Key facts
- The studio's schedule, twelve styles across four age groups, appeared on the site only inside flyer images, with no text version, no table and no alt text describing the classes.
- The site had five pages in its sitemap; none carried a class name, a day or a time as text, so a search for a Tuesday ballet class for a six-year-old could not match anything on the site.
- A schedule in an image cannot be read by a screen reader, so parents using assistive technology got nothing, and cannot be quoted by an AI assistant answering a parent's question.
- The home page itself was a logo image, a scrolling marquee to the class portal login and one paragraph, so the flyer was also the most informative thing on the site.
- The fix was a schedule in text on a classes page, one page per age group naming the styles and times, and the flyer kept as a downloadable extra rather than the only source.
The finding
The studio publishes a rich schedule: twelve dance styles, four age groups from little movers to teens, several sessions a week. On the website, all of it lived in JPEG flyers, the same images the studio posts on social media. Nowhere on the site did the words ballet, hip hop, Tuesday or ages six to eight appear as text. A parent who searched for exactly what the studio offered could not be matched to it, because to a search engine the schedule did not exist.
What we looked at
We read every page in the sitemap and searched the text for style names, weekdays, times and ages. We opened the flyer images and read their alt attributes, which were empty or generic. We ran the pages through a text-only view to see what a screen reader or a crawler would receive. We checked the class portal, which held the schedule for enrolled families behind a login, and confirmed that nothing public duplicated it in text.
Why it mattered for leads
Parents search specifically: the style, the age, the day, the town. A site that carries those words as text can match the search; a site that carries them as pixels cannot. The studio was spending its schedule's search value on social media, where it decays in a day, and giving its website none of it. Parents using screen readers were excluded entirely. And when a parent asked an AI assistant for a beginner dance class for a seven-year-old nearby, the assistant had nothing from the studio to quote.
False positive checks we ran
We checked whether the flyers carried the schedule in their alt text or in a caption, which would have partly solved the problem; they did not. We checked whether a schedule page existed but was unlinked; the sitemap showed five pages and none was a schedule. We checked whether the studio embedded a live schedule widget somewhere that rendered as text; the only embedded element was the portal login link. We confirmed the flyers were current, so the finding was about format, not stale information.
The fix
The proposal's demo put the schedule on the site as text: a classes page listing all twelve styles with their age ranges, and one page per age group with the styles, days and times for that group and a trial-class form. Each class carried its name, age range and time as words a search engine, a screen reader and an assistant can read. The flyers were kept as a downloadable image on the classes page, which is what they are good for, and the portal stayed as the enrolled families' system.
How to check your own site for this
Select the text on your schedule page with your mouse. If nothing selects, or only the heading does, your schedule is an image. Search your own site for a style name and a weekday; if nothing comes back, neither will Google. Put the schedule in a text table or a list, one line per class with the age range and time, and keep the flyer as a download beside it.
Related questions
Not reliably enough to rank a page for it. Text inside a flyer is pixels; a schedule in a text table is content. Alt text helps describe an image but is not a substitute for the schedule itself.
Yes. When a parent asks an assistant for a class nearby, it quotes text it can read. A studio whose schedule is an image has nothing for the assistant to quote, so a competitor with a text schedule is named instead.
A parent using a screen reader hears nothing from an image with empty alt text. A text schedule is read aloud line by line, which is both a legal consideration in many places and a matter of not turning families away.
No. Keep it as a download for sharing and printing. The fix is to add the text version, not to delete the image.
A classes page listing every style with age ranges, and a page per age group with the styles, days and times for that group plus a trial-class form. That matches how parents search and how they decide.
an anonymized finding from a real proposal audit; the business is described by type only; SearchPod sells the services that fix findings like this.
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