Why Missing Alt Text Is Costing Your Blogger Posts Traffic

A food blogger I corresponded with could not understand why a competitor's recipe post, published months after her nearly identical one, kept outranking her in image search results that sent noticeable amounts of traffic to the competitor's site. Her photography was better. Her recipe was more detailed. The actual difference, once we looked closely at both posts' source code, was that every single image on her page had an empty alt attribute, while the competing post had described each photo specifically. Search engines could not tell what her images actually showed, and image search traffic went almost entirely to the post that told them clearly.

What alt text is actually doing behind the scenes

Alt text exists primarily as an accessibility feature, read aloud by screen readers for visitors who cannot see the image itself, and that purpose alone would justify writing it carefully regardless of any search benefit at all. But alt text also happens to be one of the few places where a search engine gets a direct, explicit description of what an image actually contains, since the engine cannot see the picture in anything close to the way a visual description provides. A photo with no alt text at all is functionally invisible to a search engine's image understanding, no matter how sharp or well composed the photograph itself happens to be.

This gap matters more on Blogger specifically because the default Blogger image upload process does not prompt for alt text the way some other platforms do, which means it is genuinely easy to publish dozens of posts, image after image, without a single one ever getting a description added, simply because the editor never asked and nothing visually indicated anything was missing.

Writing alt text that actually helps instead of just existing

Generic, vague alt text barely helps more than leaving the field empty, and it is worth being specific rather than settling for the first short phrase that comes to mind. Alt text reading simply "cake" on a photo of a specific layered lemon cake with a particular frosting technique tells a search engine almost nothing distinctive about that image compared to the millions of other cake photos it already has indexed. Alt text reading "three-layer lemon cake with swiss meringue buttercream and candied lemon slices" gives a search engine, and a screen reader user, something genuinely specific to work with, something that actually distinguishes this particular image from every other cake photo competing for the same search.

The habit of being specific here connects directly to the broader thinking in basic SEO settings most new bloggers skip, where several of the most overlooked settings share this same pattern: a field that takes thirty extra seconds to fill in properly, routinely skipped by new bloggers in a hurry to publish, that quietly affects how much of the available search traffic for a given post a blog actually ends up capturing over time.

Where Blogger actually hides the alt text field

Finding the alt text field in Blogger's editor takes a specific sequence that is not obvious on first use. Click directly on an inserted image inside the post editor, and a small properties panel appears above it with a few icon options. The alt text field lives inside that panel rather than anywhere in the main toolbar most people check first, which is exactly why so many bloggers publish for months without ever discovering where to add it, simply because nothing in the interface points toward that properties panel unless an image is actively selected first.

Checking older posts for missing alt text is worth doing as a dedicated pass rather than only fixing it going forward, since a popular older post with strong images and zero alt text is leaving search traffic on the table every single day it stays that way. Working through a blog's most visited older posts first, adding specific alt text to each image, is typically a far better use of an afternoon than writing an entirely new post from scratch.

A small habit with a compounding effect

Alt text is the kind of detail that costs almost nothing to do correctly the first time, a minute or two per post, yet compounds meaningfully once a blog has published hundreds of images across its archive. The food blogger whose competitor kept outranking her added specific alt text across her most visited posts over a single weekend and saw a measurable shift in image search referrals within a few weeks, not because her photography or recipes had changed at all, but because search engines could finally understand, in plain written terms, exactly what every one of those photos actually showed.

A few habits worth avoiding along the way

Stuffing alt text with repeated keywords rather than an honest description tends to backfire rather than help, since search engines are reasonably good at recognizing text written for a crawler instead of a reader, and that recognition can work against a post rather than for it. Alt text describing a decorative divider image or a repeated background flourish is usually unnecessary entirely, since those elements add nothing useful for either a screen reader listener or a search engine trying to understand the post's actual content, and an empty alt attribute is the correct, deliberate choice specifically for that narrow category of purely decorative images. The goal throughout is accuracy and usefulness, not volume, and a short, specific, honest description consistently outperforms a longer one stuffed with terms chosen mainly to chase search traffic rather than to describe what is actually on screen.