What is alt text? Why your adventure photos need it

Alt text is the description Google can’t see on its own

Every outdoor business website has the same problem. Dozens of incredible photos from guided trips, scenic overlooks, gear in action - and behind each one, a blank alt text field or a filename like IMG_4523.jpg.

That blank field costs you twice. Screen readers skip the image entirely for visually impaired visitors, and Google indexes it as meaningless noise. Your best marketing asset, the photos that make someone picture themselves on that river or trail, becomes invisible to two audiences that matter.

Alt text is the short written description attached to an image in your website’s HTML. It looks like this: alt="four guests in a yellow raft hitting Lunch Counter rapid on the Snake River". When a screen reader encounters your photo, it reads that text aloud. When Google crawls your page, it reads that text to understand what the image shows.

The fix takes an afternoon. The payoff compounds for years.

Why alt text matters more than most outfitters think

Google Images accounts for roughly 10% of all Google search traffic. That’s a separate discovery channel most outdoor businesses ignore completely. When someone searches “fly fishing Yellowstone” or “whitewater rafting Colorado” in Google Images, your photos can show up, but only if Google knows what they contain.

Here’s what makes this worth your time: 63% of people who click an image in Google search then visit the website where that image lives. That’s not a bounce. That’s a potential booking.

Beyond search, there’s a legal dimension. Over 8,600 ADA Title III federal lawsuits were filed in 2025, and more than 5,000 targeted websites and digital properties specifically. Missing alt text is one of the most common accessibility violations. You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to get a demand letter. Small businesses in tourism and hospitality receive them regularly.

And then there’s the visitor experience. Roughly 61 million Americans live with a disability. When someone using a screen reader hits your trip page and hears “image” repeated six times with no description, they leave. That’s a customer you never knew you lost.

How to write alt text for adventure photos

Good alt text does three things: describes what’s in the image, gives context for why it’s on the page, and includes a relevant keyword when it fits naturally.

The formula is simple. Describe the scene as if you’re telling a friend on the phone what the photo shows.

Bad: alt="rafting"

Better: alt="whitewater rafting trip"

Best: alt="four guests paddling through Class III rapids on the Nantahala River in October"

A few rules that keep you out of trouble. Keep it under 125 characters - most screen readers cut off after that. Don’t start with “image of” or “photo of” because the screen reader already announces it as an image. Skip the keyword stuffing. Google’s own documentation warns that cramming keywords into alt text can get your site flagged as spam.

For decorative images that add no information (a divider line, a background texture), use an empty alt attribute: alt="". This tells screen readers to skip it instead of awkwardly announcing a filename.

Common alt text mistakes on outdoor business websites

The most frequent problem we see is no alt text at all. A typical outfitter site has 40-80 images across trip pages, gallery pages, and blog posts. Most have blank alt fields or auto-generated filenames.

Second most common: identical alt text on every image. Writing “guided fishing trip” on all 12 photos of your fly fishing page tells Google nothing about what makes each image different. It also creates a terrible experience for screen reader users who hear the same phrase repeated a dozen times.

Third: stuffing location keywords into every alt tag. “Best fly fishing guide Bozeman Montana fly fishing trips Bozeman” reads like spam because it is spam. Google treats it that way too.

The fix is tedious but not difficult. Open each page, look at each image, and write one honest sentence about what that specific photo shows. Include your location or activity type where it genuinely fits. Move on.

A quick process for fixing alt text across your site

Start with your highest-traffic pages. Open Google Analytics, find your top 10 pages by sessions, and fix those images first. This is where the ROI hits fastest.

For each image, right-click and inspect the HTML (or use your CMS image editor - WordPress, Squarespace, and most booking platforms have an alt text field in their image settings). Write a description that passes this test: if you read it out loud to someone who can’t see the photo, would they understand the scene?

Use Google Search Console to check your image search performance. Go to Search Results, filter by “Search Type: Image,” and you’ll see exactly how many impressions and clicks your images get. Most outdoor businesses have never looked at this tab. It’s often a surprising number.

Work through the rest of your site over a few weeks. Prioritize trip pages and location pages first, then blog posts, then your gallery. A 50-image site takes roughly two hours to complete.

Alt text and AI search: the connection most people miss

AI-powered search tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity pull information from web pages to generate answers. When these systems process your page, they use alt text as a signal for what your images represent and what your page is about.

An outfitter page with well-described images gives AI systems more context to work with. A page full of IMG_4523.jpg gives them nothing. As AI search reshapes how travelers find activities, the businesses with better-structured content, including image descriptions, get cited more often.

This isn’t speculative. Google has stated that alt text helps their algorithms understand image subject matter, and that understanding feeds into both traditional search results and AI-generated responses.

What to do about new photos going forward

Fix your existing images, then build the habit for every photo you upload from here out. Create a simple template for your team or yourself:

Activity type plus specific detail plus location. “Guests launching kayaks from Orcas Island beach at sunrise.” “Guide netting a brown trout on the Madison River in September.” “Hikers crossing a suspension bridge on the Skyline Trail.”

When you upload trip photos after a guided outing, write alt text the same day while the details are fresh. Waiting three months means you won’t remember which rapid that was or what trail the group hiked. The specificity disappears, and you end up writing generic descriptions that help nobody.

If your website runs on a platform that strips or ignores alt text (some booking widget embeds do this), that’s a technical SEO issue worth flagging during your next site audit. Your photos deserve to be found.

Nobody will congratulate you for writing 80 image descriptions on a Tuesday afternoon. But six months from now, when your trip photos start appearing in Google Image results for searches you never targeted, you’ll understand why it mattered. Pick your top five pages, write the alt text, and check Google Search Console’s image tab in 30 days.