommendation:
Vague version: Make your product pages more useful for AI-driven search.
Usable version:
It’s the same idea, but only one version gets to the finish line.
Tie your content recommendations to your audience’s own material wherever possible. Pull up their actual product page instead of a competitor screenshot. Use their support tickets, their survey data, and last quarter’s best-performing asset. A recommendation built on their evidence lands as relevant in a way that a generic best-practices list never will.
This approach also makes your content marketing training framework easier to repeat. Swap the examples or tactics, but keep the structure.
Always try to hand over something portable. A one-page reference, a short checklist, or a single slide they can forward to the right person. Three weeks later, nobody remembers the strategy session, but they can still open your action items.
How you deliver your content strategy to stakeholders matters as much as the material.
Invite questions throughout the session rather than in the final five minutes. Clarify confusion early, and you’re more likely to keep your audience engaged in the strategy. Pause after major points and ask something specific. “Does that match what you’re seeing on your side?” gets better responses than “Any questions?”
Bring in more than one voice when the topic spans disciplines. If the conversation touches content, technical implementation, and paid distribution channels, let the person who owns each area speak to it. You gain accuracy, because nobody has to fake depth of expertise outside their lane. You’re also modeling the cross-functional collaboration you’re asking your audience for.
Read the room as you go. A one-way info dump covers your material. A conversation encourages retention, which is the outcome that matters. Finishing every slide means little if nobody understood the takeaways.
Buy-in follows understanding, so confirm the strategic rationale lands. State the challenge or problem informing your strategy before they imagine a worse one. Skip the marketing acronyms or define them honestly. Anchor new ideas to what stays the same, providing tangible examples and specific next steps.
Start with their stakes instead of your framework. Connect content recommendations to organizational cost, risk, or speed before getting into details with tactics. Root the recommendation in data they already track.
When content strategy presentations are a two-way conversation, marketers can clarify confusion and keep stakeholders engaged. Follow the conversation with portable materials that capture the action items, and people are far more likely to follow through.
Content strategy buy-in often breaks down in translation, not in the thinking behind it. Open with what your stakeholder already measures. State the problem before they imagine a worse one. Connect the tactics they already trust to the ones you introduce as new. Run your strategy session as a conversation, not a broadcast.
The strongest content marketing programs require more than one team to execute, which means all your collaborators must understand the plan. Learning to explain content strategy to non-marketers is how that happens.
At NP Digital, we treat this as part of the work rather than an afterthought. A content strategy nobody can defend internally rarely gets funded twice. To see what that looks like applied to your own program, talk to our team.
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Welcome to the recap of the October 2026 SEO Update by Yoast! This month, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss dug into the latest search news, from Google’s multimodal filters to AI spam crackdowns, and everything in between. Below, we’ve distilled some interesting topics from the discussion, so you can focus on what matters most for your site.
Watch the full October 2026 SEO Update by Yoast on YouTube.
What’s new?
Google Search Console now lets you filter searches that combine images and text. This helps you understand how people discover your content through visual searches.
Why it matters:
Actionable tips: Use descriptive file names (e.g., siamese-cat-blue eyes.jpeg, not IMG_1234.jpg), helpful alt text, and contextual surrounding content to improve discoverability.
What’s new?
Google is doubling down on detecting and penalizing AI-generated spam, including:
Why it matters:
What’s new?
OpenAI removed UTM parameters (e.g., ?utm_source=chatgpt) from ChatGPT links, and other AI platforms may follow. This means:
Why it matters:
What’s new?
Google is penalizing sites that:
Why it matters:
What’s new?
AI crawlers (like those from Google and LLMs) access as much as they can, including RSS feeds and sitemaps. This means:
Why it matters:
What’s new?
Google’s Universal Cart lets users purchase products from multiple merchants in one transaction, without ever visiting your site.
Why it matters:
What’s new?
Why it matters:
Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for the next SEO Update by Yoast. The next show will be on the November 24, 2026, at 4 PM CET / 10 AM ET.
Can’t wait until later this month? You can always watch the previous editions whenever suits you, or even listen along on Spotify.
The post The October 2026 SEO Update by Yoast recap appeared first on Yoast.
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Adding images to your posts and product pages makes your content more engaging. Good images support your message and improve your chances of appearing in image search, visual search, and AI-powered results. However, you need to describe those images properly. Alt text helps screen readers, search engines, and AI understand what your images show.
alt tag describes images for visually impaired users, while the title attribute offers optional tooltips.Watch the video for a quick walkthrough of alt and title attributes.
