Good alt text describes what an image shows and why it is on the page, in plain words, usually in a single short sentence. That one habit serves two audiences at once. A screen reader user hears the description in place of the image. A search engine reads the same text to understand what the picture is and how it connects to the page around it. At Peak Marketing, we write alt text for law firm websites with the screen reader user in mind first, because accurate, specific descriptions are also the ones search engines reward. A keyword belongs in alt text only when it honestly describes the image.
Most websites get this wrong in one of two ways. Some leave the field empty on images that carry real information. Others stuff it with phrases like “best personal injury lawyer near me” on a photo of a courthouse. Both choices fail the visitor, and neither one helps rankings.
Who Actually Reads Your Alt Text
Alt text is an attribute inside the HTML image tag. Visitors never see it unless the image fails to load. It still gets read constantly.
Screen readers announce it aloud. A blind visitor reviewing your attorney bio page hears “Attorney Maria Lopez standing in front of the Ada County Courthouse” instead of nothing, or worse, a file name like IMG_4471.jpg. People on slow mobile connections see it when images stall.
Google reads it too. Google’s image guidelines say it combines alt text with computer vision and the surrounding page content to figure out what an image shows. When an image is used as a link, Google treats its alt text much like the anchor text of a text link. Those are two jobs, but they ask for the same thing: a clear, honest description.
What Useful Alt Text Looks Like
The easiest test is to picture yourself describing the image to someone on a call who cannot see your screen. You would not say “image of a picture.” You would say what matters about it, quickly, and stop.
Here is how that plays out with images common on law firm and small business sites.
| Image | Weak alt text | Better alt text |
| Headshot on an attorney bio | attorney photo | Attorney James Reed in a navy suit at his Boise office |
| Photo for a car accident blog post | car accident lawyer car accident attorney Idaho | Two cars with front-end damage stopped at a rural intersection |
| Firm logo in the header, linking home | logo | Reed Injury Law home |
| Team photo on the About page | team | Six members of the Reed Injury Law staff outside their Twin Falls office |
| Screenshot of a 5-star review | review | Five-star Google review praising quick replies during a workers’ comp claim |
A few habits make the right column work. Skip “image of” and “picture of,” since screen readers already announce that it is an image. Put the most important detail first. Aim for roughly 125 characters or less, which keeps the description easy to listen to. Use proper punctuation so the screen reader pauses in natural places.
Not Every Image Needs a Description
The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative publishes an alt text decision tree that sorts images by the job they do on the page. The right alt text depends on that job, not on how the image looks.
Informative images
Photos and simple graphics that add meaning get a short description of that meaning. A photo of your actual office tells a visitor something real about your firm, so describe it.
Functional images
An image inside a link or button should describe the action or destination. A magnifying glass icon becomes “Search.” A phone icon that opens a contact form becomes “Contact us.” Describing the icon’s appearance helps no one.
Decorative images
Borders, background textures, and stock photos that sit next to text saying the same thing should get an empty alt attribute, written as alt=””. That tells a screen reader to skip the image. Leaving the attribute out entirely is different, and worse, because some screen readers will read the file name instead.
One caution here: never use an empty alt on a linked image with no other text. That leaves the link with no label at all.
Images of text
If an image contains words that appear nowhere else on the page, such as a promotional banner or a quote graphic, the alt text should include those words.
Complex images
Charts, infographics, and settlement result graphs hold more than a sentence can carry. Give them a brief alt summary, then put the full data in the page text or a table nearby. This also hands Google indexable text it would otherwise miss.
How Peak Marketing Approaches Keywords in Alt Text
Google’s own guidance asks for alt text that is useful and information-rich, uses keywords appropriately, and fits the content of the page. The word “appropriately” carries most of the weight in that sentence.
Our rule is simple. Write the honest description first. Then check whether a target phrase already fits. On a page about truck accident claims, a photo of a jackknifed semi on I-84 can carry the words “truck accident” because that is what the photo shows. A stock photo of a handshake on the same page cannot.
Alt text is mostly a signal for Google Images and for understanding the image itself. It will not lift a thin page into the top results on its own. Treat it as one supporting piece of on-page SEO alongside descriptive file names, captions, and relevant surrounding text. A file named reed-law-boise-office.webp does more than IMG_4471.jpg ever will.
Repeating the same keyword across every image on a page reads as spam to Google and as noise to a screen reader user, who has to sit through it each time.
Fixing the Alt Text Already on Your Site
Most firms have years of images uploaded with no alt text or with whatever the old developer typed in. You do not need to fix everything in one afternoon. A steady process works better.
- Crawl the site with a tool like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit, or Semrush. Export every image flagged for missing or empty alt text.
- Sort the list by page importance. Practice area pages, attorney bios, and the homepage come before old blog posts.
- Decide each image’s job using the categories above. Mark decorative images with alt=”” on purpose rather than leaving them blank by accident.
- Write descriptions in a shared spreadsheet before touching the site. A second person can catch vague or stuffed entries faster in a list than in WordPress.
- Update the alt text in your CMS. In WordPress, edit it in the Media Library so the change applies wherever the image is reused.
- Spot-check with a screen reader. NVDA is free on Windows, and VoiceOver is built into every Mac and iPhone. Listening to a page for five minutes will show you problems no crawler catches.
After the cleanup, add alt text to your publishing checklist. New blog posts and pages should not go live without it.
Better Alt Text, One Image at a Time
Alt text that serves people also serves search engines. Describe what the image shows and why it is there. Use a keyword only when it is true to the picture. Leave decorative images empty on purpose, and give charts and infographics a full text version on the page.
If your firm’s website has hundreds of images and no clear record of what is on them, that is a common place to start. Peak Marketing handles alt text audits as part of our on-page and technical SEO work for law firms, with no long-term contracts. Reach out and we will show you what your images are telling Google and your visitors today.
Sources
- Google image SEO best practices, Google Search Central
- An alt Decision Tree, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
- Is Alt Text a Ranking Factor for Google Image Search?, Search Engine Journal
- Decorative Images and Alt Text, AltText.ai
