Why text on your website matters just as much

Suppose you have a shop or restaurant and you want to put your opening hours or menu on your website. Many entrepreneurs do this with a photo: a scan of the menu, or a nicely designed image with the opening hours on it. That often looks neat, but it has a drawback that few people know about. Google and AI assistants like ChatGPT read text. They cannot read text that is in an image. For them, a photo with your opening hours on it is just a picture, just like a photo of your premises or your logo. The letters you see on it are invisible to a search engine. What does this mean in practice If someone asks Google when your shop is open, or asks an AI assistant what dish your restaurant serves, then that information must be somewhere as plain text on your website. If it only appears in an image, the answer cannot be found, even though the information is indeed on your site. The same applies to PDF files that are actually scanned documents, and to text that is embedded in a video without subtitles. If it is not as selectable text on the page, it does not exist for a search engine. What you can do You don't have to remove all the nice formatting. A nice photo of your menu can certainly stay, as long as the text also appears somewhere separately on the page. That can simply be below the photo, in a simple list of dishes and prices. The same with opening hours: put them in plain text somewhere on the page, even if you also use a nice image. You can easily check this yourself. Go to your website and try to select a piece of text with your mouse, the way you would in a Word document. If you can do it, then it is plain text and a search engine can read it. If you can't, and it is part of an image, then you are missing that information in Google results and in answers from AI assistants. This applies not only to menus and opening hours. Also think of your address, contact details, prices, services you offer and frequently asked questions. If this kind of information is currently only in images, that is a simple adjustment that yields a lot: just put the most important facts as text on the page, alongside any nice images. It takes little time to check this. Go through your main pages and see if the information that customers need is actually readable as text and not hidden in a photo or scan.