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The main heading tells everyone what the page is

The H1 is the heading at the top that says what the page is about. Screen readers announce it, Google reads it as a summary, and a visitor who has landed from somewhere unexpected uses it to work out where they are. Pages usually go wrong in one of two ways: no H1 at all, or a template that has quietly produced four.

SEO Medium at worst 2 findings covered

Medium

The page has no main heading

What SEOPert detected

One or more pages have no H1 heading.

What this means

The main heading (H1) tells visitors and Google what the page is about at a glance.

How to fix it

  1. Give each listed page one main heading at the top that describes the page.
  2. In most editors, choose the text and set its style to “Heading 1” (H1).
On WordPress
  1. Many themes use the page title as the H1: make sure the title is displayed. Otherwise add a Heading block and set it to H1.

If you are handing this to a developer

Ensure exactly one <h1> per listed URL.

Check it worked. View the source of each page and search for <h1: there should be exactly one.

Low

The page has several top-level headings

What SEOPert detected

One or more pages have more than one H1 heading.

What this means

Several top-level headings make the page’s main topic less clear. It is valid HTML, so this is a minor clean-up.

How to fix it

  1. Keep one Heading 1 for the page’s main topic and change the others to Heading 2 or Heading 3.

If you are handing this to a developer

Demote extra <h1> elements to <h2>/<h3> on the listed URLs.

Check it worked. View the source of each page and search for <h1: there should be one.

Pick the right main heading A 30-second exercise. One line is the problem — see whether you would catch it.

Related

Read next

Your site may be telling Google to ignore it SEO Page titles: the headline Google shows SEO Meta descriptions: the sentence under your headline SEO Canonical tags: naming the real address of a page SEO

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