This is a complete HTML image tag:
<img src="image.jpg" alt="image description" title="image tooltip">
An image’s alt and title attributes are commonly referred to as ‘alt tag’ or ‘alt text’, and ‘title tag’. Technically, they’re not tags but attributes, but you don’t need to worry about that. These attributes allow you to add textual descriptions of your image, which can help with SEO and accessibility.
The alt tag is used by screen readers, an assistive technology used by people with visual impairments, for example. These screen readers tell them what is on the image by reading the alt tag. It’s not just screen readers that read alt text, though. Search engines like Google also use this information to understand the context of an image; to find out what an image shows, and its purpose.
Images you use should have alt text. Not only for SEO purposes but also for accessibility. People using a screen reader will otherwise not know what the image is about. One thing to note, however, is that not every image needs alt text. Instead, think of alt text as part of your content, consider its value to your reader, and be mindful of it. A purely decorative image doesn’t necessarily need an alt text. Meanwhile, an image with statistics should have alt text that explains what the statistics represent.
The title attribute shows as a tooltip when someone hovers over an image. You don’t need it for most images. Screen readers don’t reliably announce title attributes, and mobile users can’t see them. If you have information worth sharing, put it in the page text instead. The title attribute is optional everywhere except on embedded frames, where it serves as the frame’s accessible name. This is the only way screen reader users can tell what an iframe contains. Images don’t need it because alt already does that job.
If you have images in your design that are purely there for design reasons, please put these images in your CSS and not in your HTML. If you can’t do anything about these images being there, give them an empty alt attribute, like so:
<img src="image.png" alt="">
The empty alt attribute makes sure that screen readers skip over the image. If you’re using WordPress, you can leave the “Alt text” field in the Image settings empty.
Tip: Use our SEO Checker tool to quickly scan your page and find out how many of your images have alt text.
Google’s article about images has a heading “Use descriptive filenames, titles, and alt text”. This is no coincidence. Google places a relatively high value on alt text. They use it to determine what is in the image and how it relates to the surrounding text. Adding good alt text can be a chore, especially if you use many images. For sites with large product catalogs, we built Yoast AI Generate for image alt text that reads your product data and generates a relevant alt tag. Validate and apply.
You should always add images to your posts and pages to make your content more descriptive and appealing. By adding alt text to your images, you provide screen readers, AI platforms, and search engine users with a textual description of what’s on that image. This improves accessibility, and including your keywords helps search engines and AI platforms understand your product images.
We’re not saying you should spam your focus keyphrase into every alt tag. You need good, high-quality, relevant images for your posts, with the focus keyword in the alt text where it makes sense. Here’s Google’s advice on choosing a good alt text:
When writing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (also known as keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.
If your image is of a specific product, include both the full product name and the product ID in the alt tag so it can be found more easily. In general, if a keyphrase could be useful for finding something that is in the image, include it in the alt tag if you can. Also, don’t forget to change the image file name to something describing what’s on it.
WordPress makes it easy to add alt text. When you upload an image, fill in the Alt Text field in the media library. WordPress copies the filename if you leave it blank, but that’s not helpful. Take a moment to write a proper description. WordPress also lets you mark an image as decorative, if necessary. Yoast SEO AI+ and Yoast WooCommerce SEO generate alt text for your product images with AI, right in the product editor or the Yoast SEO bulk editor. Review the suggestions and apply what works
Today, many people use the cameras on their smartphones to search for things online. They point their phones at a chair or a pair of shoes and ask Google to find it. AI Mode in Search accepts photos, and Google Lens helps shoppers identify products on the street. All of this means that your alt text matters more than ever.
Google’s AI uses computer vision to analyze images. While it’s good at recognizing objects and patterns, it has trouble understanding context and specific product details. Your alt text can help these machines to see by offering extra information about the images. This way, you give AI platforms what they need to match your images to people’s searches.
When you use the Lens app to search for a product, Google combines what it captures in the images with what you wrote about it. Here’s an example: if your alt text says “red waterproof running shoe, size 10, breathable mesh upper,” the AI connects that description to the visual input. As a result, your image might appear when someone searches for “waterproof running shoes” or uses Lens on a similar shoe.
