In one sentence: Alt text is a short written description attached to an image in a web page's code, read aloud by screen readers, shown in place of the picture when it fails to load, and used by search engines to work out what the image shows.
Every image on a page can carry a sentence of plain description in the code. Nobody sees it while the page is working normally. It surfaces in three situations: someone is hearing the page read aloud, the image did not load, or a machine is trying to work out what the picture contains.
That tells you how to write it. Describe what is in the photo, the way you would describe it to someone over the phone. A file name like IMG_4471 says nothing. Roofing crew in Ocala is closer. Two technicians laying underlayment on a steep asphalt shingle roof is the one that works, because the person listening and the machine reading both end up holding the same picture.
Decorative images are the exception worth knowing. A background swirl, a divider line, an icon sitting next to a text label that already says the same word: none of them carry information, and the right move is an empty description so a screen reader skips past instead of announcing a shape.
Keep it to a sentence. Alt text that runs three lines long stops being a description and starts being an obstacle for the person waiting to hear the rest of the page.
Two pages on your site are probably carrying photos that matter more than you think: the work gallery and the team page. A gallery of before and after shots with no descriptions is a wall of silence to anyone using a screen reader, and a blank to any engine trying to connect the phrase cracked driveway repair to your picture of exactly that.
The team page has a quieter version of the same problem. Names under faces are text. Faces without descriptions are nothing, which matters on the one page where you are asking a stranger to decide you are a real local outfit rather than a call center.
There is a plain risk side too. Website accessibility complaints are a real category for small businesses, and missing image descriptions are among the first things anyone checking will look for. Writing them is small, boring, permanent work, and it belongs in the build standard rather than a cleanup list, which is how we handle it on every custom web design project.
Alt text is one line item on a much longer accessibility list. WCAG is the standard those requirements come from, and ADA website compliance is the reason American business owners hear about any of it in the first place.
On the search side, engines have gotten better at reading pictures on their own, and multimodal search is the name for that shift. It does not make the description redundant. The picture shows what is there. Your sentence says what it is, whose work it is, and where it happened, and none of that is visible in the pixels.
Only when the photo actually shows it. Alt text describes the picture, so pushing a town name into a description of a stock photo of a smiling family helps nobody and reads as noise to a screen reader and an engine alike. If the shot really is your crew on a job in that town, saying so is accurate and useful. That is the whole test: is the sentence true of this photo?
The logo gets the business name, because that is what it says. An icon sitting beside a text label is decoration, so leave its description empty and let the label speak. An icon that is the only thing inside a button, like a phone handset that dials you, needs a description of what it does rather than what it looks like.
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