Unsure whether you should remove duplicate h1 tags from your content or leave them when it comes to improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts?
With mixed advice online from different SEO agencies, it can be confusing determining which guidance you should follow. Fortunately, the SEO professionals at Aqueous Digital constantly monitor search engine updates to ensure our advice doesn’t get old.
Simply carry on reading to find out how many H1 tags per page should be included and whether duplicate H1 and title tags have a significant impact on the success of your SEO.
How many H1 tags are allowed on a page?
Technically, you can add as many HTML (HyperText Markup Language) H1 heading tags as you like on one page. However, this doesn’t mean you should.
This is because the various heading tags (H1-H6) are used to create a hierarchy for the heading structure, allowing online users alike to distinguish primary headings (H1) from subheadings (H2-H6) by simply scanning the page.
As a result, heading tags allow content creators to produce a piece of content that has a meaningful and logical structure with clear sections, helping both online users and search engines (such as Google) to easily explore different areas within the primary topic.
As the H1 tag has the highest rank, it’s commonly used as the title of your post to highlight the main topic of your webpage. This is why most digital marketing agencies and content creators will use just one H1 tag per page – a piece of advice that we agree with (and practice!) here at Aqueous Digital.
Why should multiple H1 tags not be used?
While the Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst and Search Relations team lead at Google, John Mueller, has stated that multiple H1 tags won’t have a negative impact on your SEO (unless you’re overusing them), it’s always best to stick to just one H1 heading per page.
Google’s algorithm may now be able to navigate multiple H1 tags, but creating a page with multiple H1 tags is likely to just confuse your webpage visitors as they might struggle to understand the context and relevance of your content.
Not only will this approach help to prevent confusion, but it can also aid accessibility for some users. For example, visually impaired individuals that read websites with help from screen readers will be able to explore your content with ease as these devices rely on tagged headings to understand the text.
Multiple H1 tags can make this much harder for visually impaired users, so it’s important to bear this in mind when adding H1 tags, too. As a result, while adding just one H1 tag per page isn’t essential for your SEO success, it’s certainly helpful for the user experience.
Do duplicate H1 tags hurt SEO?
Alongside avoiding multiple H1 tags on one page, you should also be mindful of creating duplicate H1 tags across your website. For example, having several pieces of content on different webpages with the same H1 tag will just confuse search engines and online users.
When choosing which page from your website to rank for a particular search query, having several pieces of content with the same H1 tag will only make it harder for the search engine pick the most suitable result.
This can lead to something called ‘keyword cannibalisation’ where multiple webpages on your own domain are competing to be found for the same or similar search queries. The result of keyword cannibalisation is often a drop in rankings for the affected pieces of content.
Fortunately, finding and removing duplicate h1 and title tags isn’t difficult. You can edit or remove duplicate H1 tags by either using a CMS (content management system) plugin or manually editing the HTML code.
Alternatively, why not ask the SEO professionals at Aqueous Digital for a helping hand?
Stick to SEO best practices with Aqueous Digital
As an award-winning digital marketing agency with decades of invaluable experience in this industry, we’ve helped countless customers to significantly improve their SEO results.
Alongside specialising in both content strategy and reputation management for high-net-worth individuals, the team at Aqueous Digital also provide expert support with technical SEO, meaning we can identify and rectify any duplicate H1 and title tags in your content.
To find out more about our technical SEO services or for any other questions related to duplicate H1 tags and SEO, why not arrange your free initial consultation with a member of our friendly team today?
Please feel free to get in touch by either calling us on 0800 285 1424 or sending your enquiry in an email to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk.
