I've been working on a Shopify app called AltMaster and just launched it. It's free right now, and I'd genuinely love feedback from store owners who've dealt with this problem.
Totally free for now. No catch. Just want real feedback before I think about pricing. Thanks!
Shopify doesn't carry alt text over to variant images - most merchants have no idea
Working on a client's store recently ~250 products, 4-5 variants each, clean catalog, good photography.
SEO audit revealed almost every variant image had blank alt text. Not negligence - they just didn't know Shopify requires you to set alt text on each variant image manually, one by one, inside each product.
250 products × 5 variants = ~1,000 individual edits. Nobody is doing that.
And the cost is real: those images are invisible to Google. No product name, no color, no size - just a CDN file path. For fashion, home decor, or anything visually driven, that's a chunk of image search traffic just gone.
I got frustrated enough with this that I built a small tool to fix it - you define a template once (product title, variant color, size, vendor, etc.) and it applies across the full catalog including all variant images. New products sync automatically.
Not trying to plug it here - genuinely curious if this is something others run into. Is this a known blind spot in the Shopify SEO world, or is it always a surprise when you flag it?
Day one I said it wrong. She didn't correct me. So I just... kept going.
Now 8 months in, everyone on the team says it the way I say it because I introduced her to most of them. I have essentially renamed this woman. She responds to it. I don't know if she gave up correcting people or if she genuinely doesn't mind but I am too far gone to find out.
Her name is on her email signature. I have seen the correct spelling. I know how it should sound. I close the email and move on every time.
I think about this at least twice a week.
So I just realized I've been doing this thing for years and never thought twice about it - whenever I walk into a room and forget why I came, I go back to where I started, stand in the exact same spot, and wait for it to come back to me.
And the weird part? It works almost every time.
I mentioned it casually to my roommate today and he looked at me like I had three heads. Now I'm genuinely wondering if this is a normal thing people do or if I've just been silently weird this whole time.
Do you guys do this too?