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Keith September 18, 2023
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How vital are h1 heading on your web pages? This topic creates hot debates among SEOs.
I did a free SEO site audit for a potential client, and the majority of the page on their site had no h1 headings. The audit flagged this as a problem; I felt it was significant, so I decided to dig further; my research revealed this.
First, a brief description of what an h1 heading is, in case you’re not sure.
What is an h1 heading? An h1 header is a contextual reference to the most crucial title of a given subject, it identifies your subject clearly, and it’s an HTML term. HTML stands for ((Hypertext Markup Language), a language used to create websites.
Generally, an h1 heading is considered the most crucial heading on a page. That being said, the apple cart is being flipped because of machine learning.
How does google view h1? In a video titled multiple h1 headings by John Mueller, he said, “We use heading to better understand the context of different parts of a page.” Check out this short video and keep reading to get the other arguments.
In an article by Cyrus Shepard on Moz, he made some crucial points.
Screen reading technology can use H1s to help users navigate your content, both in display and the ability to search.
That’s a ranking factor!
In some rare instances — such as when Google can’t find or process your title tag — they may choose to extract a title from some other element of your page. Often, this can be an H1. Heading use is correlated with higher rankings.
There we go again!
Nearly every SEO correlation study we’ve ever seen has shown a small but positive correlation between higher rankings and the use of headings on a page, such as this most recent one from SEMrush, which looked at H2s and H3s.
I say get as high as you can.
To be clear, there’s no evidence that headings in and of themselves are a Google ranking factor. But headings, like Structured Data, can provide context and meaning to a page.
What do you think? I think I’m still going to respect what h1 has come to mean and air on the side of caution.
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In 2022, our State of Business Communication report with The Harris Poll found that miscommunication costs US businesses $12,506 per employee per year.”
