Why Does The H1 Matter For SEO?

The internet marketing arena of search engine optimisation (SEO) is competitive, and ridiculously nuanced, in that there are countless “ranking factors” that can and will influence a website page’s performance on a search engine results page (SERP). On-page factors, like headings and passages of text, are some of the more important ranking signals the search engines utilise in order to determine where a webpage should rank in relation to its competitors. This article takes a look at what an H1 actually is, why it’s super important for your website’s user experience, why it’s a big deal for SEO, and how to get qualified in SEO and website analytics in 2021:

What’s An H1?

H1 comes from HTML coding, where coders assign heading hierarchies using <H1> through to <H6>. H1, which is an abbreviation for Heading 1, is the most important heading on a page. For example, the H1 of the blog article you are reading is “Why do H1 matter for SEO?”. You can also call it the page’s title, the main heading, or the headline. Here’s a breakdown of the webpage heading hierarchy:

H1

H2

H3

H4

H5

H6

The Importance Of Headings

Google’s main priority is to serve internet users with the most relevant information out there on the topics they type into the search bar. What’s the first thing you read when you land on a website page? The large H1 heading, of course. There’s a reason it’s so much bigger than the others! Humans process information in a linear fashion, starting with the headings and proceeding to the smaller passages of text. Headings guide the reader through the message contained in the content and describe the content that appears below them. While H2 through H6 describe sub-sections of the text, the H1 heading is meant to summarise the entire document in one line.

H1 Headings And SEO

Google agrees that H1 headings are more important than any other headings, and thus begins its indexing of the page there. If the H1 heading does not immediately give the Google algorithm an understanding of what the text is about, it’ll score it down. If the H1 heading has been optimised with a highly searched-for keyword that’s holistically relevant to the search query, the algorithm will see the page as being predominantly relevant to the user’s search and thus should satisfy their needs.

As you can see, H1 and other headings on a website page are critical. They save the Google crawling bots less work to do because the H1 heading tells them what the content is regarding before they even have to crawl the rest of the page. Without appropriately assigned H1 headings, your website pages will suffer on the SERPs.

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