Most WordPress sites have alt text. The problem is that most of it is wrong — not factually wrong, but strategically wrong. And in some cases, generic alt text is actively working against your search rankings.
Here’s why.
Alt text isn’t just for accessibility
The original purpose of alt text was accessibility — screen readers use it to describe images to visually impaired users. That’s still important. But search engines also read alt text as a signal about what a page is about, what it’s relevant for, and how it should rank. When you write alt text that simply describes what’s in the image — “woman sitting at a desk” or “product on white background” — you’re fulfilling the accessibility requirement but leaving the SEO value completely on the table.
The keyword problem
Search engines use alt text to understand the relationship between an image and the page it appears on. An image of bifold doors on a page optimised for “aluminium bifold doors London” should have alt text that reflects that context. The same image on a page about “sliding doors” should have different alt text. The image hasn’t changed — the context has. And context is everything.
Most alt text tools don’t know what page an image is on. They pull images from your media library and describe what they see. That might give you “sleek modern doors in a bright living room” — which is descriptive, readable, and completely useless for SEO. It tells search engines nothing about what your page is trying to rank for.
The site-wide keyword problem
Some tools offer an SEO keywords feature — you enter a list of target keywords and the tool incorporates them into generated alt text. This sounds useful, but it creates its own problem: the same keywords get applied to every image across your entire site, regardless of which page the image appears on.
If you run a glazing company and set “aluminium windows” as your site keyword, every image on your site — including your showroom photos, your team page, your blog post images — gets alt text that references aluminium windows. This isn’t SEO. It’s keyword stuffing at scale. It dilutes the relevance of every page and sends confusing signals to search engines about what individual pages are actually about.
Effective alt text SEO requires page-level context. The keyword for an image on your bifold doors product page should be your bifold doors keyphrase. The keyword for an image on your roof lanterns page should be your roof lanterns keyphrase. A site-wide keyword list can’t make that distinction — because it doesn’t know which page each image is on.
When generic alt text becomes a problem
There are two scenarios where generic alt text actively hurts you.
The first is keyword cannibalisation. If you have ten product images all described in vague lifestyle terms, you’re sending no clear signal to search engines about what those pages are relevant for. Your competitors, who have taken the time to write keyword-rich alt text, are beating you in image search and in page relevance scores.
The second is missed context. If your Yoast focus keyphrase is “composite decking installers London” but your hero image says “outdoor decking in a garden,” you’ve missed an opportunity to reinforce your page’s relevance. Every image is a chance to send a keyword signal. Generic alt text wastes every one of those chances.
What good alt text looks like
Good alt text does three things simultaneously. It describes the image accurately enough to serve accessibility requirements. It incorporates the page’s target keyword naturally — not stuffed, but present. And it reflects the specific context of that page, not just the image in isolation.
“Composite decking installed by London specialists with built-in lighting and glass balustrade” is good alt text. It’s specific, it’s accurate, it’s keyword-relevant. “Modern outdoor decking” is not.
The fix
The solution isn’t to manually rewrite every piece of alt text on your site — for most sites with hundreds or thousands of images, that’s not realistic. The solution is to use a tool that understands page context: one that reads your SEO plugin’s focus keyphrase, the page title, the surrounding content, and then generates alt text that’s relevant to that specific page — not just a description of pixels.
That’s exactly what ALTification does. Instead of scanning your media library in isolation, it scans the page each image appears on, reads your Yoast or Rank Math focus keyphrase, and generates alt text that actually works for SEO — not just accessibility.
If you’re using a media-library-only tool, you’re getting half the picture. And half the picture means half the SEO value.