**Q: Does alt text really affect rankings that much?**

Here's what happened to a small online course platform in March 2024. They had decent content and about 3,000 monthly visitors. Then Google's image search algorithm update hit.

Their traffic dropped from 3,000 to 1,800 visitors in two weeks. The founder was panicking because they'd done "everything right" with keywords and meta descriptions.

**A: The problem was invisible to most SEO tools.**

They had 847 images across their site. Only 23 had alt text. The rest? Just filename strings like "IMG_4829.jpg" or worse, completely blank alt attributes.

What's surprising is that 60% of their organic traffic was coming through Google Images for educational diagrams and infographics. When the algorithm changed how it evaluated image relevance, their images basically disappeared from results.

**Q: What did they actually fix?**

The solution took one person three days. They added descriptive alt text to every image, focusing on what the image showed and why it mattered to learners. For a diagram about CSS positioning, instead of "diagram.png" they wrote "CSS position property comparison showing relative absolute and fixed positioning differences."

Within six weeks, traffic recovered to 4,200 monthly visitors. The non-obvious part? Image search started sending them qualified visitors who converted at 2.3x their previous rate.

**Q: Why does this matter for beginners?**

Most beginners focus on headline keywords and miss that search engines can't see images. They need your text descriptions. Every blank alt attribute is a missed opportunity to show up in relevant searches. It's not just about accessibility, though that matters too. It's about being found.