AI Overviews work the same way. Google pulls images from across the web to illustrate its answers, and it could use your alt text to decide which images fit the query. Therefore, good descriptions increase your chances of showing up in these results.
Here is how to optimize for visual search. You can find more tips in our image SEO article:
Write alt text that answers the question “what is this and why does it matter?” Include product names, features, colors, and context. Keep it natural, and do not even think about stuffing keywords.
Add structured data to your images, which describes your content to search engines. Furthermore, it helps AI platforms understand and categorize your images.
Use descriptive file names, so instead of “IMG_1234.jpg,” try “red-waterproof-running-shoe.jpg.”
Test your images, so upload them to Google Lens to see what comes up. If you’re not happy with the results, adjust your alt text and try again.
Remember, the goal stays the same. You’re helping machines understand your images as we humans do. Do that well, and you can show up in more places, including the list of AI platforms that keeps growing by the day.
We all know that writing a good alt text for hundreds of product images takes a lot of time. AI can help you do that job a lot faster.
AI alt text tools use computer vision to analyze your images and automatically generate descriptions. Upload a photo of a coffee mug in the product editor or the Yoast SEO bulk editor. Add a focus keyphrase in Yoast SEO, and the AI returns alt text like ‘blue ceramic mug with handle on wooden table’.
The technology has improved quickly over the years. Today, good tools can accurately recognize products, colors, settings, actions, and more. For e-commerce sites with large catalogs, this can save a huge amount of time. Clear the backlog without writing every description yourself.
Unfortunately, generic AI doesn’t understand your products, but ours reads your product data. It cannot tell whether your navy shirt is blue or whether the model is smiling. It does not distinguish between decorative images and those that carry crucial information. Most importantly, it cannot judge whether its description helps someone who cannot see the image.
It’s good to remember that the AI is not the expert; you are. The results it produces give you a good starting point, but you still need to review and edit. In some cases, you even have to rewrite or regenerate it completely.
Use AI for the biggest jobs, like your product catalog. That way, you can focus on making the best possible alt text for your homepage hero image, landing pages, and content that explains complex ideas. Charts, infographics, and screenshots deserve your own words, because AI often produces generic descriptions for them.
Keep it simple:
Yoast SEO AI+ and Yoast WooCommerce SEO do this for product images, right in the Yoast SEO bulk editor. You only have to add focus keyphrases, generate the alt text, review and approve the suggestions.
The speed at which the AI works is great, but please use your own judgment. Let AI handle the volume, but use your eyes and expertise to ensure every image serves your readers.
We have a popular, in-depth article about image SEO. That post describes many different ways to optimize images but is relatively lacking in detail when it comes to alt and title tags. Think of this as an add-on to that article. That article is recommended reading if you want to learn more good practices for image SEO.
Read more: Optimizing images for search engines »
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Yoast already shows you which product images are missing alt text. Now you can fix them. Yoast AI Generate for image alt text is new in Yoast WooCommerce SEO 17.0, out today alongside Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium 28.8.
You generate alt text from your product data and the photo itself, then review and apply what you’re happy with. Hundreds of images without alt text? You can clear the backlog without writing every description yourself.
Yoast AI image alt text builds each suggestion from your product data, your focus keyphrase and the image itself.
Alt text has always done two jobs. It lets screen readers describe images to people who are blind or have low vision, and it tells search engines what an image shows. Both matter more now. Image search and AI-driven discovery are growing, and descriptive alt text, like “men’s brown leather lace-up boots, side view”, is one of the clearest signals you control. Accessibility rules are tightening too, especially if you sell to customers in the EU or UK, and alt text is one of the first things to get right. For a store, it’s practical: a shopper using a screen reader can’t see your product photo, so your alt text is their only description of it.
You can use Yoast AI image alt text in two places, depending on how much you need to fix.
The AI features support all languages, though performance may vary for less widely used languages.
Yoast AI image alt text is included in Yoast WooCommerce SEO at no extra cost, and so in Yoast SEO AI+, which includes it. There’s no separate add-on to buy, and your plan price doesn’t change. As with all of Yoast’s AI features, you can see your usage in the Sparks counter.
Yoast AI image alt text isn’t available in Yoast SEO for Shopify.
Running a WooCommerce store on Yoast SEO or Yoast SEO Premium? You can already see which product images are missing alt text in the Bulk Editor. To fix them with Yoast AI image alt text, you need Yoast WooCommerce SEO.
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