Learn why translating product image alt text unlocks Google Images traffic for international Shopify stores.
TL;DR: Translating your product image alt text is one of the most overlooked SEO opportunities for international Shopify stores.
While most merchants focus on translating product titles and descriptions, they forget about alt text – leaving significant organic traffic on the table. Here’s why it matters and how Image Translate Easy helps you fix it quickly.
If you’ve invested in translating your Shopify store for international markets, you’re already ahead of most competitors. But here’s what many merchants miss: your product images have their own SEO potential, and it’s locked behind a simple text field called “alt text.” In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to unlock that potential.
Alt text (alternative text) is a description attached to an image that serves two purposes:
When someone searches for “blue running shoes” on Google Images, Google matches that query against the alt text of indexed images. If your product image has the alt text “blue running shoes for men,” you have a chance to appear in those results.
Now imagine a French customer searching for “chaussures de course bleues” – if your alt text is still in English, your product is invisible to them. This is where translating your product images becomes essential.
Most Shopify translation apps handle product titles, descriptions, and meta tags. But alt text? It’s often ignored because:
This is exactly why your translated Shopify store still has English text in images – the translation gap that most merchants overlook.
This creates a massive opportunity. While your competitors leave their alt text untranslated, you can capture international Google Images traffic by simply translating these few words per product.
Consider these statistics:
| Traffic Source | Typical E-commerce Share |
|---|---|
| Google Search (text) | 40-50% |
| Google Images | 20-30% |
| Direct traffic | 15-20% |
| Social media | 5-10% |
That 20-30% from Google Images is often higher-intent traffic. Someone searching for product images is usually closer to making a purchase than someone doing a general text search.
For international markets, this percentage can be even higher. Visual search transcends language barriers – customers often start their product research with images, especially when shopping from foreign stores. If you’re already selling to EU countries with different VAT rates, you know how important localization is.
Here’s an example for a product image of a leather laptop bag:
| Language | Alt Text |
|---|---|
| English (original) | Brown leather laptop bag with shoulder strap |
| German | Braune Leder-Laptoptasche mit Schultergurt |
| French | Sacoche pour ordinateur portable en cuir marron avec bandoulière |
| Spanish | Bolso marrón de cuero para portátil con correa para el hombro |
Notice how each translation uses the natural search terms a customer in that market would use. This isn’t just word-for-word translation – it’s localized for how people actually search.
Shopify stores alt text as a metafield on your product media. As we explained in our guide on what Shopify Translate & Adapt doesn’t translate, the native tools miss this entirely. Translating it manually requires:
For a store with 100 products and 5 images each, that’s 500 translations per language. If you sell in 5 markets, that’s 2,500 translations – done manually.
This is exactly why we built the bulk alt text translation feature in Image Translate Easy. With one click, you can translate all your product alt text to any language Shopify supports.
Whether you translate manually or use a Shopify image translation app, follow these guidelines:
After translating your alt text, monitor these metrics in Google Search Console:
Most merchants see results within 2-4 weeks as Google re-crawls and re-indexes their images with the new alt text. Check out our free Shopify tools to help optimize your store further.
Translating your alt text is one of the highest-ROI SEO activities for international Shopify stores. It takes minimal effort but can unlock significant organic traffic from Google Images.
Alt text is just one part of the puzzle. If you want to go further, learn how to show different product images for different languages – because sometimes you need entirely different visuals for different markets.
Ready to translate your product images and alt text? Check out our complete guide on how to translate product images in Shopify – including step-by-step instructions and automation options.