Alt Tags - how important for SEO?

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I know alt tags should be on an image, however at the moment I have 23,741 missing on the site, how important are these? It's a big project for someone to update & I need some justification

Thanks Mozzers

[BeckyKey]

Thanks everyone, I'll prioritise important pages and see how we get on with rankings

[EGOL]

Alt tags are generally easy work.  Good work for a trainee with minor oversight.   Hire help if you have more important work.

[Maslavista]

Each image should have an alt text. Not just for SEO purposes but also because blind and visually impaired people otherwise won’t know what the image is for.

[julie-getonthemap]

How are the pages ranking now? If they're where you want them to be, I might agree with you that would be overwhelming.

But, if you have pages that could rank higher and bring you profit, then alt tags might be the thing that moves the page up. I have a bunch of landing pages that rank really well for competitive local searches. I've given them alt tags, embedded video, schema markup, heading tags.

On other pages, I've asked Google to no index. If it's not important to be found in the search results, no need to use SEO markup.